Category Archives: rambling

Grandma Rynkus’s Birthday

It’s been a little over a year since Grandma passed away. Today is her birthday, and she would have been 90. A year ago at this time, on Facebook and before I started this blog, I wrote a note describing some of my feelings and observations about the handling of her death. I think it’s appropriate to also memorialize that here, on this blog that chronicles so much about not just this house, but the lives of many in my family. I offer no commentary, besides sharing:

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OK, one small note: the picture in the obituary is her driver’s license photo (!). Here is a much better one, taken when my cousin Matt, my aunt and I took her to Buffalo in 2010 on a whim to witness the revived Dyngus Day celebration, something she partook in during her youth:

Grandma at Buffalo's Dyngus Day, 2010.

Grandma at Buffalo’s Dyngus Day, 2010.

I do promise that my next post will be about happier things. Thanks for reading.

 

The Family Silver

As regular readers of the blog are aware, Mary and I got married back in August of 2013. It was a whirlwind of fun, family and friends. When you get married, you are of course given gifts of all types. We received some very special ones from a lot of folks.

My Grandfather (the Rynkus one) has one sister who lives in California. She’s a number of years (12-14) younger than he is. I’ve met her only a few times in my life, but she makes appearances in the family slides I have on several occasions and I speak to her periodically by phone and email. Leading up to the wedding she gave me a heads up that she would be sending along a special family gift – the silverware set belonging to her parents (my Great Grandparents.). My Great Grandparents are Stephen and Laura Rynkus, married November 29th, 1922:

 

She also enclosed the following card:

 

The silverware set was a gift to them for their wedding – service for 12 at that. (For those thinking of a heist – it’s plated, not solid. Sorry to deflate your hopes.) The silverware is a 1919 pattern from 1847 Rogers Bros. called “Ambassador” that was very popular at the time:

 

 

This Christmas, we hosted Christmas Eve dinner with Mary’s family and got an opportunity to use this fancy set of silverware. We ended up making dinner for 11. We chose to make a Crown Roast of Pork, served with red potatoes, shallots and asparagus. To finish Mary made, among the usual suspects (cheesecake, pie) – Grandma Rynkus’ Polish kolache recipe. That Crown Roast? This is what it looked like:

 

So the short answer to my Great Aunt Grace is – yes, the silverware is seeing happy times, as you hoped. The roast? It was spectacular, too.

Something Completely Different

During “wedding week,” my brother and sister came up with their respective families for the whole week. Most of the time both of them stayed with us – so our house had eight extra people in it. It could be a little hectic.

My sister has three boys and one morning we had to head out to run some errands so she was getting ready in the bathroom fixing her hair. Her youngest came up and decided he wanted to help. My sister was happy to oblige – he was the right size and it was certainly helpful for her:

 

Everyone also played some croquet. Tyler, my nephew, was particularly fond of it. I even cut a special area of the lawn. Sometimes, however, it got out of hand:

 

Owego Home Tour

A few months ago I reached out to the new Executive Director of the Tioga County Council on the Arts here in Owego (who also runs the Aesthetic Outburst blog) and pitched an idea: Given that Mary and I have a very unique mid-century house, what if the annual Home Tour included not just classic Victorian period architecture, but started to also show some of the interesting examples of mid-century architecture as well? She thought it was a great idea, and would discuss it with the chair of the Home Tour committee.

This of course meant that I would be asked to join the Home Tour committee. (surprise, surprise.) Mary and I are no strangers to this, so it was an easy idea for us – our loft in downtown Binghamton was featured on Binghamton’s “Loft Life” walking tour for several years.

We had our first meeting for this year a few weeks ago, where I shared my idea with the committee. There were a few skeptical glances at first as most people’s ideas of these houses are small ranches, but after whipping out my phone and showing a few pictures…they were believers too. The logistics are being worked out and it’s stil a long way off, but with a little luck and some good planning, late in Fall our house will be featured as a part of Owego’s Home Tour as a special mid-century stop and we’ll feature information about the house, the neighborhood and how it all of this area of Owego came into being as part of the expansion of the town when IBM built their plant here starting in 1956. Stay tuned for more information!

Radiant Heat Thermal Pictures

I kind of forgot to post these previously – but back in March I had a “home energy audit” done. I had done this once before in 2011 with Grandma so I knew what to expect and this was more of a follow-up to analyze some more changes I had made.

Since I know the guys who do the audit (and they did awesome work here previously) – at Foam-It Insulation – I asked if they could also bring over the thermal camera. If you aren’t sure what that means – a thermal camera is a special digital camera that reads infrared (heat)…so if you point it at your outside wall and there is no insulation, you can basically “see” it. I happen to have radiant floor heat in the downstairs space of the house…so if I point the camera at the floor, I can see exactly where the tubing is buried in the floor, and if there is a leak it will show up as well.

There is a bigger story here, as it was believed when we moved in that the radiant heat was broken (50 years on, it had served it’s time.) But after Mary and I moved in I did some testing and figured out that it wasn’t – I’ll save that story for another post, but needless to say it saved us at least $10,000.

So, of course they hand me the camera and let me wander around and take pictures of things. So for those who are nerdy, here is what embedded radiant heat in your floor looks like – the bright spots are the tubes of hot water running in the floor. These shots are of the downstairs bathroom and laundry room floors. For fun I threw in a shot of the boiler, and some upstairs shots where you can see exactly where insulation is still missing from some walls: