Task Jar: Major PowerPoint Revision

During the Covid-19 pandemic and its corresponding shut-down, I had created a sizable task list that was converted into slips that were randomly drawn each day in order to entice me to make steady progress on the always-present to-do list. One of those items, from May 2020, called for me to overhaul a particular powerpoint module that I long ago developed when training administrators in ways to approach coaching and feedback to support their teachers.

Guilford County Schools Mission Possible Retreat
Asheville, NC • 2014

As noted in the blog post cataloguing a mix of project updates in May 2020, that specific task slip was too challenging to complete because I wasn’t in the right headspace needed to create a mindful and coherent revision. As I dug into it almost five years ago (!), I realized it also had implications for the powerpoint module that preceded it, focused on Instructional Design and Planning.

I did labor to sort out and better organize the two presentations, in my typical pattern puzzle approach spread out on the kitchen table so that I could see and shift and manipulate and fill gaps. But I only got so far before having to put it aside.

As 2025 got underway, there was a helpful convergence of events to at last bring me into that frame of mind for this presentational renovation. Over the past year, I’ve been working up a set of ideas that I’d begun to float (and submit for scrutiny) to some trusted colleagues; I’ve been engaged in some intense work with administrators facing tremendous pressure to up their students’ performance; and I was called upon in an elementary school in DC to create a small seminar conversation that would bridge the needs of a wide variety of teachers. All that occurred close to the same time I was finishing my last session with an outgoing cohort of aspiring administrators and immediately beginning my first day of work with the incoming cohort, through High Point University’s Leadership Academy. Initiate Frame of Mind!

With a couple of quiet evenings plus some open time on a weekend in between, and perhaps working later into the night than is my custom, I finally got it done. My conscience is eased even if it was an item checked off nearly five years after my clever task jar slip idea was first drawn.

Custom Grill for Foyer HVAC Return

This is the entry foyer, and backed up to the staircase is a lovely substantial sideboard cabinet...one of my eBay acquisitions when I was endeavoring to properly furnish this great old house. Behind it is the scene of one of my long-overdue house to-do tasks: replacing the screen on the HVAC return that was cut under that first turn of the stairs. It required a custom order and custom manufacture of a new grille, but this is one of the undrawn slips from my Quarantine Task Jar that I've known I needed to do for as long as I've lived here.

The previous cover was difficult to keep clean and likely caused extra strain on the system. It might boast a kazillion holes but each one was still rather tiny:

Here's the unvarnished truth of its innards:

Because of its location, this component of the mechanical system stays mostly ignored and forgotten. Now there's hidden loveliness behind that cabinet.

Brown Butter Oatmeal Carrot Cake Sandwich Cookies

Last Saturday was marked as National Carrot Cake Day. With only three at dinner and other things on my list of chores, I chose to execute instead what might be called an homage to carrot cake, in the form of brown butter oatmeal carrot cake sandwich cookies. And lordy, were they mighty fine: delicious soft and nicely spiced cookies and the magic of cream cheese vanilla frosting inside. For my tastes, although it might look a bit like a standard oatmeal creme pie, à la Little Debbie, these were stupendous in their fresh flavor, even if the cookies themselves came out thin.

Back in May of 2020, one of the slips drawn from the quarantine task jar was for making cookie sandwiches. Although that night I made peanut butter-oatmeal cookie sandwiches, they were actually my second attempt of the day. You see, I experienced failure with a first choice: brown butter oatmeal carrot cake sandwich cookies. The cookies were absolutely amazing in taste...but oh my! how thin they did spread. I'm wondering if I erred in using some of my better butter, when run-of-the-mill sticks would have worked better. Or maybe the recipe is a bit off, as might be suggested from a comparison with other similar recipes. This most recent attempt did not involve any corrective action on my part but they weren't too thin to follow through on the whole production. With the previous weekend's vanilla sweet milk ice cream not all used up yet, it was a grand balancing act of complementary tastes.

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"Brown Butter Oatmeal Carrot Cake Sandwich Cookies," from Kristie Pryor of TheSweetandSimpleKitchen.com blog. [Published 09 April 2020]

Quarantine Task Jar Update: Kitchen Swinging Door

The huge demolition and rebuild project that led to a wholesale replacement of the simple small old kitchen and sad little bathrooms back in 2008-2009 did not result in full replacement of everything. For instance, the butler’s pantry room was rebuilt to its original dimensions, but upgraded with hardwood floors, electrical outlets, and removal of an unnecessary window. Another carryover from the original kitchen was to have a new door but it was hung on its original swinging spring hinge. Alas, over time, when the retractable top piston hinge would sometimes stick, the door would fall over. It finally weakened the bottom hinge brace enough that, on one fateful afternoon, the door fell over and the break was complete:

Fortunately, the duo of Jami and Zeb Raines at Southern Raines Customs came through with a welding repair so that I could return that swinging door to full service. (Actually, I think Zeb completely recast it.) That was another one of my to-do tasks that eventually would have been drawn from the Quarantine Task Jar. Admittedly, as with so many tasks around here, it still took a few more months to rehang that door after reattaching the hinge plate. But as of December 20, 2023, it once more became operational.

The New Chimney Cap

After three and a half years, having finally come down with the coronavirus, resulting in reduced house and kitchen activities to blog about, it's fitting that I should reach back to late summer of last year to update my progress on one of the items in the Quarantine Task Jar: getting a chimney cap installed on the original southside chimney that was rebuilt several years ago (which is when I ought to have arranged for a cap!).

The picture above is from August 2022, when the guys from A Cleaner Chimney came to sweep the chimney for the wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen, and also to measure for said chimney cap.

About three weeks later, the custom-made screen and cover was ready for its install, and they came on Tuesday Sept 6th, 2022, to put it in place. This is a non-functional feature of the house, by the way: the fireplaces in the original areas of the house are coal-burning, so they are shallow and narrow...and I don't think the overall chimney from bottom to top is in especially great shape anyway.

Not only is it good to shield the old innards from the weather elements, but last summer also brought the sounds of nesting sweeps and nursing hatchlings. I’d rather not have their homesteading or squawking squatting.

In the 12 years of having a wood-burning fireplace to use in the chill of winter, included as part of the kitchen addition, it’s now undergone two sweeps. I was glad to get that done before all those fires I enjoyed in the short cold spell of this past winter.

Meal No. 3247: Roasted Salmon and Broccoli

One of my super-favorite go-to sorta-healthy meals has made a reappearance, as of this past Saturday afternoon: roasted spiced salmon fillet with roasted broccoli florets. Its deliciousness made an already good day even better.

Maybe doing a full-fridge clean-out (one of the not-yet-drawn items on my Quarantine Task Jar list) caused me to work up an extra measure of appetite that morning:

Replacement of the WiFi System

We are a long way from The Clapper of old, in this era of Smart everything and voice-controlled home features. A WiFi-equipped house was initially essential just for computers and phones and printers, but that’s small potatoes in our Alexa’d universe. The first two Echo Show voice assistants that I obtained several years ago were originally dedicated to video communicating in fun fashion between 1st and 3rd floors, or with out-of-state family, as well as simple tasks like kitchen timers and managing shopping lists.

Then came the smart plugs and smart bulbs and smart light switches, and their required control hubs, plus a smart deadbolt on the back door. Expand the network’s demands and complexity, though, and it’ll open wide the avenues to exasperated helplessness when any elements fail to function properly.

When my printers would inexplicably disconnect, I’d be mad at the printers. When units in my Sonos system disappeared from the app, I was mad at Sonos. Many of our smart features are dependent on a SmartThings hub to operate, and I was getting disconnect alerts 10 or 15 times a day, lasting for 10 or 15 minutes each. I could not understand why Amazon reviews for that hub were so glowing when I couldn’t get it to work consistently.

When I became more diligent about professional writing, I was utterly flummoxed when I’d repeatedly get error messages that the ERIC database URL could not be found. It wasn’t until I went round and round with my personal websites host about why I could not access the server management that I slowly emerged from my conditioned stupidity: it had been my LinkSys WiFi router the whole time, for all of those connection issues. My smart bulbs are a lot brighter than I am.

One of the summer tasks was to replace the failing LinkSys routers with a new mesh system I’d gotten from Costco. I was dreading it, knowing how complicated and involved it would be if everything had to be reset, reconnected, and so on. But it wasn’t so bad…it took a little longer for the security cameras to reestablish but they found their way.

And since the new routers came on line, not a single dropped or blocked connection yet. What took me so freaking long?!

Video Doorbell Installation

Downtown living has its attractions but it also is reason for some extra measures of security...not so much because of major fears about crime but more so for the assurance of being able to monitor and also review footage should something be amiss. My cameras are pretty old now, given advances in technology, but they mostly serve their purpose. At the rear door to the parking lot, though, that particular camera is not so great, as shown in the daytime video capture above.

This second photo shows a tremendous improvement, as one of my mid-summer Quarantine Task Jar items was to obtain and install a video doorbell, which is working beautifully (both video stills were captured at about the same time). However, as the owner of a 1905 house, not exactly of meager size, and with all the associated renovation and upkeep needs, I’ve regularly been asked about how much of the work was I taking on myself. My standard reply was to tell people it took me a day and a half to wire the front doorbell when I first moved in back in 2003, so I’d better leave the serious projects only to professionals. Plus, I could not afford to botch a DIY and then also have to pay someone to come do it right.

When I decided to add a video doorbell to the back door from the parking area, how long did it take to wire it? Yep: a day and a half. Pulling the interior trim was easy, but running the wire under the kitchen crawl space was the labored portion of it all. Ah, but I got it all rigged and working and tied into the smarthome and connected to my iPhone/Apple Watch…and the difference in security camera coverage is enormous.

While I am occasionally considered to be a smart man, that reputed intellect is not always fully operational. For instance, to determine the height of the drill hole, of course I thoughtlessly measured from inside the back door instead of from the top step outside...so the doorbell looks a little high.

In these last few months, it's caused me to learn that occasionally the parking lot is a cut-through option for wee-hours traversers.

Nonetheless, I’m happy to have this newest tech in place, with its two-way communication capability but especially with its camera coverage. Installing it finally incentivized me to reconnect the smart deadbolt (the SmartThings hub that controls it was one of the networked items that the now-retired LinkSys WiFi router was uncooperative with) so that it can be controlled via Alexa again. Now, somebody can ring the back doorbell and admittance can be granted without leaving the comfy confines of the third floor!

Blinds for the Blue Whale Alcove

As the summer concluded and attention turned to the beginning of a new school year, I found myself trying to wrap up a variety of projects that are catalogued on my "Quarantine Task Jar" list. (Posts on several of those projects are in my backlog of blog drafts!) Three years ago, the big push to finally order custom window treatments for a variety of areas, including the attic man cave, was a huge step forward in furnishing the house. Alas, with all the great shelving built into the north gable on the third floor, tight around that small window, we postponed devising a solution to its covering. In the meantime, light was blocked through creative means, as shown in the photo above.

In the spirit that the perfect ought not to be the enemy of the good, that task list item propelled me to settle on a cheap online solution, this time from JustBlinds.com, and on September 20th a much more appropriate covering for that window was achieved:

Ray's the Bar Sign

When architect Sam Binkley designed the kitchen addition in 2008, he did so with excellent vision and foresight. It has been a marvelous expansion of and improvement to the life of the Roediger House. The west gable added to the roof back then would, he predicted, make an excellent space for a pool table, if and when I decided to finish out the attic. Sam was spot-on yet again in 2014 when he designed that attic renovation into a massive man cave, perfect for the pool table, plenty of seating for large gatherings for movies and games, and smart uses for the smaller north and south gables.

That south gable is outfitted with a sink and cabinets and a double undercounter beer cooler, all under a unique bar top made from salvaged old wood from a theatre demolition in the North Carolina Sandhills region. Aptly and cleverly named “Ray’s the Bar,” all it has needed to be complete is a couple of key signs. I’ve got a spot above the window where someday I hope to have a Foothills Brewery beer sign. And Sam envisioned a woodcut sign on the exposed chimney beside the bar area, and we even positioned a dedicated spot light on it. Finally, over seven years later, I finally got that sign, and it’s a beauty, if I my say so myself.

New Mailbox Installed

I mean really: how many people do you know who buy a new mailbox for their house in, say, 2014...and then don’t get around to putting it up until 2022? If you know me, then that tally is at least 1. Boxed up in the original packaging and stowed away in the cellar for over eight years, this sturdier, heavier mailbox may have been part of my rug ordering from Hayneedle right around that time, just ahead of the second wave of renovation work that occurred that year (plaster restoration, painting, floor and mantle refinishing). It was a slip in my Quarantine Task Jar but had not yet been drawn. Yay, me!

Wetbar Cabinet Clean-Out

Perhaps among the readers of this blog post will be at least a few who are sympathetic to the dual dilemmas of "out of sight/out of mind" and also the incremental pace of decline. All that's to say: I was way, way, way overdue in giving the wetbar cabinets a thorough cleaning. It's so easy to overlook, ignore, or fail to fully register how bad one might have let the dust get until the wine glasses get moved, as the photo below ably shows:

The amount of entertaining that occurs here has been cut way back, and I hardly ever drink either. So those cabinets have remained untouched and neglected...until this past Sunday. I started my day with unloading the whole thing, and then first washing all the stemware and beer glasses and such:

Then I gave all the coffee mugs a good dishwashing as well:

Once I'd dusted and also wiped down all the cabinets, and Windexed the glass of the cabinet doors, I had a much finer wetbar to admire in passing:

Chalk another item off the Quarantine Task Jar list, that does not drive all my labors in these freer days of summer but which I'm always glad to knock out when I get around to it. (That same Sunday, another one of those annoying tasks was handled: giving the exhaust fan in the master bathroom a good cleaning. Most people might not notice it but I was mindful of how filthy it was looking!)

House Projects of Mid-June

Inspired at last to action and sequestered inside during a fairly uncomfortable heatwave, I spent time during the first half of June tackling some much-needed projects inside the house. Here's a run-down of some of them.

Future Library

Two years and two months ago, during the height of the pandemic and its initial shut-down phase, I was drawing slips from a task jar to keep me busy and productive while sequestered safely at home. One of those projects was to pack up the very junky room that is (or will be) the library. My rule for myself was to put in at least an hour even if I couldn't finish the specified drawn slip assignment, and my intention was to work on it a little bit on a lot of days. But after I made the libary even worse, I did not get back to it until this past June 16 and 17. With a late evening start that Thursday night, and a full day of labor on it the following day, I managed to completely pack it up, clean it out, clean it up, and set it up:

Hanging of Latest Artwork

A few more pieces by local artists had been added to the Roediger House collection, but they've been waiting in my study for me to get around to measuring and hanging them. That was also one of my June projects. I do wish I had a better eye for the right positioning/placement/spacing but it's nice for them to now be on display. I put five of those pieces along and at the top of the stairs (this page has a photo; scroll down to the 28th one), and another piece in a guest bedroom.

This is the painting I placed outside the master bedroom in the main downstairs hallway:

Collinwood Cooler Clean-Out

When the attic was renovated into a man cave and entertainment hall, one of those cool gables was turned into Ray's the Bar with a full commercial double beer cooler installed under the bar counter. I had a love affair with a couple of choice seasonal beers and always stocked up on them during their limited availabilities. (For instance, see this blog post from February 2018 regarding my absolute most favorite of beers: Bell's Best Brown Ale.) Bell's also had a great Christmas Ale and a rare offering called "Hell Hath No Fury," too. Starr Hill Brewery's Amber and their seasonal Snow Blind Doppelbock Lager were worth buying up in bulk because they are limited in availability; Duck Rabbit also has a terrific doppelbock. Abita was great for several beers: Amber, Christmas Ale, Mardi Gras Bock, Andygator, and Turbodog. Alas: when I went on a big weight-loss push in 2018, I pretty much gave up beer. I'd rather have desserts or sweets if I'm going to indulge in calories. At the same time, with the pandemic, there was virtually no company and no entertaining here at the house for well over a year. What I'm left with was a mix of okay but aged beers that were always in the cooler...and quite a few cases that I'd stored away deep in the cabinets, including some from as far back as 2015. It all had to go.

This was understandably a multi-day project, with a small beginning a few months ago, but by June 15th I'd gone through and poured out all of the beer in the house, washed out all the bottles, and put them into the recycling barrel. We are talking cases of awesome beers that were just not any good any more. It broke my heart. That did allow me to really clean up and reorganize the cabinets under the bar and counter in Ray's the Bar, though, so that was a bonus.

Recycling of Crushed Cans

While I have also given up soda, there's still a lot of it consumed here at the Roediger House, plus increasingly quite a few canned beers, seltzers, and so on from guests. I've always washed them out and crushed them and, once before, took them to a paying recyling center. There were 12 or 13 paper grocery sacks that had backed up near the crusher in the cellar, and I got them taken care of. They went into the 11th huge garbage bag of crushed cans that were piled up at the other end of the cellar. I decided to load 'em all up in the back of the pick-up and took them to a different recylcing center, where the total weight of them all was 260 pounds. But hey: that was $127.00!! On another day, I gathered up the old cleaning fluids, rotted gas can, and other old hazardous chemicals from the cellar and took them to the appropriate recycling center.

Cleaning Up the Laundry Room

Situated just inside the high-trafficked back door from the parking lot is a cozy laundry room, only big enough to accommodate those appliances, cabinets above, and a utility sink. It's where I keep my yardwork clothes and gloves, the food for birds and the dog, and bottled water.

Unfortunately, especially with my bigger yard projects of the last couple of years (like the irrigation system), it became awfully easy to come in from a very long work day and drop all the stuff I needed on top of the dryer...because I'd be right back at it again the next day.

No surprise when it becomes an accumulating monstrosity.

I present these photos with insufficient shame.

After achieving what felt like a great victory over the devastation in the library upstairs, I was inspired Saturday a week ago to knock out this last clean-up challenge. It's not suitable to Southern Living, but it's ideal for RoHo living.

Weeding and Mulching

While I am celebrating these terrific interior advances, I must say that it is pretty disappointing that I've done far too little out in the yard. Before it got so freakin' hot (I still prefer summer to winter, however!!), I was aggressively weeding and even got around to some mulching. Alas, I have yet to go buy any plants or flowers and so these are now just dressed areas that ain't going anywhere.