Lyndhurst Garden House

Lyndhurst Garden House
Lyndhurst Garden House

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Door seals attached

January 29th I finally attached the new door bottom seals, which I had removed 3 months earlier.

I also hooked up the remote thermostatic controller, based on a unit made by Johnson Controls, to control the DeLonghi radiator heater (old version from 1997).  It was easily adjusted to setpoint of 70 degrees.  I left the thermostat on the heater set to "1" (which delivers a room temp range of 65-78 without external thermostat) and the heater set to minimum (350 watts or thereabouts) because kept the inside temp at 65 even with the outside freezing (even with the door bottom seals missing).

I had lots of reasons to do these things now, especially that I found some dead bugs inside Lyndhurst that had apparently crawled in through the doorway, and the electric bill for December 2012 was way higher than last year.

When I had previously removed the door bottom seals, I was thinking that one of two things was possible:

(a) the door bottom seals had picked up smells from the spray foaming, tiling, plastering, painting, etc.

(b) the door bottom seals blocked airflow from the bottom, however the lack of seals at the top of the door (fixed several weeks ago) created a negative pressure at floor level, sucking in smelly air from under the floor moldings.  By removing seals from top and not the bottom, I had created an unbalanced pressure situation which would normally produce undesireable negative pressure at floor level.

This was something of a moment of desperation because while the chemical smells did seem to be decreasing, and were often not noticeable at all, sometimes they seemed to come back at a significant (though still reduced from original) level.  So I wanted to try something new.

At the same time as I removed the door bottom seals, I also finished cleaning the undersides of all the wood shelving (where a lot of the smell seemed to be originating from, or maybe it was just that the smell had affinity for the paint on the shelving).

The combined result seemed at first to be the second most important smell reduction I achieved (the first being cleaning the top sides of all shelving).  But I could not determine whether the improvement came from removing the door seals or cleaning the shelf bottoms.

Later, there was one particular day when the smell was almost back to the level before those changes, and after that I wasn't so sure about anything.

Anyway, once the door seals were off, I also considered the possibility that having the door seals off was providing needed ventilation after November 1 or thereabouts when I officially ended the formal outgassing period and closed the doors routinely.

The seals around the top and sides of the french doors had actually been removed by the contractor when I pointed out they had paint on them.  I can't remember exactly how this went, but I might have told the contractor I would replace the seals (because I would buy new ones, whereas the contractor might try to use the old ones, just cleaned off a bit).

But I figured that with the top seal removed, the stack effect would force warm expanding air out the top of the door, but the seals on the bottom of the door would not allow new air to flow in, creating a small vacuum at floor level.  Whether or not this was true, I determined I should replace the top seals first.  I had purchased replacement seals in mid 2012 but finally installed the top seals a few weeks ago. About that time, I also purchased new door bottom seals, making sure they matched the ones originally on the door which I had stashed in Palmhurst.  They did match, almost exactly, but needed trimming.

Replacing the top seal did actually seem to reduce the smell somewhat (though I no longer have much confidence in such assessments because they are highly variable and related to outside and inside temperatures and humidities).

I tried to replace the bottom seals for the first time a week or so later.  I just brought some scissors into Lyndhurst to cut the new ones to size.  But that cutting turned out to be more difficult than expected, and then I found I also needed to cut the spine of the molding which holds it into place.  It needed to be cut back 1 5/16  of an inch to match the factory ones.  That cutting could not be done with scissors.

I finally did do the cutting on the same day as I was finally clearing out the Queen's Room in my house.  I had temporarily stored the new door bottoms in that room.  The cutting was done with a large wire cutter and was very messy because I had to cut off small pieces which flew everywhere despite my trying to direct them into the trash can.  That was OK because just after I finished, I vacuumed the entire room for the first time in at least 4 years.  I intended to do the re-installation the next week, but didn't get around to it until the following week.

The seals went on very easily.  I just pushed them up into the door, starting at the hinge side.  I then went side to side pushing the seals up as far as possible.  I kept doing this until the creaking noise it made while getting pushed up went away, indicating the seals could not be pushed up any more.

I had previously thought the door seals needed to be slid into place, and figured that might be rather difficult.  Or possibly they might need to be nailed into place.  The factory seals were stapled in place at the ends.  The instructions actually say you must remove the door to replace the seals.  But none of that turned out to be necessary.  Installing seals is actually quite easy, and people should know this because seals are one of the most important parts of energy efficiency.

I plan to do the door side seals later, or perhaps leave them off.  My thinking has been to leave a gap in the door seals on the sides, starting from about 4 inches up (to deter bugs) and then ending about 2 feet up (to prevent too much hot air loss).  This would be the passive ventilation plan for the building, which otherwise is far better sealed than most buildings.



Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Queen's Room ready for Succession


At 9:20 PM on Sunday January 20, 2013, I texted my lady friend "Queen's Room ready for Succession."   She was out for an inspection by 11:20 AM on the next day and was pleasantly surprised at how cleaned out it is now.  (She decided to leave the slippers I bought as a gift on the table.  She likes the table and lamp and intends to use them when she moves in.  Whenever that is--she doesn't know.  In the meantime we plan to make a number of changes to the room.)


Being able to clear out this room for my friend (or others) to sleep in was the #1 reason for building Lyndhurst.   This room hasn't been this well cleaned out since I bought the house in 1992, when it became my mother's bedroom.  When I returned from San Francisco in 1997 after the death of my mother, it got used as a storage room for old heavy tube-based electronic laboratory equipment.  I made a previous effort to clear out the room in May 2009 for my friend.  That time I simply moved junk temporarily into the Garage, with the plan that I'd build a backyard storage building real-soon-now, though the heavy electronics equipment got recycled at a paid recycler (I paid a fee based on weight, which came to $200 or so).  Even then, I hadn't really moved everything out, it was a cheat, I left stuff in the closet and under the bed.  When it was clear my friend wasn't moving in soon anyway, the junk quickly made its way back into the room so I could resume parking my car in the garage.

Fortunately the weekend of January 19 and 20 was a very pleasant weekend, with highs in the upper 60's, for moving stuff out to Lyndhurst.  It wasn't necessary to move much more stuff, given what I had already accomplished in previous weeks, but stuff did need to be moved, and I organized the stuff in Lyndhurst better so it now almost appears like a useable room.  Lyndhurst is beginning to get the appearance inside of a basement room.  The big thing moved on Saturday was the large bookcase-like cabinet for holding video and audio cassettes.  In so doing, I also sorted the cassettes leaving a certain class for inside-home-only (I'm still considering Lyndhurst one notch less environmentally stable for long term storage than my home, but it could actually be the reverse at this point) and replacing them with others in hallway cabinets to go out.

I also moved out the antique table, which had been positioned in the Queen's Room as a bedside table, but clearly wasn't a good bedside table being about a foot higher than the bed.

There were also boxes packed last week sitting in hallway and living room that needed moving out.  Two more large plastic bins were packed, one with stuff mainly from the bed and table, including CD-R's of me playing my Kurzweil synthesizer, and one filled mainly with hangers from the closet.  I cleared out the Queen's closet on Sunday by moving most clothes and ordinary spare plastic hangers to the King's Room and Laboratory closets.  That left special hangers of various kinds, and metal hangers, and they went into this box (which is currently in the Living Room actually, as by the time I finished packing it was 8pm on Sunday and I didn't want to go outside in the sub-60 temperature, and I haven't been moved to move it since, having time constraints ever since then.

One of the biggest ordeals in my mind was clearing the desk table, but actually the papers there were quickly placed into a new folder if they related to home improvements or the construction of Lyndhurst.    That job was done in less than an hour on Sunday night, and then the room was vacuumed, leading up to the 9:20 completion.

At this point the items left in the room can be numbered.  I've left the bed, which is perfectly useable, with minimal bedding including two pillows and a blanket.  They've been there all along, the sheets were probably last changed on this bed in the early 2000's, or possibly when I prepared it for friend usage (but nothing like now) in 2009.  My friend wants to bring her bed and mattress with her when she actually moves over, but nevertheless wants me to clean the bedding that's on the temporary bed now.

I left the desk with a desk lamp on top.  My friend likes the desk a lot, so it is going to stay.  It is a nicely made wood computer desk.  I can't remember exactly what she said about the lamp but she liked it too.

I left two artworks, a large meadow picture above the bed and another tiny meadow picture painted on a small wood piece, now hanging on the side wall.  My friend liked both of those.  Many other pictures were removed, including especially the Flapper Picture which was for my mom.  It was actually a framed copy of The Ladies Home Journal from September 1915, the month in which my mother was born.  It was treasured by my mother but wasn't particularly pretty or meaningful to anyone else.  It got repacked in the cardboard box that a new A/C intake grille was packed in.  That box with grill was another thing needing to be removed from the Queen's Room.  Removing the grill from its shipping box (it was placed in front of A/C intake but not actually attached to wall yet) and repacking the picture into that box was one of the bigger accomplishments of Sunday.  Another was chipping the small plastic edges off the bottom of a marble cutting block that had been stored in the Queen's room.  I did that chipping in the driveway, during which a pretty neighbor lady walked by and said hello.  I needed to do that chipping because previously every time I tried even to move that piece of marble (which I put underneath hifi components to lift them off the carpet generally and that was why I bought it) I cut my fingers on the edges of plastic underneath which had originally glued the long-since-removed feet from the base.  Once the marble was fully smoothed underneath, I simply carried it to Lyndhurst.  It had been stored out-of-the-way in the Queens Room for years simply so I wouldn't have to handle it and get my fingers cut again.

I left the antique white lamp on the floor plugged into the switched outlet.  Since the antique table it used to sit on had been removed, there was no alternative but put this lamp on the floor for now.  It will eventually be replaced by a floor standing lamp with arms.

The only remaining wall hanging is a mirror.  My friend didn't like it, so it will go.  It looks like an antique mirror but on close inspection the fancy carving is just moulded plastic.  So it is made of moulded plastic laminated on top of real wood.  So the mirror is a fake antique mirror, but now so old (probably from the 40's or 50's) that it is itself antique.  Still, fake things like this generally have little value.  I can't remember seeing this mirror in any previous family residence.  I think my mother picked it up at Goodwill.  To Goodwill it will be returned.

And I have left the vacuum and stepstool in the room.  Though I have vacuumed the floor, I haven't actually vacuumed all the way under the bed, and the stool is nice for reaching in the closet to remove the shelf hardware.  But those are really just excuses, I'm just keeping the vacuum and stepstool in this room because the garage room, the Gymnasium, is not ready for it yet.

And that's all there is now.  In case you forgot how it looked before, even after a week of clearing out, it had looked like this:



Thursday, January 17, 2013

New Room Names

I've decided to give my bedrooms actual nice names to help keep them straight.  I've been thinking that one possible name for my house itself would be King's Castle, which is the name of the castle where Prince Charming lives.  I may come up for another name for the house itself, but I like the names suggested by that motif:

Master Bedroom becomes King's Bedroom
2nd Bedroom becomes Lab (shorter and more accurate than Computer Room)
3rd Bedroom becomes Queen's Bedroom
2nd Bathroom becomes Queen's Bath
4th Bedroom becomes Gym (more succinct than Exercise Room)

So, the new bedroom names are King's Bedroom, Lab, Queen's Bedroom, and Gym.

Alternate choices rejected

"Lord's Bedroom" doesn't sound any less stilted than "King's Bedroom."  Lord, which is the counterpart to Lady, has also gotten to mean something like God.

"Princess Bedroom" sounds demeaning.

"Mistress Bedroom" (the counterpart of Master) sounds even more demeaning.

And it's not so far out to use these names, considering we call our beds "King Size" and "Queen Size" and so on.  Actually the King's Bedroom now has a Queen sized bed, and that is the size that fits best into the room.  The Queen's Bedroom now has a twin sized bed, that will probably also stay the same.  These are not large rooms, in fact they are smaller than the bedrooms in most houses built after 1965, like my whole house.  But the comparative smallness helps keep the house efficient in many ways.  The fancy names are a nice complement to the small rooms.



Looking better

The 3rd bedroom is getting close to being entirely cleared out, and the other 3 bedrooms are looking much neater also.  It was cloudy but with temperature near 70 degrees Saturday January 12 was an ideal moving day and I spent 6 hours moving stuff.  Sunday it got cold again and so I only moved one more box on Sunday.

The biggest part was that I moved out all the stuff that was packed underneath the bed.  That was quite a lot of stuff.  I removed the remaining items from the closet shelf, including the PS Audio PowerPlant 300, and a burnt-out stepdown transformer I used to use as a dimmer in the master bedroom.  After removing the transformer, I carefully cleaned the shelf twice to remove any possible residue.  However, there was no visible residue from the transformer anyway.  I also removed a cube full of LP records and some other items.

I also finished sorting all of the electronic cables which I had temporarily moved from the 2nd bedroom (aka the Computer Room) into the 3rd bedroom.  Now the computer room has 3 boxes of cables, and they are neatly organized and not spilling out all over the floor.  There is a new box of cables in the 4th bedroom (aka the Exercise Room) for outlet strips, and there is a new box of old computer cables also.  Some RF cables got packed into the box of RF cables that was already in the exercise room.

Some lightweight stuff remains, including a previously undiscovered bag of papers and magazines.  However I will almost certainly get the 3rd bedroom all cleared out this coming weekend, and I am greatly looking forward to that.  The biggest and heaviest thing is the case full of VHS and cassette tapes.

Actually I plan to leave a few things in the bedroom for now, including the bed itself (until replaced with a nicer one) and the small desk.  The antique table next to the bed is not good for a bedside table and will be moved.  I will leave a couple of desk lights and a couple of clip lights. that could be attached to the bed.  I'll let my friend decide which lamps, if any, to keep in the bedroom.  I will move the remaining clothes in the closet by relocating to other closets.

I moved some speakers in the closet shelf in the master bedroom into their factory box and then into Lyndhurst, making room on the shelf for stuff that used to be taking up space on the floor.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Slow moving out to Lyndhurst

I knew it was going to be a cold weekend.  Wintery weather was forecast.  Actually, it wasn't as wintery as predicted and there wasn't any significant precipitation after Friday night.

So I wasn't expecting I would be able to, but as it turned out I took a little time both on Saturday and Sunday to move stuff out to Lyndhurst.  I moved just a few things on Saturday when it was still quite cold, and spend more than an hour moving stuff on Sunday.

Fortunately, the inside of Lyndhurst isn't getting full yet, but I'm frustrated by the fact that the ladder gets right in the way of where I would be stacking boxes and plastic bins otherwise.

The key achievements this weekend were inside my house.  I wouldn't pull out the "transformation" hyperbole just yet, but some areas inside my house are better organized than they have been in years.  All 4 bedrooms saw substantial improvement in organization.  And improvement is getting easier too.

The 4th bedroom, the converted garage room, also called "the exercise room" has been essentially impassible for at least a year and a half.  I do walk through the room daily to go from hallway to garage, but that was the only clear path.  Starting from that path at the front of the room, further ingress was blocked by two large boxes, scattered tubes of caulk, planter pots, and other junk.  This gridlock was cleared on Sunday by moving several things to Lyndhurst, the 10 foot FM antenna, the 10 foot box containing backing rods for fixing concrete gaps around my house (which I didn't get around to doing in 2012 as hoped), the special self leveling caulk for filling gaps.  Also moving some things to the car for taking to Goodwill.  Plastic shopping bags were collected and put into box inside car also.  Also, the boxes that line the right wall have seen some reorganization and the equipment on top of them has been merged in with other equipment elsewhere.  It's now possible to enter into the room about 4 feet or so, and access all of the boxes on the right side of the room, and the piles of equipment on the left side.  The ultimate plan for the boxes on the right side is to have only one instead of two layers of boxes along the wall on the right side.  The layer that will remain is the now front layer which has been getting better organized itself.  There are now sorted boxes containing A/C adapters, X10 gizmos, RF cables, and AC outlet strips, among others.  Those will remain in this room for convenience, but stuff like old videos and magazines, typically in the back row of boxes, will get moved out, because they don't get looked at often if ever.

In the master bedroom, there was a pile of junk in the right corner that finally got cleared out, allowing the rearrangement of all the space in the closet so stuff is no longer filling half the bedroom.  There was a still boxed Belkin UPS which I plan to use in computer room eventually--it got taken to Lyndhurst with the help of a dolly.  There was a Denon 2900 which is still minty but I may never use again (because I have better stuff now, like Denon 3910 and 5900 currently in use, as well as an Oppo BDP-95).  The 2900 got taken out to Lyndhurst.  There was also a flakey 5900 that needs a new laser.  That was combined with another 5900 from the 4th bedroom and placed into the Skandia shelves in the 2nd bedroom.  So once that pile of junk was cleared, the remaining closet area was rearranged leaving my dumbbells  accessible for the first time in years, and everything basically tucked back in the closet, much neater looking.  Also some speakers on the high closet shelf were moved out to Lyndhurst, making room for some times that had been permanently in the near-closet-floor area.

In the 2nd bedroom, there was considerable re-arranging of stuff on the Skandia shelves, with some of the equipment I doubt much I'll use again being moved out to Lyndhurst.  The floor near the shelves was cleared, and the 3 main boxes on the bottom (for RF cables, AC cables, and computer cables) have now been cleared of surplus cables (that were spilling out everywhere in the room), and now back in place with their cables neatly wrapped.  For the first time in a year or more it was possible to move the chair around.

I didn't clear much stuff out of the 3rd bedroom, but I continued using it this weekend mainly for sorting out the boxes of cables from the 2nd bedroom, which was a major effort requiring many hours of work continuing from last weekend to this one.  I was able to remove the hardest thing to deal with of all--the picture of my mother, which was laying flat on the table. For sentimental reasons, I didn't want to put that picture in any box, but could no longer hand sit it on the mantle in the living room (because it rattles) or hang it on any wall (because the hanger is broken).  I found the perfect spot on top of my Skandia shelving in the 2nd bedroom for it.  So the picture of my deceased mother is now on display in the room that few girlfriends will dare to enter anyway (it's the computer and electronics workroom filled with electronics junk)--so that's the best place in the house for her.

I took the speakers from the master bedroom closet out to Lyndurst on Monday morning also to check the temperature out there.  I don't know exactly where I put the RF thermometer and was wondering if I could actually trust it anymore.  Well the room was as warm as the thermometer said, despite having just been through a night where it got to freezing outside.  So all is working fine, the room is staying warm with the heater on lowest power setting.  The Lyndhurst chemical smell is barely noticeable mostly, but when I went out there on a particularly humid morning last week it was more noticeable than I would have liked.

Now I wish I had taken "before" pictures of the other rooms, as I did for the 3rd bedroom in mid December.  Just believe me, the 2nd and 4th bedrooms were about as bad or worse.  And now, my house is become more like a house and less like a warehouse.  And that was really the point of building Lyndhurst.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

New goal for February 1



The photos above are from my 3rd bedroom, as it was in mid December 2012.

I have made good progress in clearing out the 3rd bedroom since those photos were taken.  And I have even started clearing out the 2nd and 4th bedrooms as well, the 2nd now becoming somewhat passable for the first time in months.

No, I did not meet my goal of having the 3rd bedroom (the one eventually intended for a friend) entirely cleared out by January 1, but I have many good excuses for missing that goal.  I was ill for the 3rd week of December, and not fully recovered by the start of the 4 day Christmas weekend.  Then very cold and sometimes drizzly and windy weather set in.  We don't consistently get wintery weather during December in Central Texas, but it's been pretty consistently wintery for the past 3 weeks.  Having just gotten over a bad respiratory illness, I'm was not going to be carrying junk out across the back yard when the temperature is 40 and it's blowing at 15-20 mph or drizzly.  I did make progress during the early afternoon of December 28, when I hauled out all the big plastic containers filled with papers, books, and magazines that had been sorted to reduce volume by 70%.  That was the only nice warm afternoon in the past few weeks, just over 70 degrees, and I sacrificed my usual after breakfast nap to do the moving.  Moving actually goes quite quickly when you have stuff boxed up and ready to move, and I felt that was the time to do it.

So as not to consider this lack of meeting my goal slipping back, I've made a new goal, that of having the 3rd bedroom entirely cleared out, as I had been intending to do by Jan 1, AND having the 2nd and 4th bedrooms completely passible (i.e. no papers or junk on floor, so you can walk around freely) by February 1.  At least that's a forward moving goal, and one that also requires a lot more work inside my house where I'm likely to be mostly anyway, though it's also quite possible that foul weather, which often continues into mid February, will get in the way of that goal too, so I may have to triple down then with an even more ambitious goal, say that of having Lyndhurst nicely resorted and inventoried too, by March 1.

It also is a golden opportunity because now that the floor of the 3rd bedroom was cleared, that room has lots of space for sorting the boxes and piles of stuff from the other bedrooms.  Those other bedrooms have gotten so packed with stuff, no sorting can be done in them, the most you can do is pull stuff out of them and sort it elsewhere.  And since I can't carry stuff outside anyway, it's good to have all the stuff organized into containers for efficient moving when the weather improves.

Possibly the biggest bit of progress was made over the Christmas holiday weekend, starting on Monday December 24.  On that day, my nose finally stopped running so I could sort stuff without constantly having to blow my nose and re-wash my hands.  So I really got into the sorting thing.  When I started the floor of the 3rd bedroom was piled up to 18 inches high all over with papers, magazines, unopened mail, books, plastic bags, and so on.  During the previous few years, whenever I was cleaning up for one of my monthly parties, and there was stuff of this kind, I simply carried it to the 3rd bedroom.  OK, well, maybe it wasn't quite that simple, sometimes I carried it first to the master bedroom thinking I'd sort it out after the party.

After sorting all day December 24 I was really swinging the paper axe, so I continued right through most of December 25 and cleared a similar pile in the corner of the master bedroom, and a much smaller (but nasty) pile right next to the night stand.  (It was nasty because it was papers all built up around a remote control having corroded batteries.  I needed to carefully remove and detoxify the remote, put it into a plastic bag, and stash for later repair.)

About 2/3 of the stuff went to the recycling can.  Certain things had to be boxed, certain magazines I am saving, certain kinds of receipts and other paperwork, certain interesting looking articles, and some rarely needed manuals.   Those boxed items were put into 2 new 14 gallon plastic containers which were taken out to Lyndhurst on December 28.  Credit card statements and credit offer were mostly stripped out of their envelopes and advertising inserts and put in special "to be shredded" can.  Some of such were just dumped into that can without being stripped from their envelopes too, when I got impatient or was running out of time.  I opened so many envelopes my finger was hurting so I started using a knife to open envelopes--the first time I've ever done that.

So by the end of December 25 not only had I cleared the floor of the 3rd bedroom of all the papers, I had started examining the 6 large plastic containers (up to 28 gallon) in the corner of the room.  Most of them contained more papers of a similar kind as was on the floor, and I managed to clean out a sizeable fraction of their now obviously unneeded contents.  But I didn't finish that process, or continue it much during the next two work days, and then on December 28 I simply hauled all the plastic containers out to Lyndhurst and found some way of stashing them there.

I also hauled a fair number of old audio components out to Lyndhurst, and stacked on the high shelf on the north side mostly.  A typical component in that pile is the Sony DVD-7000 player.  That was the first DVD player from Sony, a Reference component for many years.  But since it won't play DVD-R discs, and it won't play SACD's or DVD-Audio's, it's no longer useful to me.  I think it could be sold for enough on eBay to make it worth selling, but not much more.

When it got warm for an hour or so on Sunday December 30th I carried a few more components out to Lyndhurst, including a Nikko Alpha III amplifier that was the darling of Audio Directions when I worked there in 1979.  Since then I've decided it really doesn't sound as good as my newer amplifiers, even the Parasound HCA-1000A.  But I don't really want to trash it either.  It's almost worth holding onto for sentimental reasons, though I'd be glad to sell it at a price high enough to cover the considerable effort required to pack and ship.

Now actually the floor of the 3rd bedroom is largely covered with open containers from the 2nd and 4th bedrooms that are getting resorted.  But that's progress toward the new goal.

In the process of doing this kind of sorting I always find interesting things.  One was an article from Jamie Galbraith writing in 2003 describing the evidence that JFK had positively decided to pull out of Vietnam by 1965 and positively not send actual "troops" (at that time, only "advisors" had been sent) to fight a major war to defend South Vietnam.  Then he was shot a month later.  The timing and many other known facts and speculations support the idea that the decision to pull out of Vietnam and Kennedy's being shot were not coincidental.  Jamie was making that point and has some first hand association with this as well as having spent a long time thinking about it.  His father, John K Galbraith, was an advisor to Kennedy.

Still, I have to say, the actual evidence presented was not exactly iron clad.  If you read the transcription of a Kennedy dialog Jamie included in the article (Kennedy actually recorded discussions in the White House, though not as obsessively as Nixon) it's a little vague, actually.  You have to know the context of the Cold War--the intense hawkish anti-Communist attitude in the US generally--to understand it.  
It's partly that Kennedy is NOT being so hawkish that makes the story.  He's not sounding like a peacenik either, however.  Noam Chomsky, notably and noted in the article, disagreed with Jamie's hypothesis, though I'm not sure Chomsky had read that particular dialog presented by Jamie, which was enough, but just barely enough, to confirm my new suspicions.  I was perfectly willing to accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission until sometime in the 2000's, and I had always thought of Kennedy as hawkier than hawk for his "missile gap" campaign ploy.  But now I have seen recordings of press conferences in which the press was basically ganging up on Kennedy for not being sufficiently warmongering.  In addition to possibly deciding to pull advisors out of Vietnam, Kennedy also resisted sending the Air Force to defend the CIA's invasion of Cuba, resisted escalating the Cuban Missile crisis, and did not cause a military confrontation over the construction of the Berlin wall, three things that made cold war hawks very angry at the time, but also quite possibly the reason we're still around today.  Kennedy said at one point that the President's number one job is to keep the USA out of war.  And he may have done that far better than his successors.  If he had succeeded in keeping the USA from fighting a full on war in Vietnam, things today might be far different.

If I had never sorted through these papers, I would have never found this very interesting article.