From the Mind of Trevor Stone

[Context: the Bedrooms Are For People initiative to change Boulder's "only 3 unrelated people can live in a house" code is in dispute because of a dispute over signature deadlines, so supporters have been making their voice heard in communication to city council.]

I am writing in support of eliminating the “3 unrelated” city occupancy rule, and to support increased residential density more broadly.

I was born in Boulder, and have lived in and around the city my whole life. I attended CU, work near Pearl Street, and own a home in east Boulder. My parents moved to Boulder in the 1960s, and still live in the 4-bedroom north Boulder house they bought in 1980. Growing up, this was a middle class neighborhood; our neighbors did construction, worked at the library, wrote books, and one served on city council. When my parents reach the point that they need to move into a retirement home, my hope is to rent the old house out to other folks of modest means so that people whose work is vital to a vibrant Boulder---from teachers to firefighters to nurses to students to retail clerks---can afford to live in Boulder. Our family demonstrated that four related adults plus a friend could live in this house without a negative impact on the community; why should the occupancy be limited to three when we rent it out?

I spend much of my free time as a climate advocate. Climate change is a major systemic risk that requires communities around the world to reevaluate business as usual. I applaud the City Council for declaring a climate emergency resolution and setting ambitious goals for greenhouse gas reduction by 2030. Pandemic shutdowns aside, vehicle emissions by in-commuters to Boulder account for a significant fraction of Boulder’s contribution to climate change. Even if the combustion occurs outside city limits, these emissions are still on “our tab” so to speak when they come from folks who would like to live in Boulder but cannot afford to do so. Climate change doesn’t care on which side of a municipal border emissions occur. Boulder’s investments in low-carbon transportation, including our beloved bike trails and quality bus transit, will be even more valuable as higher density increases utilization. Compared to the millions of dollars the city has spent on municipalization, increased occupancy limits is one of the cheapest reductions in CO2 we could make.

I have many friends and colleagues in the Bay Area where low-density housing policy is heading to crisis levels, creating major stress on essential workers and reducing quality of life for even the well-paid professionals who can afford housing. Let’s take heed of this warning and work to increase housing density in Boulder before we stumble into the same fate.

Sincerely,
Trevor Stone

I've got an interesting problem at my house that I hope someone can help me solve.
TL;DR: There's a metal art frame wedged between a wall and the door to a room, and I'd like to move it a little so we can get the door open.

Details:
Our spare room has a door that swings in from the hallway.  To enter the room one must step in and turn left, because there's a closet wall that sticks out from the wall that's to the right of the door.

We had a large (4' tall? 3'6"?) map of Middle-earth in a sturdy metal frame standing against the closet wall.  Today the frame fell forward, pushed the door closed, and is now wedged between (I assume) the baseboard along the closet wall and the back of the door.  We're able to push the door just a little bit, but only to the point that there's a paper-thin crack next to the door jamb, not open enough to get something meaningful in.

The gap between the bottom of the door and the floor is perhaps half an inch: I can get my fingers under it but not my palm.  I was able to slide a long piece of bamboo under the door but wasn't able to get it between the art frame and the right-hand baseboard to try to push the frame to the left.  Based on a video I took by sliding a smartphone under the door, it looks like the frame is resting a few inches below the door knob, so I think it's got room to move up (and hence move the bottom away from the closet wall) if there were a mechanism to do so.  I think we only need to get the door open a couple inches past the jamb, at which point I could get a hand or other object in there to push the frame out of the way.

The room only has one door.  It's got two windows, but they're both latched.  (And the blinds are down, so I can't get an eye on the state of the room.)

So, wise and clever Internet, how can I get this thing to budge a little bit?

Without chopping a hole in the door with an axe, of course.  I'm leaving that as a last-resort option.


Other notes:

• I'm okay with damaging the frame and/or the artwork; it was a gift that's been more of a white elephant than a blessing (and that was before it locked us out of its room).  Breaking a window seems more expensive than breaking the door.  (Also, it's cold outside.)
• The hinges to the door are on the inside (so I can't easily remove the door) and the screws for the knob are also on the inside (so I can't take the knob out and reach my hand through the hole.)
• There is a crawl space that goes below the room and ducting that I haven't investigated in detail.  The two air vents are far away from the door, but I think the cold air return is along the wall that's next to the door, so it might be possible to reach a very long object from there to the frame.  I don't know how detachable the duct work is, and I'd have to bust through the grate from behind (since the screws are on the inside of the room, natch).

I've been imagining a thin-but-firm object that can be inserted fully under the door, then somehow turned upward.  Getting the geometry right seems possible but tricky: the base of the frame is about 35" from the door; the door knob is about 35" above the floor, so I think the vertical height of the right triangle is a little less than the horizontal length.  The trick is getting the leverage/control to raise a long object once it's under the door.  Maybe a long, thin, firm object with an obtuse angle near one end?

A firm object longer than 3 feet with a hook at the end might also work if it can pull the bottom of the frame forward.

I'm sure there are other clever possibilities, too.

March through June in Colorado have been a lot wetter than the norm over the last three decades. The last time I remember this much rain (excluding the 2013 freak flooding event) was 1990, which I remember as the year of rained out Little League games.

July seems to have dried out a bit, but it's still been an unusually water-themed month for me.

On July 4th we watched the Boulder fireworks show… and an impressive night-time thunderstorm to the south from the 4th-story café balcony at my office.

On July 5th I was at home getting ready to gather letters to Congress before the Dead and Company show. With about 30 minutes of prep left to do I noticed there was a funny sound coming from our utility closet. Upon investigation I discovered that the hot water heater had sprung a leak about a foot from the top and was spraying water on the wall behind it. I turned off the inflow to the tank and called around to find a plumber who could show up on the Friday of a 4-day weekend. When we bought the house we knew the tank was old enough to need replacing, but we hadn't gotten around to it because we wanted to investigate tankless water heater options. I learned from the plumbing and heating guy that a tankless system would require boosting the gas capacity in the pipes that go all the way across the house, plus new venting.
This resulted in around a $8,000 estimate for a tankless heater compared to $2,000 for a tank heater. Doing some gas expenditure estimates, it didn't seem likely that $8k over 20 years would come out ahead of $2k every 10 years. This is a bummer, since water heater tanks are a pretty inefficient use of greenhouse gas-producing fuel. Fortunately it was pretty clear that the leak hadn't been going on for too long, so we actually managed to dodge a big mess of having 40 gallons of water bust through a rusted bottom.

With the water heater problem staunched for the moment, I headed to the Dead show about an hour before showtime; leaving the letter collecting for the next day. It had been a super-hot day and the sky seemed pretty clear, so I opted to leave my light jacket in my bike bags. Since I got to Folsom Field close to show time I decided not to jockey for a front-row seat and instead figured I'd have plenty of room to dance if I picked a seat in the second level, facing the still-hot sun. Some clouds moved in and there was some foreboding clouds to the west, but it looked to me like they were going to head north of the stadium. A light rain started a minute or two before the band took the stage and opened with "Not Fade Away." The rain picked up a little bit and I was still feeling warm and dry, though started to question my "don't bring the jacket" decision. The band played "Cold Rain and Snow" and the rain picked up a bit, but the now-rapid cloud motion still looked like it might miss us. Wishful thinking.

As "Cold Wind and Snow" ended, Bob Weir announced "We've got a little weather situation, so we're gonna take five." The PA system announced that everyone should head to one of the designated shelter areas… and the sky opened up with big rain drops, turning to hail. I was stuck in a crowd of people trying to stream through one of the tunnel "gates" from the seating area to the outside of the stadium, but the people in the front of this liquid tube of humanity decided to stop once they got inside the tunnel. Getting out of this crowd wasn't feasible, it was probably 10 people thick in an 8-person aisle width, so the wave slowly pushed from the back and we inched forward while getting pelted with pea-sized hail. Eventually the message reached the folks inside the short tunnel that they were blocking egress and the middle cleared out enough that the crowd pushing from behind could slip out. My felt Uncle Sam hat had somehow kept my head fairly dry, and I was still warm, so I calmly walked across streaming puddles to the Balch Fieldhouse, which was now a hot and humid huddle of Deadheads. Everyone was pretty chill, though, and folks made orderly use of the bathrooms and bought pricey food from vendor stalls.

After more than an hour we were back outside and the band took the stage again. They picked up in the middle of "Cold Rain and Snow" which I thought was a brilliant touch. After a few songs, Bobby announced that due to the rain delay they weren't going to take a traditional intermission. Since the early-to-mid '70s, Grateful Dead shows have had a loose first-set/second-set formula. The first set typically has shorter, lyrical songs while the second set typically features a couple long jams, plus the drums and space interlude. Without an intermission (or with a 2-song first set, if you'd like), there wasn't a clear boundary and "first set" songs started sounding more like "second set" material, with three straight amazing jams from "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo," "Cassidy," and "Deal" which I don't usually think of jam songs, and they flowed beautifully into "Box of Rain" (always a big crowd favorite, it got a big cheer from the damp auditorium), with a nice China-Rider, followed an epic Terrapin Station into Drums/Space into "Casey Jones" into "The Other One" into "Morning Dew." While my Dead-related concert attendance list is fairly short, I don't think I've been at a better show.

On Saturday the 6th I dragged myself slowly through the morning. I got involved in a very detail-oriented and not-at-all crucial prep task for my letters-to-congress project. By the time that was done and I'd gotten the rest of my act together it was getting close to 4pm and I was feeling low energy. But I'd been planning to do this for so long that I shouldered my backpack and headed up to campus… where I sat at a picnic table for five or ten minutes and sighed as I realized I really didn't have it in me to start meaningful conversations with strangers for two hours. So I biked back home, tossed my backpack on the couch, made a slight costume change, and headed back to The Hill for a pre-concert burrito. As I came up from the Broadway underpass I saw something ticket-shaped face down on the concrete. I figured it was someone's receipt or a ticket for the previous night's show, but upon picking it up I discovered it was a ticket to tonight's show. I looked around and didn't see anyone nearby, so it hadn't been just dropped. So cool—free show as a reward for respecting my personal energy limit. (Given the ridiculously high service charges for concerts at Folsom Field I didn't feel too bad about not paying.) Before hitting up Illegal Pete's I noticed Albums on the Hill, another old haunt, and managed to find 10 decent used CDs which apparently now just costs $35 bucks. Music prices have gone in two different directions in the last decade :-/

I brought my jacket to the Saturday show, but it was bone dry. I loved several selections, including an opening Scarlet/Fire, a couple beautiful slow and sweet songs, closing the second set with "Not Fade Away" (making it a two-day-long NFA sandwich :-) and a gorgeous "Ripple" to start the encore. It didn't quite have the same magic as the prior show, where we'd all unspeakingly bonded over the warm rain and hail. I ran into a coworker in the parking lot while I was on a tie dye hunt, though, and had a great post-show decompression.

Stay tuned for the next phase of adventures in a wet July, featuring more water heater problems, lawn problems, and a thunderous massage.

Today I received a glossy mailing from a real estate agent addressed to the folks who sold us their house a month ago. The flyer starts "Selling a home in East Boulder requires extensive local knowledge, a great marketing plan, and superior negotiation skills." It then lists several houses currently for sale or under contract. Finally it lists five recently sold houses… including the one we just bought.

On Monday we're signing a bunch of documents and an escrow company will move a whole bunch of money around between accounts and we're going to move some essentials into a house and change the locks.

I would feel significantly less nervous about this if I'd received final amounts and money wiring instructions by now. I usually assume that data networks between banks are made of molasses, so moving a few bytes from one bank to another takes two days and COBOL code doesn't run on weekends. So I've had over a quarter million dollars sitting around in a couple accounts for a month and I'm getting nervous, because moving $250,000 from place to place is a lot harder than moving $25.

As is often the case, when exciting things are happening they take up most of my time, so I don't blog about them. So what better use of a New Year's Eve at home than a recap of the annum.

My primary foci for 2015 were my wife, my job, and my esophagus.

Wedding

As you may recall, I proposed to Kelly at the Temple at Burning Man 2014. Planning and executing a wedding celebration took about a year, culminating in a wonderful gathering of 150 of our best friends on September 19th. Knowing that we wouldn't be able to pay attention to everyone at a single wedding day event, we created several opportunities to spend time with people: bridal shower, game day, a hike, a storytelling evening, a union ceremony, a reception full of dinner and dance, and a Sunday brunch to recover and say farewell.

Most of the decisions we made turned out really well, in some cases being more key than we'd realized.

• Planning and conducting the ritual ourselves
• The yin-yang and I Ching theme and the eight friends and family that played trigram roles
• The grand-right-and-left movement across the circle that brought guests face-to-smiling-face
• Foothills Community Park in Boulder as a venue, even though nobody told us there would be six soccer games in the field where we wanted to set up
• My Mom's Pie in Niwot who made 20 pies to boost everyone's blood sugar after the ceremony; much better than cake
• The Dickens Opera House in Longmont which were very accommodating, served a great dinner, and had a great space for dancing
• Double helix rings from Zander's Creations; I didn't expect to enjoy wearing a ring every day, but it's been really nice
• Reusable wedding outfits; we looked fabulous for a wedding, but we can also wear them on anniversaries and other party occasions
• Not having an expectation for wedding night sex because we might be exhausted, but being sufficiently energized that we could have fantastic sex anyway
• A Google Sheets gift suggestion list rather than a specific store's registry; we got a wide variety of gifts that can't all be found in one place (except, now, our house :-)
• Tracking invites, RSVPs, food restriction, chair requests, and everything else with Google Sheets

I think it's a very good idea to plan a wedding before getting married. You learn a lot about your partner and have an opportunity to get a lot of significant arguments out of the way. If you can get through all the stress and conflict of wedding planning and still want to get married, I think it's a good sign you'll stick together. Along the way, we stressed about

• What sort of wedding to have
• When it should be
• Where it should be
• How many days it should last
• How many people should be involved
• How the ritual should be structured
• How the reception should run
• Timelines for invitations
• Making homebrew in time for the big week
• Construction of flagpoles
• How to move humans in lines and circles
• Who was going to attend, even though they hadn't RSVP'd
• Where guests would stay
• What car to take
• Folding chairs
• The position of celestial bodies
• … and probably more I've forgotten

That's all a lot of chaos for a couple of introverts, so we had a separate private commitment ceremony in advance: just Kelly and Trevor and Joan the cat and a marriage license under the blue moon. This was the yin side of the wedding: inward looking and nurturing at night, establishing fortitude before the yang energy of crowds and movement in the sun.

Rest and Recovery

The traditional follow-up to a wedding is a honeymoon. But planning a wedding is a lot of work; planning a long vacation immediately afterwards would add undue stress. Instead, we set the intention of doing little but sleep, eat, and screw for the next month. Around our mensiversary we took a four-day agave moon to Valley View Hot Springs for further relaxation and a side trip to the Colorado Gator Farm and the sand dunes.

Moon of Honey

We'd been talking for some time about a honeymoon in Iceland. Winter isn't our ideal time for adventures near the Arctic Circle, so we figured we'd plan something for the summer time. Fortunately, we got an opportunity for an early summer. I've got a business meeting in Sydney in mid-January, which sounded like a great starting point for a month of adventure in the Southern Hemisphere. Wondering if there were any interesting Burner events in Oz, we discovered that Kiwiburn is the week after my meeting. It turns out that New Zealand has a more compact set of adventure opportunities, fewer things that will kill you, and less intense summers. We're still working out the time balance between former British colonies, but it looks like we'll spend more time near the flightless birds than pouched mammals.

Home

In 2014 we moved in with some friends in Ranger Outpost Cherryvale. Despite good intentions, the arrangement didn't work out. We got a great opportunity on a place we call Lucky Gin, with ample gardening, a nice kitchen, and plenty of space to host friends and family in case a wedding should break out. Providing a safe home was one of my key wedding commitments to Kelly, and we hope to stay here until we have the opportunity to buy a house.

Googling and Alpha Bets

One of my big work accomplishments this year was the full launch of the new Google Drive web UI. I led the handoff of production management and oncall duties to our great site reliability team. I then turned my attention to migrating the invisible and lesser-seen parts of our old and crufty server to smaller, easier to maintain homes. This led to a project of introducing an internal framework suite to our organization, evangelizing its use where appropriate, and coordinating things to make the transition feasible.

After six years on the team and my natural inclination to absorb information, my brain has become a repository for a lot of disparate parts of our system. My day to day work often involves answering lots of questions by email and reviewing lots of design documents. This means I don't spend as much time writing code as I would like, but it does mean that I'm demonstrating impact and scope, so several people have told me I should go for promotion. I declined to spend energy on that process this year because the performance review cycle was the same month as the wedding and I was busy working on my promotion from fiancé to husband. The next performance review cycle starts when we get back from our honeymoon, so it may end up feeling like an unproductive quarter.

The Esophagus is Connected to the Stomach

The least fun part of this year has been my gastrointestinal experience. Around the beginning of the year I had several sudden onrushes of an acid feeling, often expressed as tightness in the chest or pain in the jaw. They would often happen at night, waking me up and making me worry that I had heart trouble. I would also experience sudden trouble eating, finding it difficult to swallow. This was often on the third or fourth bite of a meal, but would also happen if I had a bready snack. Sugars like dark chocolate and dried papaya seemed to keep the issue somewhat at bay, and could provide relief after a sudden acid attack. At first I thought the feeling might be a side effect of wisdom teeth removal, but it became fairly clearly gastrointestinal.

Western medicine didn't do a great job on this one. I saw my primary care physician early in the year. After a suite of tests ruling out heart trouble and a variety of other issues, he prescribed omeprazole (brand name Prilosec), a proton pump inhibitor that helps reduce acid reflux. A course of that takes a while and didn't seem to solve the problem, so a few months later I saw an enterologist. That led to an endoscopy a few weeks later, in late April. That turned up partially elevated levels of an inflammation sign, but was otherwise unremarkable. So they prescribed a stronger dose of omeprazole, tapering over two months. That seemed to help a bit, but not a huge amount. In August I returned to the enterologists, who prescribed a modified barium swallow, which is basically a video X-ray of me eating. Of course the condition didn't end up triggering while the speech pathologist was working with me in the lab, but we determined that there didn't seem to be a structural problem in the throat. As the omeprazole course ended and I still had no better idea of the problem than eight months before, I returned to the entorologists. The next prescription was an inhaled steroid, with the goal of reducing the acid in the throat so it could recover on its own (IIRC). I picked up the prescription, but was wary of taking it, so I paid a visit to the naturopath who diagnosed me with a milk allergy over 20 years ago. As I described my symptoms she immediately inferred the problem: the top of my stomach stuck in my esophagus, likely from a night of intense vomiting last December (one of two likely proximate causes I mentioned on every doctor's visit). Her attempts to pull my stomach out of my esophagus were unsuccessful, though. Finally, I paid a visit to a massage therapist who's worked with my family for years. He was similarly very familiar with this condition and with half an hour of body work got my GI system in the best shape it's been all year. The problem isn't fixed entirely–I still often have trouble swallowing and occasionally get awoken in the middle of the night by an acid shock–but it's a case where a holistic approach was able to both diagnose and mostly solve the problem way faster than the western approach focused on data, hypotheses, and attacking symptoms.

Zymurgy

Aside from marriage, work, food consumption, moving, and gardening, my time has been occupied some this year by brewing. It's a hobby I'd wanted to get into, but had put it off until owning a house so that I didn't have to worry about moving a fermenting 5-gallon carboy. My cider foray in 2014 got me started with equipment and I took the opportunity of a more convenient kitchen at Lucky Gin to get into beer brewing. In the late spring I made a by-the-recipe Belgian wit that's been well received; even some non-beer-drinkers have said they enjoyed it. In the summer I took advantage of the juniper tree and mint patch in our back yard and made a batch of ginger juniper saison. (Intended to be ginger-mint-juniper, the mint is basically undetectable.) This brew has been a hit with homebrewers who've called out the juniper aroma without it being an overpowering taste and the complex flavor profile from the ginger. Finally, Kelly and I started a batch of honeymoon mead this week. We hope to rack it before leaving so the yeast can be cheering us on from the secondary fermentation while we enjoy a more figurative honey.

In the kitchen, I also made at least four good rhubarb pies with our bumper garden crop as well as a couple rounds of banana and zucchini bread. Maybe one of these years I'll master pie crust.

I raise a glass of mead and a slice of pie to my friends and wish you all a happy new year. I'll see you on the flip side, so to speak.

After a hiatus full of box moving and parking challenges, it's time to restart the tradition of monthly games at my house.

HOWEVER! "My house" has a different referent. Get thee to
1062 Stearns Ave, Boulder, CO 80303
It's in the Cherryvale neighborhood of Boulder. Brief directions:
* Take Arapaho or Baseline east of Foothills Pkwy.
* Turn south (from Arapaho) or north (from Baseline) on Cherryvale.
* Turn east on Baseline (even if you were previously on Baseline).
* Stearns Ave is the first left past Platt Middle School. (Any of the first four lefts will eventually lead to Stearns, in case you miss.)
* My house is on the east side of the road, with a bunch of bushes along the street. There is ample (and I mean *ample*) street parking.
* Games will be happening downstairs, where we can't hear the doorbell or knocks. Come in the back door (through the gate) and down the stairs.
* This house contains four adult humans, one baby, one dog, two cats, and a large yard. Consider yourself forewarned if you're allergic to any of these things.
Arrive any time between 2pm and your bedtime on Sunday the 27th.
Bring friends, games, children, snacks, drinks, or whatever moves you.
Call 303-EEL-WANG if you need directional assistance.

See you this weekend!

It's time for games day at my house! If you've had practice before, there are important changes:

* New house! I now live at 1006 Wagonwheel Gap Rd, Boulder, CO 80302. Google Maps has incorrect assumptions about the spacing of addresses on this street, so please follow the directions and parking instructions at http://trevorstone.org/wagonwheel.html

* New housemates! I now live with my lovely girlfriend Kelly. You'll like her. We also live with a well-behaved cat. You'll like her unless you've got strong cat allergies. I've also got a nice earth scientist who lives in the upstairs portion of the house. Come to the lower door on the south side of the building, not the north door on the big wooden deck.

* New neighborhood! If you feel like a hike, hit the Anne U White trail before joining the party. My house is a block away from the trailhead.

* New games! I've got (and have yet to play) Domion: Dark Ages. There are several other games I've picked up in the last couple years that I've yet to play as well.

* New year! I turn 33 on Yom Kippur. Feel free to celebrate my birthday, the Jewish high holidays, or the fall equinox with your selection of snacks and/or beverages. Or totally ignore this arbitrary point in time. I aim to remove the social assumption of holiday presents.

Some things are still the same:

* Show up at 2 PM or later. Leave when you get tired.

* Bring friends (especially if you carpool), bring games, bring kids, bring snacks, bring drinks.

* Call 303-EEL-WANG if you need navigational assistance or have any questions. Your cell phone might not work inside my house, so tell your friends and family to call that number if they need to get ahold of you.

I look forward to seeing you all! If you can't make it, but would like to check out one of Boulder's best hiking trails, let me know. We can go for a nice stroll some other time.

Be seeing you!