That which fades into the ether.

For the record — I’m utterly pooped today

For the singleton parents out there, let me just say that having twins is not twice the effort of having a single baby and puts a distintly non-linear increase of stress on parents of multiples. My present state of sleep deprivation is doing nothing to help this opinion.

I didn’t sleep prior to the 1 AM feeding, which is my own fault because I chose to read TDIClub forums and get things prepped for the evening.  Both kids fell asleep on half-full bottles. Not 15 minutes after putting them down, they decided it was “non-productive poo time” and proceeded to grunt and scream for the next hour. Failing to find any useful appeasement, another round of bottles was warmed in hopes that they just hungry. Stella powered hers down and contentedly dozed off; Elise found no such satisfaction.  She’d calm down just long enough to think, “FINALLY, peace and quite”, and just as I was about to nod off she’d belt out more screams.  Valerie had been getting small bits of sleep throughout this, but, she’d been up since 5:00 AM that morning and was dragging too heavily to be of any help for Elise. So I returned the favor of sending her to the office as she had done for me the night before.

The discomfort continued on. Elise would not stay quiet. Somewhere along, Stella filled her diaper (literally — it’s unreal the volume of poo she saves up) and proceeded to wail from the discomfort of all that smelly gooey goodness left for me. By now, it’s 5:00 AM; both are in high grump for food.  At 6:00 AM with the twilight glowing behind the curtains, both kids are quietly pulling on pacifiers and slumber falls upon them.  That left me pondering if there’d be any value in getting 1.5 hours of sleep (best case) before Maia woke up. I’d convinced myself that I might as well just start my day without a wink of …

7:15 — Wah! Wah! Wah!

As I groggily woke up and searched for Stella’s pacifier, Maia and Valerie bound into the bedroom. A brief synopsis of the night was exchanged, and was sure she’d have pity on me and take the terrible twosome away to let me sleep under the silence of my earplugs. Work would be there at noon, or whenever I’d be rested enough to be functional — I’d be useless with only an hour of sleep.

And she did take the screaming Stella. And then she brought her back, with two bottles in hand. And a toddler in tow. A toddler that was very happy to see me. And the lot of them climbed into bed. My night was clearly over and so the day started with a brusque departure from bed and hardly a word to Valerie as I staggered out the door for work.

I wasn’t totally useless at work. Absentmindedly stumbled through the day; dumped coffee and cocoa on a wall, of all places. Dumped soup on the kitchen table as sat down for dinner.  It was like being drunk, but without the warm fuzzy happy feeling.

Those with triplets or more, my hat’s off to you. I’d have rolled the dice to figure out who goes up for adoption.

If the potty was like batting averages, Maia would go pro

We gave potty training an earnest try yesterday. Maia batted a 429 for the day. Not a bad start.

But, today started with a revolt followed by incessant bouts of giggling and screaming — combinations that do not lend themselves to relaxing for the call of nature. Ohh well, back in the diapers for a while longer…

Naptime

We recently installed a “night vision” camera in Maia’s room.  It’s been rather telling about what happens when we turn the light off and say “good night”.  Now we no longer have to wait for the tell tale sounds of toys to know she’s off on a mission gathering sundries to extend her wakefulness.

This 1 hour time lapse was today’s attempt to get her to nap. Valerie was busy tending to the babies, so, Maia had the run of her room.

On tankless hot water heaters and sizing a natural gas pipe

Researched tank-less hot water heaters and their voracious demand for natural gas. Decided to go for the Takagi T-K3-OS because: 1) it is for outdoor installation — no fancy exhaust flume required, and 2) its *minimum* BTU rating of 11K was one of the lowest I’d seen (considering that the maximum side was more than capable).

I worried about the minimum rating because there’s a dirty little secret about tankless hot water heaters: they completely shut down when the flow is too low and you get no hot water. Yup, your water conservation efforts of running a trickle of water will be for not with most gas fired tankless heaters. And after having the T-K3 in use for a few days now, I’m glad I did worry –0.4 gpm doesn’t quite go low enough for my liking. It’s probably just me, but the small stream of water I use when washing dishes is not enough to keep the water heater from turning off due to inadequate flow. You don’t read about it often, but, this is one of the cons to a tankless hot water heater.

A second negative to the tankless setup is the amount of natural gas they consume at full water flow — 190,000 BTU’s for the T-K3. That’s more than my furnace, oven/range, clothes drier, and old water heater… combined. Most installs are going to need to upgrade the gas plumbing to provided enough gas flow.

Here’s an online natural gas flow calculator that takes into consideration more than the standard 0.5″ water column pressure drop that most flow tables use.

Here’s is a good paper that illustrates the application of the low-pressure gas flow formula [1] used in the above calculator, and gives some helpful information about how to account for discontinuities. For example, a 90° elbow adds 2 linear ft of “equivalent pipe length” of resistance. Things that make you go, “huh”.

[1] found here.

Pacific Northwest travel log, day 2

At only 212 miles covered, day 2 was all about Crater Lake.

We awoke from our caboose cabin and Maia was happily asleep in her locker private room which gave Valerie and I a peaceful morning to ease into the day while the sun peaked over the mountainous horizon. When Maia awoke, she was excited to be in the train and after getting dressed she wanted to “ride train” while snacking on a granola bar. More than happy to oblige, I climbed up with her and sat on the opposing seat and we pretended our caboose was swaying down the track while making choo choo and whistle noises. Even Valerie gingerly climbed the rungs once to come play train with us. Incidentally, only a few cabooses have the upper level observation deck.

As we gathered the accouterments from the cabin and got the car loaded, Maia wanted to, “play stairs”. In true form, she managed to make a playground out of any available obstacle and kept herself entertained. This quality of hers is, after all, what really let us make this trip in the first place.

With the car mostly packed, we moseyed around the park and checked out the variety of cabooses they had. Maia started pouting when her “play stairs” session was so abruptly terminated by our walkabout

The park is nestled in a valley, and the Cascade mountains are all around. Although it was still smoky, this was the first day we’d seen blue sky in about two weeks.

We got on the open road and decided to get a few miles in and then stop for breakfast. Little regard beyond going north was given as to what road those miles would be covered on — the destination was, after all, breakfast. And indeed it was found when we stopped in Yreka at the Black Bear Diner. Turns out they are small chain throughout the west (38 stores), which is just fine by me as their 7-Grain Almond Granola Pancakes are worth going back for.

Back on the road, I asked Valerie to check the map and remind me what road we’d need to go to Klamath Falls. After a brief study, she responded confused that there’s no obvious reason to go to Klamath Falls. It quickly became clear the road we wanted was already well behind us. So, regarding that GPS purchase we debated about prior to the trip … yeah, it was looking like we’d chosen poorly. But, that’s another story.

We spied a small, unnamed road in the atlas that head more directly to Crater Lake. A quick check of the iPhone showed it did have a name: Dead Indian Memorial Road. Crisis averted!

Dead Indian Memorial Road to the 140 was a very lightly traveled, well maintain road that winds through the forest and proved to be a very pleasant drive. We were quite pleased to have missed the more direct routing of 97 through Klamath Falls.

Eventually, we made it to our intended destination. (The astute reader will note we arrived from the south. This was actually taken on the drive out of the park).

Crater Lake was largely inaccessible due to snow. We arrived at the main visitor center and Maia headed directly for the snow. She wasn’t all that interested in it during the winter, but now it was suddenly fun.

After Maia soaked her shoes enough, we were able to take in the view.

And then Maia found new obstacles to play on.

Did I mention there was still snow?

We stopped at one of the overlooks on the north side of the lake and had a nice picnic snack while Maia ventured off in search of more obstacles. What she got was a spank’n when she refused to stop going toward the road.

More Crater Lake photos in the gallery.

We had a short drive from the lake to Chemult where we had a most unfortunate reservation at the Dawson House Lodge. Let’s just say, pictures posted on the net don’t tell the whole story and hide lots of cleanliness sins that change one’s perspective upon arrival. It was across the street from a truck stop and the lack of AC made for a long night of jake brakes through the open window as the truckers came and went. To add insult to injury, there was only one restaurant open in town and they clearly had no worries about any competition. Diner was edible, but left plenty to be desired beyond that. Maia was the smartest of us — all she’d eat were pre-packaged Saltine crackers.

The best thing about Chemult, was leaving the next day.