Graham Steinhoff Archives

February 8, 2015

Birthdays 2 and 4

In another of an infrequent series of posts about how living in Florida in the wintertime isn’t bad, I invite you to a birthday party for Son Adam and Wife Carly’s boys this weekend. Both of them have birthdays in February – Graham is 4 and Elliot is 2 – so they have a combined party for now.

Back up to September: Wife Lila’s niece, Laurie Everett of Annie Laurie’s Antique Shop fame, had a toy tractor that had come in from an estate sale. Lila said I should pick it up for the boys and haul it 1100 miles back to West Palm Beach.

Tractor made it to Florida

We decided that Christmas had so much going on that we’d hold the tractor until Birthday Season. It was well received.

Is this a good idea?

Graham was all about the bounce house, but he wasn’t convinced that going down the slide was a good idea. I remember that feeling the first time I climbed onto the high dive at the Capaha Park Pool.

Dad comes to the rescue

Dad Adam was a little more sympathetic than the pool lifeguard who growled, “Kid, those are one-way steps. There’s only one way back, and that’s off the end of the board.”

Graham remained unconvinced. He’s going to be the conservative kid in the family. I remember him complaining at last year’s party “That music is too loud.”

I’m alive to see 5

THERE’S a kid who is limp with relief that the experience is over and there’s a chance he’ll be alive to see his fifth birthday.

Here’s trouble

Elliot is going to be the one who, like his dad, will try anything at least once. As soon as he figured out how to climb up to the top of the slide, he was beating feet to do it again and again.

A gift of love

Lila is a quilter. Not one of those machine quilters, but an real old-time hand quilter. She made a snowman quilt for Matt and Sarah’s Malcolm, and a similar one for Graham.

She presented Elliot’s to him today. When you are two, it’s probably not as cool as a tractor, but he’ll appreciate it over the years.

Graham and Elliot are expecting a brother to come along in a couple of months, so Lila better get busy.

Graham with his quilt

Graham knew right where to find his quilt in his bedroom. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

January 25, 2015January 26, 2015

Steinhoff Rocket Launch

Grandson Malcolm needed to launch some rockets for a school science project. There’s something about the possibility of seeing something blow up that is deeply embedded in the Steinhoff genes (check out Dad blowing up a bridge), so Son Matt, Son Adam, Carly, and Grandsons Graham and Elliot assembled on what passes for a hill in South Florida – a landfill that has been turned into Dyer Park. Across-the-street-neighbor Cheyenne came along. She and her sisters practically live at Malcolm’s house, so she is almost an honorary Steinhoff by osmosis.

Highest altitude

These rockets aren’t the cardboard tubes that my buddies and I stuffed with gunpowder: the engines are made to produce consistent results. An Estes A8-3 engine, for example, produces eight seconds of thrust, pauses three seconds, then sends a blast out the other end of the engine to cause the nose cone to come apart, pulling out a parachute.

Returning to earth

Instead of an old-time fuse you lit with a match, these have electrical igniters to set off the explosives. That’s where I came in. When I climbed to the top of the hill, I found the launch team deep in contemplation after several failed launch attempts.

When they said they had run connectivity tests to make sure there was loop current, I suggested that there might be juice present, just not enough. Of course, there was no spare battery.

Then it came to me that I had left a camera bag in the van that contained 9-volt batteries for my wireless mike. That solved the problem. I refrained from swaggering up and growling, “Failure is NOT an option.”

The white smoke in this photo was caused by a burning piece of wadded-up paper towel that served as wadding to protect the parachute when the backblast blew off the nosecone.

Recovery team in action

Malcolm and Cheyenne race to recover the falling rocket. Well, Cheyenne races to recover the rocket.

Malcolm isn’t the kind of guy who feels the need to demonstrate his alpha maleness if it involves the exertion of energy. That’s another Steinhoff trait.

Wife Lila informed me that Malcolm isn’t loafing: he’s conserving his energy for a soccer match. He didn’t want to take a chance on pulling a hamtwitchit or whatever it is that causes athletes to get carried off the field.

Another Cheyenne capture

That gal has serious wheels. She was great at getting under the rockets.

Record the results

After each launch, Malcolm would write down the stats recorded by a gizmo that blasted into space inside the rocket. It tracked all kinds of variables.

For example, I’m pretty sure it was the rocket on the pad in the photo below that set the record for the day: 264 feet altitude; 83 mph top speed; 26.3 seconds of flight time.

Busted

I saw a park ranger car pull over at the bottom of the hill. Somehow or another, I got the feeling that the ranger wasn’t there to enjoy the launch event.

Sure enough, a very nice woman ranger came up and said that rocket launches weren’t allowed in the park “because the air space over the park” was controlled by a model radio-controlled club on another hill a tenth of a mile away.

Matt explained the science fair project and said they needed to do three launches of three different rockets to get the results Malcolm needed, and there were just two more to go, with one rocket ready on the pad.

Go for launch, then get gone

She said to go for launch on the last two, then get out of there.

After it was over, Matt said he had checked to make sure the FAA wouldn’t have problems with the location and altitudes, but he never thought they would run into a problem with “controlled air space” in a park sitting on top of gigatons of garbage.

December 10, 2014

Shakspere on Kent Library

Son Adam brought Grandkidlets Graham and Elliot over this evening to give their mother a few hours of piece and quiet.

That left me scrambling for something to post this morning. I came up with a long-forgotten (and poorly composed) shot of the front of Kent Library before a wraparound covered the names of seventeen writers chosen by English professor Dr. Harold Grauel and Dr. W.W. Parker, then president of the university.

Fred Lynch’s February 22, 2010, blog lists the names as “Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Virgil, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene Field, Victor Hugo, Homer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Kent Library in 2010

Here’s what the library looked like in 2010. One-Shot Frony took a picture from almost this same angle in the late 1940s if you’d like to make a comparison.

By the way, Wife Lila questioned the spelling in my headline. Fred’s blog talks about that:

Grauel recalled that the stone mason wanted to alter the spelling of Shakespeare. Grauel suggested “Shakespere,” one of several ways that the famous playwright spelled his name.

That spelling was used on the frieze. Soon after, letters arrived at the school from people critical of what they felt was the “misspelling” of the name.

“When the enlargement of Kent Library was undertaken in the ’60s, I saw to it that the name of Shakespeare appeared on the new facade as SHAKESPEARE,” Grauel wrote.

Earlier stories about Kent Library

July 19, 2014

My RAID Failed

Things were starting to come together for my trip back home. I wrapped up the final revision of the Smelterville book, got a haircut, the van got an oil change and new rear shocks, we went out to say goodbye to Grandsons Graham and Elliot, and I made a lot of progress pulling together a video this morning. I even worked in a well-deserved nap after all that activity.

Then, I looked down at the corner of my computer screen and saw an unusual scary-looking alert message. I think this email to Computer Geek Sons Matt and Adam will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about my travails. Bottom Line: I’m out of business until the Geeks parachute in.

HELP!!!

Got an alert this afternoon that my RAID 1 array had gone critical. That’s my boot drive.

I confirmed that my overnight backup had run and copied a few files I knew had changed over to the Drobo. Then I created an Acronis boot disk.

I loaded up the AMD RAID utility and confirmed that it WAS RAID 1 that was sick. My RAID 5 data drives were fine.

I went to Best Buy and picked up a new drive, just in case.

I told the utility to rebuild the mirror. It would crank awhile, then the computer would reboot.

I pulled what I thought was the drive attached to Port 2, which I thought was the bad drive, then I booted up the computer. It booted fine (much faster than usual, in fact).

There’s no joy in Steinhoffville

I went into the utility and confirmed that the drive in Port 2 was gone.

I put the new drive in, and got an error message telling me to tell it where it should boot from.

I tried Ctrl-F, Esc and F8 to get to a window that would let me do that, but no joy.

I pulled the new drive. Same result. I put the old drive back in. Same result.

I put the Acronis boot disk in the drive. It booted up with a bunch of data dumps and got me to a screen asking if I wanted to recover my computer. Rather than take a chance on screwing something up, I turned off the machine and typed this message.

Matt is getting up a 4 a.m. to ride 130 miles, so I don’t think he’s going to be of much help on Saturday. I’m getting ready to leave town, so I need to get fixed as quickly as possible. Am I overlooking something simple?

Remember the big Amazon button

Click on the big red Amazon button when you order stuff online. That helps me keep feeding hard drives into my computer and it doesn’t add anything to your cost.