Earlier in the summer I posted about an old Ohio farmhouse. The house was expanded sometime during its life, but the original part dates from about the 1830s or so, long before plumbing and electricity and, apparently, bolts. In the original attic, you can see that wooden pegs were used to tie a horizontal beam to its vertical support.

Here's a closeup...

It looks as if the wall and roof planks have been replaced over the years, but the huge beams seem original, still showing marks from having been made with, I think, an adze. Here's the same beam as [...]

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Last month I posted about a Surreal (and exceedingly unpleasant) PayPal Experience, and also about an Apple customer-service fiasco coincidentally related to PayPal, but unrelated to the first issue. The common theme among both unpleasant customer experiences was "policies that make no sense, combined with explanations that make no sense."

Through an almost serendipitous chain of events, I received a phone call today from Mike Vergara, Director of Account Protection at PayPal (featured in this article), who shed light on both experiences.

The summary for both situations is this: there is a reasonable basis for the policies I was running [...]
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In my previous post, about fun on our trip to Blumeの丘, I recounted how fun the go-carts were, but that the real fun had only begun. The real fun was a short hill covered with some slippery surface down which you could toboggan.

Toboggans could be rented at $3 for 20 minutes. We rented two for an hour, and had great fun.

Each trip down the short hill took about 10 seconds.

We mixed and matched in every permutation....

I tried a number of runs where I went down backwards ahead of Anthony, facing him with the camera as he [...]

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The outing that I mentioned yesterday (that produced the car at sunset advertisement-esque shot) was an hour's drive away, to the German-themed Blumeの丘, a name with German and Japan components that translates in English to "flower hill". It's a park full of flowers, farms, restaurants, shops, and entertainment, that was pleasant, although as far as I could tell, the German theme extended only so far as the font used for signs, and the music played throughout the mini town mall.

We didn't really know what to expect, and were pleasantly surprised to find an enjoyable day. We went with the [...]

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