Author Archives: aaronbertrand

Master Closet Remodel

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I recently blogged about what we’ve been doing with more time at home due to the pandemic. One of the things on my list was remodeling our master closet. When we walked through before closing three years ago, we were blown away with the size – it is slightly bigger in square footage than either of the girls’ bedrooms. But it is not laid out really well, and it came furnished with standard rod & shelf storage:

How it started…

We started looking at options, and most of the custom closet places were $15-20K and up. They were fancy, of course, and had lots of options. But still, hello, DIY.

Wayfair offers a system called Grid by Dotted Line, which I think is a white label for Stow’s Easy Track. It’s a little more industrial-looking, is only 14″ deep (so we can’t really add doors or mirrors, since clothing sticks out), and it shows all the peg and screw holes. But it’s a closet.

Anyway, I planned out what we wanted on this crude whiteboard sketch:

Ordered all the parts (at a substantial employee discount!), and went to work. Progress after the weekend:

…how it’s going

Some minor adjustments from my initial drawing (most notably the nook corner was just too tight to use two walls). Still a couple of things to finish the nook, coming in the next shipment – a few shelves and two undermount hampers.

There’s still a lot of unused space in the middle, which would have been narrower if we went with full-depth, closed closets. We’re talking about an island of some kind in the middle – not a full-height dresser, but some kind of ottoman/storage combination. But we’re ready to start migrating piles of clothes in our bedroom back into the closet.

Next, we’re thinking about changing our vented fireplace to a ventless model, to help better support a bigger project coming soon.

Aaron’s Eggs

Posted by aaronbertrand on

We make eggs a lot, and we like a little spice, so here’s my recipe. Leave out the hot things if you don’t like spice. I like a large non-stick pan, and a silicon spatula to keep the pan spotless as you move the eggs around.

  • 4 links of fresh, ground sausage
    • The more exotic the better – Chorizo, hot Italian, or combo
    • A little more is ok too, but you’ll need a big pan
  • 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
  • 1 large pepper, red, yellow, or orange, chopped
  • 1 or 2 jalapeños, chopped
  • 2 tbsp Frank’s Red Hot Buffalo Wings sauce
  • 1 tbsp green Tabasco milder jalapeño
  • 6 large eggs
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • Shredded cheese

Beat eggs, add milk; set aside.

Squeeze the sausage out of the casing into the pan. Start the browning process, but don’t cook completely, then drain; return to pan (with a little olive oil depending on how well you drain).

Mix in onions, peppers, and sauce; stir occasionally until veggies are close to desired consistency and sausage is fully cooked.

Push sausage and veggies to one side of the pan, and shift the pan so the mixture is largely off the burner. Go down to medium heat, and add the eggs to the spot you cleared.

Stir the eggs frequently until they’re just about done, then mix everything together to finish cooking.

When it all looks done, turn down to simmer, add cheese, and cover until melted.

Please Stop Abusing BCC

Posted by aaronbertrand on

I’m involved with many e-mail distribution lists, and use incoming rules to direct those messages – based on To/CC – to a specific folder. Every few days, one of the lists I’m involved in has a thread that suddenly appears in my inbox. It takes me a few minutes to figure out where that message was supposed to go, and file it manually.

The reason? Someone decided to move the distribution alias to BCC. Why? To avoid inadvertent “reply all” messages going to the list, I guess, or to prevent people from having to ask, “What happened to that conversation?”

This may seem petty, but PLEASE stop doing it.

Not because it affects me, but because it affects every single person on the list who uses filters or inbox rules to redirect incoming messages. I hope I’m speaking for more than just myself when I say this: the disruption is far worse than the potential reply all that will just end up in the same filtered folder, if it even happens. If someone really needs to know that you’ve taken it offline, they’ll ask. To the list. Which still won’t break filters.

By all means, keep using BCC for legitimate reasons – to covertly include a co-worker on an e-mail to your boss, or to send an e-mail to a group of people when you don’t want recipients to know who the other recipients were. But stop using it to protect other people from not replying responsibly – either tell them to reply to you directly, or take the distribution list off the thread entirely. (And sending one last message to the list telling them you’re taking it offline is far less disruptive than telling them that with them in the BCC. All 500 people still get the message; the only difference, really, is that the latter breaks filters, and the former doesn’t.)

Thanks for reading and for using BCC responsibly!

Alexis Sutorius

Posted by aaronbertrand on

andyalexisAt the beginning of September, I lost a dear friend and fellow nerd, Andy Sutorius. He passed away in his sleep from a heart condition that he kept very private.

Our friendship goes back about 20 years, and we shared a meal together on just about every trip I took to corporate headquarters. He would always choose the restaurant, but he would never let me pay.

He was that big, lovable goofball we all know. When he lived in the mountains, he almost sent me off the road as I tried to follow him at breakneck speeds around switchbacks he knew like the back of his hand. This was before either of us had kids, by the way.

Last month I was in Huntersville and I met up with his wife, Heather. We chatted for a couple of hours and she and their daughter, Alexis, are doing well in spite of everything. Alexis is in STEM and is a fan of the arts – she was just cast by Intune School of the Arts in Annie, which will run in December (tickets).

Now, this is where you come in. I don’t ask for a lot of help from my friends and colleagues, but I would absolutely love for you to help me contribute to the trust fund that has been set up for Alexis’ education.

No amount is too small. Want to send a dollar? I think that’s awesome, because every dollar counts. Just e-mail me at aaron.bertrand@gmail.com, or message me on Facebook or Twitter, and I’ll give you all the info you need.

Where I was on 9/11

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Luke & I - September 9, 2001
Luke & I – September 2001

About a week before that fateful day 15 years ago, I landed at MSP to meet with my good friend Luke Magnus. We were in a group of five who would head out for some canoeing and camping in the Boundary Waters, using an outfitter out of Ely, Minnesota.

I do not possess many good photos from the trip, because one of the five struggled with simple sentences, such as, “be careful, there’s a camera in that pocket.” The memory card was partially salvageable, but I was camera-less for the remainder of the trip.

Anyway, the bulk of the trip is not what’s interesting today, as I look back, but rather the last half hour or so, and then the dramatic days to follow.

As we were paddling in to the shore to meet the outfitters, who would drive our canoes back to camp, we passed some new paddlers just starting their journey. They told us that a plane had just hit one of the towers in New York City.

Now, having been in the woods for a week, with absolutely no contact of any kind except for a couple of run-ins with park rangers, we all looked at each other and muttered, uh, ok.

For they may as well have told us that, while we were off the grid, a nuclear war had broken out, or the zombie apocalypse had finally become a reality. We really thought they were just effing with us, as you can do with people who can’t possibly know for sure you’re effing with them.

It was when we collapsed into the outfitter van, exhausted, that he confirmed the other party’s story. We listened to the news, incredulous, for the entire ride back to base camp. And we spent much of that morning glued to the TV – watching those first impact videos over and over again, learning about the Pentagon, seeing the crash site in Pennsylvania, reeling from the glimpses of people choosing to jump, and watching the towers collapse live.

We didn’t speak much. We spent most of the time with our jaws on the floor, full of shock, disbelief, and sorrow. It was a very sad morning, and a very quiet four-hour drive to Minneapolis.

I had a flight scheduled back to Logan that night, but as you can imagine, I wasn’t on it. Not only were all flights canceled, Logan ended up being the second-last airport to re-open (only beating Reagan). Not knowing that at the time, I showed up at MSP every morning for a week, hoping to get on a flight. I didn’t have any kind of status back then, as it was before I started traveling a lot for work, so I was on a constant standby shuffle for flights to anywhere else reasonable – Providence, Hartford, Manchester, NYC, Newark, I didn’t care. Just get me on a plane. I finally made it home on the 20th IIRC, and would have rented a car earlier if I wasn’t convincing myself every morning that “this will be the day.”

I got off pretty easy, being very far away from everything. My wife has a friend who was actually in one of the towers that morning. She made it out and home to Connecticut, but I can only imagine…

Looking back on those days is hard. When I wasn’t in a long snaking line at the airport getting turned down yet again, we were glued to a television set, still full of shock, disbelief, and sorrow. I still feel that way, and catching Osama has not made a dent in my emotions in any way at all.