Gladstone-Whipple Family Pictures
November 1999
What's up for November? Well, fall in New England kind of stuff. Leaves. Pumpkins. Impending freezing temperatures, soaring fuel prices, astronomical heating bills....You just gotta love fall in NE.
Leaves first -- here's what we saw out our bedroom window for 3 weeks. I'm not a particularly romantic kind of guy, but it's hard not to love maple trees. First, nothing can compare at foliage time. Second, if you've ever worked with wood you know that maple is as good as it gets (strong, straight, even, closed grain, nice to look at, etc -- you can make anything out of maple as long as your tools are sharp). Third, it burns clean and hot. Finally, have you ever tasted real maple syrup? Maple sugar candy? I read something the other day about how people are concerned that Norway maples are proliferating like crazy and crowding out native species around here. As far as I'm concerned, they can push all the pine trees to extinction and NE will be a better place. As David would say, "Maple RULES! Pine DROOLS!"
On the other hand, somebody does have to rake up all those leaves. Good thing we have kids,
so they can handle the leaves while Dad goofs off and the Moms work on the pumpkins (that's Dr. Carolyn Sax with Carol -- you can find out more about the mom of our kid's best friends Mimi and Joseph at www.hydeparkpedi.com/newpage5.htm):
Speaking of Mimi, here's this month's adorable picture of her and Liz (you've probably figured out that they play together a lot):
Hey Liz, what's your project today? Oh, painting a kitty? Is that a Calico? A Picasso?
David's new thing is using the phone -- not just talking, but finding the number and dialing too. He's got excellent telephone manners -- Grandma Jackie is going to be thrilled the first time she hears him call and say "Hello, this is David Whipple speaking" (she tried and failed for years to get her 4 kids to say this). Last Saturday he called Joseph's house every thirty minutes all day to see if he was home and able to play. Anyway, here he's telling Agnes about Pokemon (Agnes is a very special person who helped take care of David from when he was 3 months to 3 years old).
Let's see, what else happened in November? Oh yes, we got some more new windows. I put some in upstairs, but downstairs we needed professional help. The leaded casements in the dining and living rooms looked OK, it's just that if you made the mistake of actually opening them, the frames were so rotten that they'd fall right off the side of the house (one did, before I put warnings on all of them):
So we bought some spiffy new ones from Pella and pleaded with Arthur Massaro at Columbia Contracting until he sent Jim and Eric to install them (OK, we didn't really plead, we just arranged 3 days of work 6 months in advance):
They did a very nice job, and now enough light gets into these rooms that you can actually almost see during the day without turning on the lights:
Anything else? Oh yes, the gas company came and re-installed a gas pipe (the house must have had gas sometime before, because it still has gas light fixtures in a few places). I learned that if you convince the gas company that you are going to burn lots of gas, they will come and do this for free:
Everyone else was busy, so Liz supervised the work:
And that's a wrap for November 1999. Next month, who knows? Tune in.