Delano Bungalow

Hooping it up

2012-01-10T14:57:00.002-06:00

It's been crazy warm lately (just like the summer was), but it's finally going to act like winter starting tomorrow. I gave the critters in the teeny-tiny hoop house a good soaking, and finally got around to trimming up the salvaged coroplast on the ends, zip-tying it on, and cutting doors so I can water it easily. And take pictures. Guess I should have taken a side-view so you can see the construction, but it's two pieces of conduit bent into house shapes (so not exactly just "hoops") and threaded through a cedar 1x3 ridgepole.

There's a half-dozen broccoli plants, which are finally thinking about broccing. (That's the verb for what they do, right?)

The half-dozen cabbages are slowly heading up. They've done a lot of their growing in this warm spell, so they'll probably slow down a little now. Or not, since the better-sealed hoop house will probably keep them a bit warmer.

I need to cover a second bed, since I planted some chard hoping it would get started on sprouting during the warm spell. Chard sprouts really slowly, and grows slowly when it's cold, so it may not have been worth it, but when the temps are hanging around in the 60's that long, you just gotta plant something.

Some of the hardneck garlic (in a raised but not covered bed) also finally sprouted, so I'm a little relieved there. It didn't show anything when I planted it this fall, so I didn't know if it actually did put down roots or just rotted in the ground. I feel better seeing some of it now, so hopefully I'll have a batch of garlic scapes this spring.

Bird book

2011-12-21T14:38:00.001-06:00

Finished a book. Binding one, that is, not reading one.

Not 100% pleased with it; the spine is just a little too narrow and it wants to spring open. This is why I like limp bindings... whereever the text block ends, that's where the spine does too.

Still, the advantage of a ribbon-bound book is that you can untie the ribbons and replace the cover.

It's 60 pages (30 leaves) of Canson 90# cold-press aquarelle, 5.5" x 7.5", ribbon bound with cloth covers.

Book haul

2011-12-13T22:16:00.003-06:00

I haven't mentioned my bookbinding hobby yet here, apparently. But it's safe to say if there's a crazy DIY hobby, either Carl or I have tried it. Bookbinding is a recurring one.

Salvation Army haul

I bought a quartet of raggedy hardbacks at the Salvation Army today, with the intent of reworking/reclaiming them in various ways. I have regular davey board I put bookcloth on, and I make limp leather bindings, but I've seen so many altered books I finally decided I needed to try it myself, and hit up the SA thrift store knowing they're, um, less picky about the quality of books they take in. The Three Musketeers book above looked promising; the spine was taped in place, so this should be a book I wouldn't feel guilty about cutting up.


Three Musketeers - Inside front

Inside, it had some lovely endpapers. Unfortunately, the front had library bits glued to it.


Three Musketeers - Inside back

The back endpaper was more brilliantly colored, but half of it is missing.

Three Musketeers - Color plate

Fortunately, it has plenty of lovely color plates, so I can reline the front cover when I use it.


Three Musketeers - B&W illo

It also has lots of black and white pictures, ranging from full-size down to little spot illos.


Three Musketeers - Dude looks like Milady

Most of the color plates are lovely and swashbuckle-y. I have no idea what's going on with Milady in this one, though. Maybe makeup is really hard to apply on a boat during a Channel crossing?

Three Musketeers - spine

The spine was what caught my eye first. Yay damaged books!

Handbook of Tropical Aquarium Fishes - spine foot

The aquarium book wasn't in as bad of shape - the cover is coming off, but mostly the book is out of date. Fishkeeping has changed a lot since 1971.

Aquarium Fishes - color plate

It has quite a few color plates, and a ton of black and white images, mostly photographs.

Aquarium Fishes - black and white illo

A few of the pictures are nice line drawings.

Aquarium Fishes - diagrams

And some technical diagrams.

Shen of the Sea - front cover

Shen of the Sea is in pretty good shape, but it's a late printing of a very common book (a Newbery winner).

Shen of the Sea - inside front

More library damage.

Shen of the Sea - Cut paper illo

The illustrations in this one are all paper cut silhouette style.

Brooooomp.

I love this matter-of-fact sound effect. Exclamation point? Nah, honey badger don't care.

Keys to Happiness - spine

Keys to Happiness is a nice pink-and-red Reader's Digest book. Those can always be counted on to have nice, if uninspired, covers, can be found in good shape, and are common enough to chop up without guilt. The inside of this one turned out to be kind of fun when I started to think about it.

Turn Your Sickness into an Asset

I'm thinking get-well card.

Don't Let Your Illness Go to Your Head

Yep, definitely.

Live on What You Make!

Or maybe random free-advice cards.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOB

Sympathy cards for laid-off friends?

We Found a Substitute for Income

Does that sound like a good spam subject? It does to me.

Why Didn't You Get That Promotion?

Hmm. Another sympathy card?

WATCH OUT FOR THE WEATHER

More random free advice.

Stop Killing Your Husband!

Just as soon as he stops beating you, that is.

Turn Your Imagination Loose!

Some will be good bits of encouragement to include in blank books, as end papers and whatnot.

Get in There and Paint!

A prime candidate for one of my books with a canvas cover.

Note: I've been doing some playing around with Google Plus, so that's been part of my blog absence. Now I'm going to experiment with quoting these entries over there, so we'll see where the comments end up.

Poor, neglected blog

2011-12-13T08:12:00.002-06:00

I'd like to say the house hasn't been as neglected, but, well.

It's not as if there hasn't been *some* house-related activity, either. It was the most insanely hot summer ever, and the A/C went out. Somewhere I have a picture of the capacitor that needed replaced... we did it ourselves.

Last week the furnace did, too. I don't have a picture of the motherboard that needed replaced... did that ourselves, too. So it's not that we are complete incompetents when it comes to house repair.

We've about conceded defeat on the siding, though. I think we're going to take it all off and replace it with fiber-cement.

There, I said it.

It's not as if the house is a museum (remember, the entire interior has been gutted, sheetrocked, popcorn-ceilinged, and so forth), and we'd re-side it at the original narrow reveal and all that. And the city's Historic Preservation department will get first dibs on the cedar we take off. So that's not evil, is it?

Inglourious bâtards

2011-08-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

Spent the morning with a 15-minute bread-kneading workout. It's good exercise. Too good for my Kitchenaid stand mixer, which is out in the garage awaiting an overhaul. (The motor's fine, but the linkages need serious tightening up.)

The sourdough bâtards were from a couple days ago. Today is market baking, so there's four challahim (rather, the dough for them) in ferment from the above-mentioned knead, and the biga and soaker that will eventually be twenty 100% whole-wheat cinnamon rolls de-chilling.

Tonight at market, the local flour guy is bringing me 25 pounds of medium-grind whole wheat, so we can make the Poilâne-style miche at some point this week, using the same sourdough culture that made the above bread.

The same day as the sourdough, I made pain l'ancienne baguettes, also from the Peter Reinhart book that I've been working through:

They were good, but not as life-changing as the book indicated. I may need to work a little more on my hearth-baking technique, but it was 105 degrees that day. Perhaps not the best day to crank the oven to 550?
The whole-wheat rolls are from a different book, which I've only checked out of the library. I'll probably have to buy that one next:
Those are a little more life-changing. 100% whole wheat, but they actually taste good. I have some whole wheat for sprouting to make a 100% sprouted-grain loaf, at which point my transformation to hippie will be complete.

Jinxed it. Also: HOT.

2011-08-01T21:42:00.001-05:00

It was time for regular maintenance on the Saturn, so we took it in to the brake place and got that done. As we were checking out, we chatted with the brake guy about the reliability of Saturns of that vintage. "It's never given us a major problem," Carl commented.

Yeah, you know what's coming next.

Folks who follow me on Google+ (which I'm still undecided about, by the way; if they don't add Atom feeds pretty darn soon I'm not going to use it any more than Facebook) have already heard all the gory details, so I'll summarize: It's hot here (107 today, 112 forecast for tomorrow) and the Saturn's brain has been baked.

Nothing too essential, except when it gets hot it won't shift out of Park without the physical override, the fuel and temp(!) gauges don't work, and the door locks don't work. Oh, and the horn randomly honks and the lights flash, but not (I *think*) while it's moving (unless the same thing that thinks it should stay in Park thinks the panic-button function should still be allowed).

You know, just little quirks.

When things cool down enough that the critter isn't too hot to touch, we'll tear it down, get the number of the chip, and find a used brain. In the meantime, it's parked, which means Carl is driving the van to work (three days a week), which is really inefficient. (It gets decent mileage for a vehicle of its size, but that's relative.)

Now, generally I'm not above walking a mile or two to get places, but like I said: 107 today. Kiddo and I have done a little walking, with Carl's big black ~~umbrella~~ parasol, and it's doable. If you're not in a hurry. And you aren't carrying anything heavy, except for a lot of ice water. We haven't tried it for anything over 104. But I'm not sure I'm ready to go car-less to that extent.

And that won't work at all in a couple of weeks, when the kiddo goes to middle school - he's going to a school several miles away, but (because it was a transfer) doesn't get transportation there (nor do city buses run there).

I'd like to say it'll cool off by then. But it won't.

We done did go get some beef

2011-07-23T11:47:00.001-05:00

Most days, living in Wichita is pretty typical suburbia, but occasionally I get reminded Kansas has its own character.

This morning, we got up at the crack of dawn (or as close as possible considering the place didn't open until 8) to go pick up a side of beef. "We" in this case was Carl's mom and I. The processor was in Halstead, about fifteen miles from the edge of town (fortunately, same edge she lives on).

The cow was raised by the family of a co-worker of Carl's stepdad, so I'd actually met the folks a week or two ago, at the estate sale where we picked up a waterfall desk for the kiddo (at half off its $15 price tag). And there I learned that they are in fact the sort who un-ironically use phrases like "done did go," which you tend not to hear in Wichita proper. Much. Fortunately, the cattle weren't where the estate sale was, so while kiddo got to meet some pork on the hoof, we shouldn't have another "That Cow" problem.

Halstead is between the Big and Little Arkansas Rivers, so it's prime irrigation land, and you see a lot more corn on the way there than you do in most of south-central Kansas (green circles are pivot irrigated):

View Larger Map

Not all the fields we saw were irrigated. We could tell, because those were thoroughly dead. (Take note, Hollywood. Serious corn in Kansas is pretty much all north of I-70. Kansas switched to winter wheat after the grasshoppers of 1874 and several droughts.)

The processor was on Main Street (of course), and had a sign in the front window: We Kill It, You Grill It. (I really, really need a working camera. Streetview's got nothing.) Loading that up was pretty much non-noteworthy, largely due to the number of young employees idling in the lobby, who lugged five bags of frozen beef in about as many minutes. And because this time we didn't do any weird "third" splits, they came handily bagged with our names on it, so no sorting beef in the driveway. A good thing, because it's insanely hot - mid-80's already when we got there, and 90 by the time we got home, en route to 105 sometime this afternoon.

On the way home, MIL swung into an access drive next to one of the irrigation pumps.

Her: "You know what I'm doing, right?"

Me: "Yes, and I'm hiding and pretending I don't know you."

Now, there's two types of corn, field corn and sweet corn. Farmers gleefully tell tales are told of ignernt suburbanites pulling into access drives to steal corn, only to find they got field corn when they wanted sweet corn. Well, we got sweet corn (or at least corn in the milk) when she wanted field corn. Go figure.

Shut up!

2011-07-14T16:50:00.000-05:00

So I read this article:

Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them.

and now the entire purpose of this blog has been invalidated. (While, simultaneously, the assertion of that article has been completely validated.)

I guess that means I should quit blogging about what I'm going to do (looking over the last few posts, looks like I've already done that, at least the "quit blogging" part), and just blog about what I've done.

(crickets)

About the only house news is that, for purposes of logging, I should mention that the City of Wichita has cleaned out the sewer mains on our block. I log this because, in past years, that seems to mean they shove tree roots into the laterals, and it seems likely we'll be having Dutchman out again in the near future.

Creative wasp management

2011-06-17T15:15:00.000-05:00

Twice now the cat has alerted us to a wasp in the house. Fortunately for the cat, organ pipe mud daubers are pretty mellow wasps. Still, we didn't want them in the house.

The first one ended up in the bathroom, on the shower wall. Carl popped a plastic cup over it, slipped a piece of paper (a neighborhood newsletter, as it happened) under it, and then after a bit of "now what?" we masking-taped the cup to the paper. That was a couple of weeks ago.

The second one, yesterday, insisted on crawling around on our (sadly) popcorned ceiling. And mud daubers are good at squeezing into small spaces, so the cup idea didn't seem like such a good one. So we opened the front door, and when he tried to fly through the all-glass storm door, we slammed the front door on him. No problem, we'll just go around the back when we're ready to leave, open the storm if he hasn't found his way around it, and we're good.

Except I'm an idiot, and before we left I decided to put out the 2-liter I'd fashioned into a wasp trap. And I opened the front door, put it on the porch, started back in the house, and had a "Waaaaait a minute" moment.

This is how they end up in the house, after all: they go crawling around looking for a likely nesting spot, and come in where the weatherstripping is gone from the storm door. Then we open the front door, and presto, one confused wasp in the house.

This time, because it was getting dark, he decided to go back to the popcorned ceiling and go to sleep. Turning on the porch light couldn't entice him out there. Turning on the living-room lights just enticed him to dizzily bump the living-room lights, then go back to the ceiling as soon as we turned them off.

Finally, we got creative again. Shopvac, with the crevice tool from the house vac. Shhhhloomp! And then, um, duct-taped over the end of the crevice tool, because even a mellow wasp is going to be a little unhappy about that treatment. Shopvac went back outside, crevice tool came off, and if the wasp survived all that, hopefully it decided this is not a good place to nest.

And if not, then we'll have to get really creative.

Be kind to your fine feathered friends

2011-04-19T23:23:00.000-05:00

When I was in my early twenties, Dad moved my car from the street to the driveway. He came in shaking his head at my choice of radio station, and said something to the effect of, "didn't know I was raising a longhair."

I'm not sure I would call classical music a hippie thing, and in hindsight maybe it was in a news program when he heard it, which would have been NPR. Though I guess since classical stations tend to be NPR, maybe it's all a hippie thing. I dunno. Anyway, I like classical music, and KHCC is still my radio station of choice.

So some while back, when I drove by a neighborhood church and saw them advertising the "Delano Chamber Orchestra," I thought, "how cute, they've got a little church orchestra." I duly reported the event on the neighborhood news site, and moved on. Eventually, I don't remember how, I ended up on their press release list, and (when we actually started going to that church, and realized the musical talent, um, wasn't coming from there so much) started to figure out that maybe it was a cute little amateur-but-not-church orchestra, and finally I went.

It's a bunch of crazy people.

I mean that in a good way. People who are very determined to do this thing even if nobody pays them for it. And not because they aren't good enough to get paid; I think they're all at least semi-pro musicians outside of the Delano groups. They are good.

They do two different concert series, one the Delano Chamber Players, the other the Delano Chamber Brass. Sunday the Brass played, and for the second time their encore piece was a rousing Sousa march. "Stars and Stripes Forever" this time, with a muted trumpet doing a pretty passable piccolo impression.

Do hippies like oom-pah music? I may not qualify as one after all, because I admit I would be happy as a clam if they were to do an entirely Sousa concert. At the previous concert, the weather was so unseasonably fine the church had the windows open, which made me think: entirely Sousa concert, in a band shell. Possibly with an ice-cream social involved. Delano used to have an outdoor stage (built in the 70's, used by many longhairs), but it deteriorated and was torn down a few years back, and seems unlikely to be rebuilt. So the band shell part is a pipe dream, whether or not Sousa is.

They're going to be playing at the farmers market in June. It's not clear yet whether it'll be a brass ensemble or something more orchestral. It'll depend on what musicians are available (because they have other musician-ly jobs, you know). If it's brass, and they even hint that they might play some Sousa, I will personally make sure that an ice-cream social happens.

From the mouths of tweens

2011-04-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

Well, from the mouth of a tween, anyway.

Kiddo and I were standing in line at the local pharmacy/grocery. A selection of medical equipment is displayed under the pharmacy windows, including a little forest of canes, the four-footed kind that stand on their own. One adjustable one was cranked all the way down, and was the right height for the four-feet-and-change kiddo. "Hey, look, a cane your size," I said, attempting to alleviate his boredom.

He took a few experimental steps with it, then stopped, gave it a moments thought, and shook it in the air, mock-shouting "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

The other incident is kind of telling on myself, but if you've read this blog for long you'll have figured it already.

Spring cleaning time, and I needed to deep-clean the kitchen, beginning with the countertop that had accumulated junk. (It's a deep countertop, with a breakfast bar on the far side, so it can accumulate a lot of junk). So I put a vinyl tablecloth on the dining room table, and began moving everything out of the kitchen, from the dishes waiting to be washed to the stack of baskets that in theory hold dishtowels and practice are the equivalent of our junk drawer. Then the collection of motley, mismatched Tupperware and Ziploc and Gladware and Rubbermaid stuff all came out, to be washed of dust accumulated while waiting for the matching lid or base to show up.

Even with the leaf folded in, the table's 48" square, so it was an impressive amount of stuff. Kiddo came home from school and was duly impressed by the cleanliness of the kitchen, at least, even though I hadn't gotten to things like the cabinet faces yet.

Next day, kiddo came home from school and observed that the kitchen counter now had a stack of dirty(ish) dishes on it: everything that hadn't fit in the first load of the dishwasher was waiting there, and it hadn't made an appreciable dent in the stack of stuff on the dining table. (I'm still not sure how all this stuff fit into my kitchen.)

He surveyed it all, and prophecied, "You're going to fill the counter up again, then move it all to the table with this stuff, then do it again, until the stuff on the table reaches the ceiling. Then it'll all avalanche down, and I'll come home from school and have to rescue you from all the stuff that's lying on your face trapping you."

Carl laughed to the point of tears when I relayed this to him. I'm not sure whether I should just proceed directly to tears, myself. Truth, kid. Truth.

(Be it noted, though, that the only thing still on the dining table right now is the basket stack, which contains oddities like: tea ball, kitchen scale, sushi mat, silicon cupcake liners [never get the faux-pleated kind, they don't come clean], Magic Eraser, crazy straws, and the duck coop thermometer display [the remote's still in the coop, where it's 43.9 degrees right now... good thing I waited to put the tomatoes out.])

Pi Day, or, "What smells like zoo?"

2011-03-15T11:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Pi Day, at least rounded to two decimal places: 3.14. So we had pie for dinner. (Also, I'm not a food photographer. But keep reading, it gets even more unappetizing!)

As you may recall, we had a cow processed some time back, and we're getting down to odd bits left. Soup bones, one lonely package of ribs… and offal.

Mmm, offal.

It being St. Patrick's Week (the festivities in Delano start with the parade the Saturday before), it was time for some Irish, or at least British Isles, food. Steak and kidney pie.

All the packages we got from the processor had nice, computer-generated labels, with NOT FOR SALE indicating that it wasn't a feedlot cow and all that. Except this package, which got rather creepily organ-donor labeled.

The recipe I had (Better Homes & Gardens checkerboard cookbook, not terribly British) called for soaking and then simmering the kidneys beforehand. Before cooking, they look kind of liver-y and surprisingly lobe-y. During cooking, they smell kind of… well, the kiddo's question in the subject line was oddly apt. I was prepared for this, since plenty of people said they liked steak-and-kidney pie but didn't like how it smelled while cooking.

Other recipes call for cutting it into cubes raw, and dredging it in flour like the cubed steak. Mine didn't look done, though the texture said it was, so I kind of compromised and cooked it a little more. Didn't seem to change the texture, which was very much like a cross between chicken gizzard and chicken liver.

I had some bacon that needed used up, and some recipes mention it, so I used that too. Some recipes call for carrots and/or potatoes, which normally I would have added but that would have called for a larger dish, and Pi Day pie needs to be round.

Carl made the mistake of telling Nathan what it was, so he wouldn't eat any. Normally he's not quite that picky, and normally we'd make him eat something new anyway (and we did make him try a bite without kidney). But some things are just a little too adventurous, and so I had strategically bought cold cuts for packing lunches, and as a fallback. For, um, all of us. Just in case.

If I had it to do again, I'd've cut the kidney up a bit smaller, and potatoes and carrots would be very good in it. Otherwise, it was actually pretty good. Perhaps not something I'd specifically buy kidneys to make, but if we're going to buy a side of beef, I figure we should use as much of it up as possible.

Except brains. There is, I assure you, no package labeled "PAUL DOW BRAIN" in my freezer. You gotta draw the line somewhere.

Ducklessness

2011-03-14T15:04:00.000-05:00

Our backyard is eerily quiet.

One of the staffers at the kiddo's school forwarded us a Freecycle post looking for a female duck companion for their lonely drake. She thought we might be able to point them to where we got ours, but instead I asked them if they wanted six. And they did, emphatically so.

Saturday night, we loaded the ducks into a dog crate and, for the first time in their lives, they left our property. The ride was quieter than we expected; they made their little complaining "bupple-bupple-bupple" noises when we made a turn or hit a bump, but otherwise were almost silent. It was almost dark when we got there, so rather than try to introduce them at that point, their new owners put them in a chicken-wire enclosure inside the coop. (A coop which is, I might add, half the size of our house.) Their six chickens and one drake could see them, so everyone could get used to each other without making contact.

Sunday morning, they posted a Facebook video (the owners, not the ducks). In it, Digory Drake, a half-Mallard half-Crested, strutted around, while the six Campbells bunched up and followed him, not quite sure what to make of him. The chickens decided to assert their territory, and charged the ducks a little, but didn't want to take on all six. Eventually, Digory got tired of the chickens harassing "his" ducks, and ran them off, so that's a good sign.

It looks like the ducks get to live happily ever after instead of landing in a stewpot. And maybe next spring, after we're done with all the scary hammering and rebuilding and stuff, we'll order another box of chocolates. In the meantime, we'll enjoy the quiet.

Grocery shopping at the research company

2011-03-03T15:45:00.000-06:00

I didn't think my cooking was that adventurous, but I guess it is.

Today turned into an errand day: another one of our ducks died last night, leading us to suspect a bacterial infection. So I hit the veterinary supply for some antibiotics, which they're now swimming in. I don't think that's the recommended application method, but they're ducks, what are you gonna do?

We made the decision, after the pen damage, to go duckless for awhile. At three years old it's time to replace these birds, but raising another batch of ducklings is too time-consuming when we're needing to get the house painting done by the end of June. I've been putting the word out to see if anyone wants semi-retired layers, but no nibbles so far. At this point, it looks like they'll get a week of antibiotics, then four days without, and if they're all healthy (none have shown any signs of illness, but this time the duck wasn't one who was dog-mauled and went from symptomless to dead in less than 24 hours) we can have them processed. Or if someone turns up to want them, they get three weeks without before the eggs are safe for eating.

After that, I ended up doing some crisscrossing of town, first trying Spice Merchant, then All Things BBQ. The latter pointed me the right direction: Mid-Western Research and Supply, which sounds scientific but actually is a seasonings company. There I finally procured (see what I did there?) some "pink curing salt," so I can starting corning some brisket just in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Roof collapse: film at 11

2011-02-28T09:55:00.000-06:00

There was hail, of course.

But it was really the rain that did it in. I don't have a rain gauge, but we got a whole lot in a very short period of time, and the weight on top of the tarp was just too much.

The ducks are fine, though. Unlike the last surprise hailstorm, it ramped up slowly enough for me to shoo the ducks into the coop. And none of the hail was over marble size, so that's the extent of the damage.

It's clearly time to do something about duck shelter, at least if we're keeping them. They like to sit in the shade, which is why we added the tarp. But we don't actually use the pen as a pen - technically, city code requires them to have an enclosure that's at least ten feet from the property line. I'm sure it also requires them to be in it, but our neighbors don't care (in fact, as I've mentioned one has asked if they'll come over into his yard for weed control), so they have the run of the yard. It's easier than lugging the 8x12 pen (or "chicken tractor," properly) around to rotate where they get to forage, and we only close them in it when we need them out of the way. So all we really need is something smaller, that doesn't occupy the middle of the yard like this has.

Ironically, because the wind will actually pick up the whole thing the ducks haven't gone in it lately, and I just bought some shiny stainless stakes to tie it down. Guess I don't really need those now.

Seed library

2011-02-23T22:25:00.000-06:00

I love seeds, as the last couple posts show. I also love libraries. So of course I really love the seed library. Except it's very dangerous: it's in my house. Two boxes containing over a hundred varieties of seeds. I can't plant more than a tiny fraction of them, but I really, really want to.

So if you're a local, I need you to check out seeds. Becky, I'm looking at you: start some of these dozen-plus varieties of tomatoes and sell them at the farmers market, pretty pretty please? Rebecca, you can answer all my dumb questions about how to not cross-pollinate if I plant ten different dry bean varieties in my 50'x50' backyard, right? Jim, if there's anything you don't already have or anything you need more of, tell me. Jenn, here's your chance to counteract Every Garden A Wildcat: a KU garden of, say, red and yellow tomatoes plus blue kale. (I also have four varieties of pink tomatoes and one ~~purple~~ very very dark lavender, so the girls could have their own "mamato" plants.) Mom, you need some potted herbs, right? We'll hook them up to the sprinkler system. Pat and Judy, I hope you guys haven't bought seeds yet. And so on.

Now, we need to finally take out the dying elm out back so I can plant some Bloody Butcher corn in the currently-shady Best Neighbors Evar's backyard.

Yay spring... ish.

2011-02-22T14:38:00.000-06:00

I have spinach growing under plastic outside, and today I had to open it up to breathe because it's actually looking a little burnt. At least, I hope it's spinach. No true leaves yet, so it's not a sure thing. The kale might even be bouncing back… it's been uncovered all winter, -17 temps and all. I had planned to move my cole bed since it's been a couple years, so I wasn't too worried about it. Amazing stuff.

Its replacement is in seed starting medium, along with pak choi, Brussels sprouts, and a couple varieties of cabbage. They're not messing around: the pak choi and a few of the kales are already sprouting. Guess I'd better get my grow light set up on the timer.

I put in a little garlic outdoors, since I didn't get to it last fall and the folks at Valley assure me it's doable this early in spring. I forgot to pick up onion sets (even on the second trip), but as soon as I finish covering another bed I'll put those in for scallions, and some lettuce and other cold-weather greens. We're supposed to get "wintry mix" Thursday, so it's not exactly time to put tomatoes and peppers out, but relative to what it has been it sure feels like it.

Of course, the onset of spring weather means it's time to talk to Larry about getting that Paint Shaver, and then the race will be on. We have to finish the south side of the house and garage by July for the insurance coverage. I really, really don't want to have to give up and re-vinyl it.

Every Garden A Wildcat

2011-02-17T13:45:00.001-06:00

There's a slogan from the 50's that Kansas State fans have resurrected: "Every Man a Wildcat," or EMAW. I almost went to K-State, before U of Tulsa promised me a bigger scholarship, but I've never really been a fan of either of the Kansas rivals (or much of anybody else, for that matter). The fact that my sister is now a Jayhawk by marriage (note the URL) definitely means we don't have K-State stuff around.

This has been a bit of a problem. K-State is purple, purple, purple… when we went up for a scholarship acceptance dinner, there was so much purple around that I recall whispering to my parents, "If the food is purple, we're leaving." And the twins' colors are pink for Kayla, lavender for Megan. We have to be verrrry careful that it doesn't cross the line into purple when buying for her.

Anyway, I coped with the ridiculous cold snap* by planning the garden, and it's getting to be time to start plants indoors, so I went seed shopping. In some cases, I didn't have specific varieties in mind, and chatting with Beth at Valley Feed led to a few changes. And when I got home, I realized I had a pattern going.

Cosmic Purple carrots (purple exterior, orange interior with a yellow core)
Purple Plum radishes (I know, yet another radish variety)
Black Beauty eggplants (dark purple)

Add that to what I already had:

Purple Ruffles basil
Purple Top rutabaga
Hyacinth beans
Purple bell peppers

Yeah, that's a theme right there. This led to a discussion on Twitter of all the possibilities for purple veggies: onions, potatoes, kale, cauliflower, snap beans (apart from the hyacinths, which are mostly ornamental), asparagus, cabbage… seed potatoes weren't in yet, but I got Purple Majesty ones last year and they're very good.

Today was a visit to Johnson's Garden Center, both to hang up a farmers-market vendor flier and to check over their seed selection. Johnson's seed is all prepackaged, so I didn't expect much (though that was where I got purple potatoes last year)… but then I found purple tomatillos. And bought them, despite having already bought regular tomatillos.

That clinches it: I have a color theme. It's probably not too original; K-State is an ag school, after all, so I can bet that if I looked hard enough, I'd find purple varieties that originated there, and are probably named "Wildcat" or "Powercat" even. I'm not sure how well this will fit with my plan to try saving seeds (which necessitates avoiding hybrids), but we'll see.

I don't think ducks come in purple, though.

* We're undergoing weather whiplash now… it's into the high 70's, so we're setting records in the other direction.

Mostly-wordless Friday

2011-02-11T15:56:00.000-06:00

My sister pointed out via email that my phone was ringing without anything picking up. That's odd; our cordless runs out of juice now and then, but at least the answering machine catches things. But with all the power outages in the snow, I figured it must have the hiccups. Nope... we had good DSL, but no dial tone on the landline. So I went to check the box, which you may remember got moved after the hailstorm. And this is what I found.

To be fair, he did mention at the time that there really wasn't enough wire to properly put the voice line back up.

And then there were seven

2011-02-08T17:20:00.000-06:00

We've had a sick duck for a little while. We figure it's fallout from the dog attack awhile back - both badly-injured birds seemed to recover well, but it had to be hard on their immune systems. It may or may not even be one of the ducks that was injured; now that they're mostly done molting, we're back to not being able to tell most of them apart, and as far as we could tell the two badly-hurt ones had made a full recovery. The third one, with the minor wing injury, still has a lazy wingtip, but that was the only sign… we thought.

But then a week or two ago, one duck started hanging out by herself, showing some weakness in her legs and wings. It's come and gone, and up until it got ridiculously cold last week she seemed to be improving. We babied them through the last cold snap in large part on her account, and today it got cold again. Wasn't too worried about her; it was "warm" enough for the others to stay out in the pen, heads tucked and feet up, and she'd gone back in the coop. All eight came out of the coop fine this morning, got some food and water, and griped about the heavy snow. No problem, right?

The temp has been dropping all day, and so I decided to go sweep them a path through the snow to get back to the coop in case that was why they were staying out there. It wasn't: it was because there was a dead duck in the coop. Crud.

(You can take a moment to picture me on my knees in the snow, halfway in the door of the coop, gently poking a duck and saying, "You're dead, aren't you? Yep, stiff as a board. You're very dead, huh?")

It really kind of surprises us that it's taken this long for us to lose any of them, what with the various urban predators and all (we've had several hawk visits, the aforementioned dog attack, and every stray and not-so-stray cat has to learn that ducks are not as easy to catch as sparrows), and our complete novice-ness to the whole duck thing. Two years and eight months... not bad, especially considering that three years is about the laying limit for hens.

Apart from the kiddo (who would cry in heartbreak if we told him, but who won't even notice one missing if we don't), it's not like losing a pet. It's just disappointing that we failed in keeping all of our charges alive and healthy as long as we'd hoped to.

Spoiled ducks

2011-02-01T18:41:00.000-06:00

Not that they feel spoiled. I wouldn't, either.

That top temperature is from the probe inside the duck coop, after we put in a dozen or so two-liters full of hot water (and, of course, the ducks). We've been changing out the water every few hours, and it's still been down into the single digits inside the coop off and on.

It was in the 70's last week.

Eating local...ish

2011-01-21T21:30:00.000-06:00

Every year, my sister gives me various mixes and whatnot for Christmas, and they accumulate because I never think to use them. So in my menu planning, I decided to make sure I used the ones she gave me this year. Earlier, I used the Colman's Chicken Chasseur mix, and this week I decided to use the Sausage Casserole.

I sat with my menu planner last Sunday, trying to decide what would be a good substitute for British-style sausage. And then I said to myself, "You idiot. British Banger Company opens tomorrow." So Thursday, I walked over and picked up lunch there (rag pudding, or as he calls it for us Americans, "beef dumpling") along with a pound of frozen bangers (or, as he calls them for us Americans, "bangers").

And tonight, we had sausage casserole for dinner, along with neeps and tatties.

I spent a good part of the day cooking for the freezer, so now I have a couple of deboned chickens, chicken stock, five batches of meatballs, and a pound of taco beef. Because everyone should follow up their British/Scottish food with nachos, right?

Achievment unlocked: one week of meals at home

2011-01-13T11:04:00.000-06:00

It's not a resolution. Really. Honest.

It's just that, what with Christmas shopping and being sick (for Thanksgiving we shared turkey and sinus infections) and all, we've been eating out more often than not, even with a stocked freezer. And we're tired of it. So is our budget. As I mentioned last Friday, I'd written out menus. Not only that, I actually managed to stick to the plan, without falling back to the Kraft Shells'n'Cheese. And without throwing out significant amounts of leftovers because I'd lost track of what was in the fridge.

We last ate out a week ago last Sunday (so we're nearly up to two weeks of meals now), with the exception of my lunch with Mom a week ago and Carl's lunches with co-workers. And that's despite my busy evening schedule. This week was a perfect storm: 4H on Monday, though it got cancelled for weather; an open house for the bike rack plan; the annual planning meeting among the heads of Delano neighborhood organizations; and the board meeting for Wichita Independent Neighborhoods. Go team me.

Yes, this should be basic stuff for someone who's been a SAHM/housewife for ten years, give or take.

In other, duckier news: it's been insanely cold here the last few days, though I don't think we actually dipped below zero (Fahrenheit, anyway). (Those of you from more northern climes, be quiet. We don't think your 90-degree "heat waves" are serious either.) The winds were serious enough we considered ways to bring the ducks inside(!) if the coop temperatures dropped low enough. Fortunately for all concerned, with plenty of two-liters full of hot water the thermometer by the vent reported it never got below the teens inside. The ducks will happily sit in the shade during the day if it's that cold, and are in fact doing so right now, so they can certainly tolerate that.

Valentine soap

2011-01-10T11:02:00.000-06:00

While waiting for my "real" soap order to arrive, I did a little melt-and-pour. Pink, glittery, with embedded hearts, hugs, and kisses... now, if only I'd remembered to put the scent in.

Oops.

All that waffling over what scent to put in, and I ended up with none. See, I don't have a lot of sweet scents that aren't florals, because anything with vanilla tends to add a yellow color… not good, with transparent soaps. I guess I'll have to wander down to Karma Konnections and pick up some rose essential oil.

Clearly, with the glitter and the pink and the stuff, I was just too far out of my comfort zone. My from-scratch Valentine soap won't be quite so over-the-top cute.

Irresolute

2011-01-07T21:50:00.000-06:00

Every year I joke that my only New Year's resolution is "I resolve not to make any resolutions."

It occurred to me this week as I wrote out menus for the first time since before the holidays, and reset my calendar card file, and set about deep-cleaning the kitchen, that I'm kinda doing the same thing anyway. It's not intentional, it's just that all those things get put off until after the holidays, and the fresh-start stuff is natural. Blog posting is one of "all those things" too, I guess. Good thing I didn't resolve to post daily.

I have made one decision, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a resolution: time to get back into the workforce. I think. Maybe. I always hate that job-search stuff, and I'm afraid I may have lost what little tolerance I had for petty office-politics stuff. Anyone need a snarky but brilliant software developer? And if so, would you consider settling for me instead?

Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T20:14:00.000-06:00

Drama boy opens Christmas gifts:

We're going to Cirque du Soleil. 'Bout time we check out the new arena our tax dollars are paying for.

Damaged duck followup

2010-11-19T12:15:00.000-06:00

It was chilly last night, so we put the ducks up early figuring those who'd lost blood should stay warmer than usual. They don't seem bothered by the cold, and happily sat in the shade all day, but still. It made *me* feel better.

Squeaky Duck seems unbothered by her injuries. We'll need to put antibiotic on her, but I think that's it.

Busted-Wing Duck let me examine her middle wingbones, and they seem fine, and she was strong enough to keep her upper wingbones tucked hard against her ("NO NO NO TOUCHING!") so they and their muscles are certainly fine. The wingtip just doesn't want to tuck into place, though there's no damage I can feel. (Admittedly, most of my experience in what a wing is supposed to feel like comes from cooking chicken wings.) Hopefully it's just a sprain, but if not, it just means that wingtip is going to sit a few inches out of line. It may drag in the water when she swims, but doesn't drag on the ground when she walks, so even if it's permanent it shouldn't be a problem for her.

Damaged Duck was last out of the coop, and moved slow but normally. She's still fluffing and waggling her tail but not doing a full flapping stretch yet. But she's walking evenly and all, so that's good. I was concerned yesterday because she couldn't balance well enough to lean over and get a drink but was terrified by the water dish when I raised it a couple inches. (Ducks, even chewed-up ducks, remain idiots terrified by novelty.) Today she dipped water carefully but successfully when she came out of the coop, and has been following everyone around just fine.

Damaged eggs remain a concern, so we'll be watching for anyone that looks eggbound, but only three were laying and chances are very good neither Squeaky or Damaged were among those (since they molted first). Tentatively, I'm going to say everybody will recover well… so no roast duck for Thanksgiving.

Hello, worst-case scenario

2010-11-18T15:47:00.000-06:00

Okay, not quite worst-case, but close to it.

Best case scenario, for a backyard-poultry owner, is that your critters live happily ever after, at least until you decide to ship them to a processor. And mostly ours have, with no more than a couple of lost-feathers incidents up to now. But if something does take after them seriously, you kinda hope that the job gets finished. Worst case is that they don't, and you have to put a mangled duck out of its misery.

Carl's working from home today, and went to check the mail. I was talking to him, so I followed him out the door, and the ducks heard us talking. They like to sit in the shade of the neighbor's house, up against the "front" gate. If they're hungry, and they hear us, they yell. This was particularly strident yelling… and I realized I'd just fed them an hour or so earlier. So I went back in the house, looked out the back window…

… and saw a pair of great big black Labrador Retrievers cavorting with ducks in their mouths.

I'm not entirely sure what I yelled, but it was loud enough and angry enough that both dogs dropped ducks and bolted, though one came back around the garage hoping for a to-go snack until it realized Carl was coming after it too.

As with the post-hail storm, we had some trouble locating panicked ducks. Eventually we rounded them up. The two that had finished the molt were the worst off, meaning that the dogs had been grabbing them by flight feathers to catch them and, for the other birds, those just came right off. Squeaky Duck, first to molt, has a couple of punctures, but recovered quickly. The other fully-molted bird… not so much. Puncture wounds dripping blood, gasping for breath, dragging a wing, and finally face-planting with her bill folded under… not good.

Fortunately for her, we dithered over what to do for quite awhile, checking Holderread for the best way to cleanly dispatch her and all that. Sure, there's the whole slaughtering process, but is there a simpler way to put an animal out of its misery? Hmm… he says they "appreciate the chance to recover" from seemingly traumatic injuries. So we check on her again, skeptical.

Once those pesky humans left her alone, she got up, started breathing normally, and preened a little. Ooookay. We needed more bedding and whatnot, so I decided while I was at it I'd ask Terry at Valley Feed. He agrees with Holderread: he had a Rouen that was badly injured twice, and recovered with basic care. He also called around looking for a farm vet, with no more luck than I'd had, though he did get a line on a potential duck-doc at the Kansas Humane Society. We're looking for someone with a "poultry not pet" mentality, though, but it's good to have a backup resource. (Our very good vet has someone who specializes in parrots and such, but one takes an entirely different view of treating an animal worth thousands of dollars and with a lifespan upwards of fifty years.)

By the time we got home, Damaged Duck was following the flock, albeit slowly, and while she wasn't doing a full fluff-and-settle, she did shake herself a bit and waggled her tail like they do when they're merely annoyed. So we're in wait-and-see mode. Squeaky has a couple of shallow punctures (she quite happily does the full stand-on-tiptoes-and-flap stretch), one of the half-molted birds is dragging a wing a bit (hopefully just a sprain, since she's moving it but just can't get it settled right on her back), and Damaged Duck is potentially a bit worse off but not, apparently, quite as terminal as we'd first thought.

Wichita Animal Control responded with commendable promptness (I have to admit to calling them and saying that the dogs had "killed a couple of our animals," which at the time I believed was true). The responding officer even gave us tips on how to cleanly slaughter the bird, and offered to take her and euthanize her if we wanted.

I did neglect to ask him to call me back if the dogs were located, so I guess I'll have to check on that. We're not too concerned with restitution, even if Damaged Duck doesn't make it, but we are concerned that if these dogs live nearby and aren't reliably contained, they'll be back for more fun and games. We're guessing not, since we've never seen them before and we saw the Animal Control van circulating around the area for quite some time—which probably means those dogs were long gone. We'll hope they stay that way.

Sautéed Butternut Squash With Garlic and Sage

2010-11-03T21:45:00.000-05:00

One of the door prizes we put together for the last day of farmers market was a basket with a butternut squash (from Cook Produce, an honorary co-op member), sage (from the community garden, since Jim has way more than I do) and garlic (originally from my garden, until Jim decided we needed two larger bulbs), plus a bag of fall-shapes pasta from World Market (kind of the antithesis of eating local, but it was a special occasion). And a recipe card, which I've since been asked to share, so:

Sautéed Butternut Squash With Garlic and Sage

3 cups butternut squash, ½-inch cubes
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
4 medium cloves garlic, slivered
12 large fresh sage leaves, shredded
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound pasta
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to taste

Bring 4 quarts water to a boil for cooking pasta.
Steam the squash until tender, but not mushy, about 10 to 12 minutes.
Heat the oil and 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet. Add the garlic and sauté over medium heat until golden brown, about 4 minutes. The garlic should be richly colored but not dark brown or burned. Use a slotted spoon to lift the garlic slivers from the oil. Discard the garlic.
Add the steamed squash, shredded sage leaves, salt and pepper to the pan. Toss to coat the squash with the oil and butter. Cook, stirring occasionally, until squash is heated through, about 3 minutes. (Cook it until it just starts to lose its shape, but short of mushy.) Salt and pepper to taste.
While preparing the sauce, cook and drain the pasta, making sure some water still clings to the noodles. Toss the hot pasta with the squash sauce and the remaining tablespoon of butter. Mix well and transfer portions to warm pasta bowls. Garnish with additional sage leaves, if desired. Serve with grated Parmesan. Makes 4 servings.

The original recipe came from "Pasta e Verdura" by Jack Bishop:

There's a hashtag for that

2010-10-19T12:09:00.000-05:00

Twitter has quite a few social conventions, of which one odd one is the hashtag, a sort of keyword system for tweets. One such hashtag is #firstworldproblems.

For instance, having the icemaker in your brand-new fridge leak overnight and flood your basement stairs is very much a #firstworldproblem, because hey, you have a brand-new fridge.

And having so much excess stuff that you've got boxes of books waiting on those stairs to go to the used bookstore? #Firstworldproblem.

At least the weather is holding out, so not only is it still warm enough to paint (still scraping), but it's warm enough to run the whole-house fan (along with regular fans and the dehumidifier) so everything will dry out quickly.

House painting, day 4-7: Flashing and shaving.

2010-10-05T11:04:00.000-05:00

Progress slowed a bit, with other things on the schedule. I did finish tearing off the front siding with the exception of a spot above the stairs that needs the big ladder, and the corner "boards," which are still attached around on the sides. I can peek under them now, and it turns out we do still have most of the flashing on the corners. Only the bottom couple of feet on one corner are missing, and of course that's the spot I checked first. We still don't know if we can replace what's missing, or if other corners are missing even more. Corner boards may still be in our future.

Scraping proceeds slowly on the front of the house, and the weather is cooling off quickly. At this point, we are assuming the sides of the house are as bad as the front, and we're going to have to revise our plan.

In retrospect, I realized that all the spots we looked at, where the paint was nearly nonexistent, were on the additions to the house. This seems strange, since the additions were supposedly within thirty years of the original construction, but maybe the paint that we're seeing is every coat that's ever been put on the house? I begin to think so.

At any rate, it doesn't look like we can get it scraped before winter sets in. It might be possible if we got a Paint Shaver in addition to the Speed Heater, but that's another $500 tool. We'd like to borrow Larry's to try it out, but he's racing the clock same as we are (except on a three-story house) so it remains to be seen if we can work that out.

Assuming we can't or that it doesn't magically speed everything up, we'll shoot for prepping and priming the front, and repairing, prepping, and priming the trim. If we paint it, that will leave us with a white house with cream trim, which is a little odd but not awful. Weather permitting, we'll also paint the foundation the dark green, which will maybe make the cream look not quite so odd.

Then we'll spend the winter pulling the windows and cleaning up the sashes, painting, and reglazing them. Which we should have done this summer, but getting started was really scary. But hey, taking a wrecking bar to your house is a good way to get over the fear of messing with it.

Speaking of wrecking bars, I now have a nice little "tennis elbow" brace thing since I managed to tear a tendon. I suspect it was a place where I played tug-of-war with the bottom vinyl bracket since the wrecking bar wouldn't fit. And my bad knee (the other one is my worse knee, but the bad one always hurts first since I favor the other) tells me I need to get out my knee brace if I'm going to do any more climbing on the monkey bars.

House painting, day 2 and 3: de-vinyling and monkeybars

2010-09-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

I hadn't planned on taking off the vinyl just yet, but it was driving me crazy, so I started in on the porch.

We've always known the PO was nail-happy, so this wasn't a surprise. Nails to hold the insulation on. Nails to hold the brackets on. And just in case the brackets weren't enough, nails to hold the siding on.

And sometimes, nails to split the siding apart. We're a little worried about how much of this we'll find, and we haven't found a source for replacement pieces - the lumberyard I expected to find it at has too much taper to theirs.

The doorframe shows more of the mustard yellow that was on the roof trim. No sign of it on the window frame, though, just cream.

We're still mystified by the weird crumbly beige stuff. It's all over the front siding, so I think I'm going to have to scrap the "sanding sealer" theory in favor of a "paint gone horribly wrong" hypothesis. It wasn't on the bits of the south side that we inspected, so we're hoping the porch is all there is, otherwise prep is going to take a lot longer than expected.

Look, window trim that stands out from the house instead of being flush with it. When the siding is green, the trim is cream, and the sashes are brown, these windows will really pop. Especially after we ditch the aluminum storms in favor of traditional wooden ones, though that's a ways down the road.

After we're done, I expect we'll recoup all our costs and perhaps turn a profit, just from scrap metal sales.

As of last night, we're officially a renovation project and not just a house in bad shape: we have scaffolding. Serious scaffolding. Most of my morning was spent acquiring scaffolding boards: contrary to what Larry of Simpson's Folly says, ours are 2x10 and not 2x6. But he's right, they are really heavy, and they were originally 16' long.

The Star Lumber guys tossed them around like they were no big deal before cutting them in half to go in my van (since we'll use a single tower at any given time). First they looked at the flimsy joke of a roof rack and asked, with considerable skepticism, if I was going to put them up there. "We've seen people haul things some interesting ways." I can imagine. I had a pavilion and a market booth in the van already, so that probably qualified as another interesting way, but at least I wasn't trying to maneuver with 16' boards on the roof.

Of course, by the time I got to that sooper-sekrit contractor site (versus the lumberyard where mere amateurs pick up their stuff), got it cut, and got it home, most of the morning was shot. And I don't even have everything I need. I have cedar for the roof trim, but the siding corner boards are completely gone so I'll need something to rebuild those. Neighboring houses have flashing, which I kind of wanted, since it's clearly an "in your face, this ain't vinyl" sort of look, but we're probably going to have to go with corner boards, especially if that's what was originally there.

Vinyl does look a bit more appealing every day, I have to admit.

House painting, day 1: whoop-ti-do's

2010-09-28T13:23:00.000-05:00

Our first step was to fire up the Speed Heater, to make sure it worked. The plan is to leave the siding on while we do the trim, since it's bare wood, so we tackled the porch columns first. They're not bare wood, but are the opposite: heavy paint, terribly gatored. But they will be the same color as the trim, plus they're easiest to reach.

They, or rather, it, may not have been the best test. At least, that's what we're hoping. The Speed Heater is supposed to make the paint smoke, bubble, and turn into a goo, at a temperature just below the point where it would vaporize any lead in it. And it certainly smoked, and it kind of turned into a goo, but it didn't just scrape cleanly off into a lump like it does in the videos. (And, more to the point, like Bob Yapp described, since I trust him more than the commercial.)

After a little more heating and scraping, we kind of figured out why. There's something under the paint, a skim coating of… epoxy? Some kind of sanding sealer? We're not really sure. The smoke was also mostly the result of resin bubbling out, which was kind of a surprise from what's supposed to be 90-year-old wood. It's quite possible parts of the column have been replaced through the years, but at any rate that tended to gum up the scrapers as well.

While Carl played with that, I surveyed the bits we'll have to replace. Some trim, and some soffit pieces, the latter partly a casualty of the new plywood in last roofing job.

It took almost an hour to strip the first side of the first column. It's kind of gnarly, and the outer two sides went a little more quickly. They're a little resin-y too, plus one is a two-part construction caulked together. The beige-ish stuff visible at the top of the scraped part of the column isn't a layer of paint, it's the skim coat.

Tomorrow, Carl will move to the other column, while I sand and clean and prime this one. Then we'll get the big ladder and take on the south-facing end rafter. It's mostly bare wood already, as the second picture shows, so apart from the fact that it's a story-and-a-half up, it shouldn't take as long as the fiddly porch bits.

…We hope.

Random catch-up post

2010-09-25T10:20:00.000-05:00

Following up on a few things I've blogged about lately:

There's been no further sign of any hawk activity, though the yard looks like a duck was dismembered there: Squeaky Duck, a/k/a Yellow-Band, molted all her flight feathers this week, even though we haven't force-molted them. Others are showing new body feathers, which seems to be a defense mechanism against the fact that we were considering retiring most of the flock. Kelley Klucks is processing chickens at the end of October and we considered asking Sean if he'd add a few ducks to the queue. But it's difficult to cleanly pluck birds that have new quills coming in.
The rendered tallow went in the freezer for now, since I haven't had time to make soap. I have been shopping online for fragrances, and discovered the place that Yoder Candle got scents, some of which are suitable for soaps too. So that's right, I could now make marijuana-scented soap if I wanted to.
The weather is perfect this week for house painting, so Carl will be taking some half days off. I want to get the trim done first, since we can do that without taking siding off. It'll make things look a little odd, since cream trim on a white house isn't too typical, but that's still better than unpainted trim on a white house, right?
You know the hailstorms have become way too routine when I don't even bother to blog about them. Even though this last one had record-setting hail (not in our neighborhood, thankfully) leading to a picture that makes me wonder if I need to update my hail size chart with "baby's-head-size hail." We had a little bit of golf-ball stuff, and I guess I need to call the insurance company to have the roof checked, but I'm really hoping we don't need anything done.
That hailstorm actually started while I was at the farmers market. We got the last booth packed up and were climbing in our vehicles when the first ones plinked down. So now I've tested the rain-worthiness of my market booth (pretty good) and this week, with gusts up to 40mph, its wind-worthiness (also pretty good).

Hen Harrier

2010-09-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

A little while ago, I heard an outraged quack from the backyard. This was more outrage than a neighborhood cat tends to elicit, so I ran over to the back door and looked out the screen.

There, glaring at me from the (open, unoccupied) duck pen, was the biggest hawk I've ever seen up close. I've been that close to a male Northern Harrier, as it sailed along a ditch next to the car out near Medicine Lodge, but females are bigger. Up to 24" long, according to one of my bird books, though I'd guess this one wasn't quite that big.

I was paralyzed for a few minutes, trying to decide whether I should be scaring the critter off or running for the camera, and I admit I actually considered the fact that the ducks are two years old and starting to lay irregularly and decided it was worth the risk. But then the ducks realized I'd stepped out on to the back steps, and the little switch in their brain went from "feral" to "domesticated."

…And they started clucking happily and all toddled out into the yard hunting bugs, as if a giant hawk was not sitting three feet above their heads. I KID YOU NOT. "Oh, the human is here. She'll handle things." Idiots.

The hawk got tired of the staring contest and/or got freaked out by this fearless mob of ducks and hopped to the far side of the pen, and when I opened the door to go get the camera she flew up into the tree. When I came back out, she was gone, so no pictures.

The ducks seem unharmed, and despite being sometimes called Hen Harriers (I prefer "marsh hawk," since that's what I learned from Grandma's bird books) they're more likely to go for small mammals. So I don't know if she was going after a duck, or after a squirrel or mouse in the duck feed—if the latter, she might have already gobbled it by the time I saw her.

I'm assuming she was just passing through on migration; we do have urban hawks and owls—I heard a screech owl just last night—but a big ol' Northern Harrier seems unlikely.

Laziness, impatience, and hubris

2010-09-15T14:12:00.000-05:00

First, unrelated picture of flowers (circa 2007) to make up for the rendering picture.

Today's work isn't nearly as unattractive, I just didn't happen to take any pictures of it.

Laziness is a programmer virtue, and sometimes I make it work for me outside of Perl. Breadmaking, for instance. Today I made twelve loaves of bread (talamee, Syrian flatbread, actually) because hey, if you're kneading bread, it's not much harder to knead a big batch than a small one. Plus, it means I can just dump a five-pound bag of flour in instead of having to measure or weigh it.

I should buy flour in bigger than a five-pound bag, but I'm lazy there, too: five-pound bags is all the local-er grocery carries, and I lazily support it instead of driving farther to a bigger place. (Lazy works against me sometimes: it's only a mile away, but I do drive.)
Laziness also means I mix the stuff up by hand instead of firing up the Kitchenaid…because it's too much work to fix the mixer, use it, and then clean it afterward. So hey, living the green life there.

I do need to work on my hubris, though, since I don't yet ~~write programs~~ have a nicely-painted house that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Two-bedroom one-bath rendering plant

2010-09-13T15:14:00.000-05:00

Awhile back, I hauled the beef trimmings home from my mother-in-law's, but didn't actually get around to rendering it like I'd planned. My calendar was open today, so I pulled out the 18-quart roaster, let the stuff thaw enough to break it apart, and put it in the roaster frozen. Or rather, put half of it in the roaster frozen. That's a lot of beef fat.

It's on the second half now. When they say you should have it ground up, they're not kidding, but I didn't ask the processor for that and it was frozen into a giant forty- or fifty-pound rock when I got it. So I rendered it awhile, then fished out the biggest chunks and ran them through my teeny-tiny two-cup food processor, and returned them to the pot.

And yes, that's how commercial soap is made, too. "Sodium tallowate" is the fancy term for "rendered tallow mixed with lyewater." Tallow is not an appropriate thing to wash yourself with (though it has wonderful moisturizing properties, I can testify), and lyewater even less so, but once they're put together, it's magic.

Carl should be happy, though: even the stick blender can't speed this part up. (For the record, I tried. It does work when the stuff's broken down enough, but before then, it just wraps gristle around the axle and doesn't actually chop it up.) At least I don't have to stand and stir it; the roaster is just playing slow-cooker. I'll resist the temptation to process it in the roaster; eighteen quarts is probably enough to hold all the soap, but even with all my pack-rat tendencies I don't have enough Pringles cans to mold that much.

It's all very fun and satisfying to see it happen, but stop me if I decide to filter my own lye out of wood ash, okay?

Lead test - no surprise there

2010-09-10T20:22:00.000-05:00

The siding under the vinyl has hardly any paint on it, so I thought hey, maybe there's a tiny chance what's there is post-1978 and the lead paint is mostly gone. I wasn't too hopeful, but I decided I ought to check in case it avoided some work.

Well, no surprise, the little swab turns all kinds of pink on just the little flakes of remaining paint. Disappointing, but not surprising at all.

I've started buying the scrapers and brushes and stuff we'll need, and tomorrow I go pick up primer. Alkyd, per Bob Yapp's seminar. This weekend, the siding comes off the porch, doggonit.

I'm scared.

Woo! New fridge! (House colors, too.)

2010-09-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

At least, we ordered one. Took advantage of Labor-Day sales and annual bonuses and such and finally sprung for a replacement for our faithful 17-year-old refrigerator. This time, I measured to make sure it will not only fit in the space (it will, though much more closely than the old fridge) but through the back door (it will, though we'll have to take the doors off just like we did with the old fridge and with the new freezer).

I ended up with a Samsung french-door bottom freezer model. Samsung? Between them and LG (formerly Goldstar) I was looking around for the Viewsonic fridges. Does this come with HDMI input? What's the contrast ratio? I also fretted over color... should I get a black one in case we go with that when we redo the kitchen? Is that even going to happen in the lifespan of this fridge?

In the end, I went with white to match the range and dishwasher, though at 15 years old the latter is the last major appliance that needs replaced, for another 15-20 years. (I can hope, right?)

In painting news, I picked up swatches and sample pots of paint, so I should have color samples up this week. It's scheduled to rain during the week, but this weekend looks like good prepping/painting weather.

My current favorite paint scheme, almost:

I think the final one will only have the dark brick-red on the door, and the window frames will be a reddish medium brown closer to the roof color. And of course the current railings are black iron; we'll eventually add wooden ones, but probably not until spring. But the bright green Astroturf porch carpet(!) will go before that.

The first batch of soap

2010-09-03T20:35:00.000-05:00

Ta da!

Twenty-four bars (plus three cutoffs) of all-vegetable-oils soap. They're usable now (I washed my hands with a scrap earlier) but I see what the books mean when they say they really need to cure a few weeks. There's a slight sliminess, as the authors warn… it's fully saponified, so I guess it just needs to dry out a bit.

We've (well, Carl, really) made tallow soap before (and I have suet and fat scraps from That Cow in the freezer for a batch of that later), but this is the first veggie soap I've ever made.

It's quite the mix, compared to the all-tallow: cocoa butter, coconut oil, olive oil, grapeseed oil, and castor oil. No scent or coloring; this is pretty basic stuff. When Carl made tallow soap, he had to stand and stir for "hours" (his memory, anyway) waiting for it to saponify. Nowadays, stick blenders make that happen practically instantaneously, so between that and hot-processing it in the slow cooker, this felt like cheating.

I smelled the cocoa butter while it was cooking, but not now. Baxter's sure it's in there, though, as he hovered while I was unmolding them and hoovered up every scrap that hit the ground. Dachshunds... go figure.

Cleaning Grand Plan

2010-09-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

I've never been fond of the too-cute cheerleader-y declutter sites like Flylady, but Organized Home/Organized Christmas is pretty close to tolerable, and has had some interesting projects in the past. The site seems to be mostly in maintenance mode, cycling through the scheduled plans, but I'm still subscribed to the RSS feed.

So it was that the Holiday Grand Plan kickoff landed in my Google Reader (and probably in my blogroll, if you happened to check on the right day) this week. In addition to the getting-ready-for-Christmas (Christmas?!) plan, there's a Cleaning Grand Plan. And the first week is Front Porch Week. Well, okay, I know a sign when I see it.

Here it is Thursday already and I finally got to the front porch, which has been accumulating junk since it's just been too hot to deal with it. It's cleared off now, and vacuumed, and hosed off—never carpet your front porch, folks, especially in a dusty state like Kansas—and ready for me to start pulling siding off. It's still going to be a shade on the warm side for painting, but since the porch is the place we'll need to do the most paint removal first, and since I haven't finished picking colors yet, I think we're about right.

I'm not sure I'll stick to the Grand Plan week-for-week. It's a bungalow, after all, and a small one: we don't have a guest bedroom or bath, no foyer, and the living room and dining room are one big room. And where's the basement on that list? Still, for the rooms we do have, it's a good checklist of things to do. Not that "pull siding off" is on the usual Front Porch Week list. But it ought to be.

Remember, it's a neighborhood clean-up, not a neighborhood collect-more-stuff.

2010-08-27T23:33:00.000-05:00

It's Neighborhood Clean-up Eve, and the curbs are littered with all kinds of stuff, some of which I helped put there. The last of the extraneous fence is coming off the driveway, though it'll take daylight before it'll make it to the curb…but I did help a 90-year-old lady by hauling a couple hundred pounds of construction debris out of her house. (Her husband died a couple years ago, mid-remodel. He was 92, the age I suspect I'll be by the time we're that far in.)

The hard part, of course, is driving around the neighborhood and thinking "Heyyy, I could use that." None of "that" was good 1920's-era furniture, though, so I really can't. There was a Kroehler slipper chair that will make some mid-century-modernist very happy (I put the word out so I know it won't end up in the dump), but that was as close as it got.

At it's not all post-hailstorm debris like last year's.

Tomorrow's high is 90. Barely on the edge of painting weather, so if the cooling trend continues, next weekend will see actual exterior work…if I was more confident, I'd put some vinyl siding on the curb (which I guess would make for post-hailstorm debris, technically), but first I have to pick colors.

Want to take a shot at it? I have a nifty browns-and-green I'm working on myself, but here's the uncolored version.

(Click through for the largest version, if you seriously want to try it. And the original is here, if you can't figure out what stuff is. Bear in mind that while there's wrought iron porch railing, someday it will be painted wood too. And the roof is de-colored because the original picture has the gray roof, and it's now a medium reddish brown, color non-negotiable until the next hailstorm.)

Mega-egg

2010-08-25T23:18:00.000-05:00

You would think, with all the things on my to-do list already, I wouldn't spend my time on silly things like sewing giant fried eggs.

You'd be wrong.

Time to cook!

2010-08-24T17:03:00.000-05:00

Finally, after scrounging at three groceries and a hardware store, I have all the ingredients for my recipe.

Mmm, lye.

Living by the weather

2010-08-23T23:41:00.000-05:00

For a suburbanite, I sure am weather-obsessed. All summer, I've kept an eye on rainfall (pretty easy: all-or-nothing) and temps (pretty easy: hot), and now I'm eagerly checking weekend weather reports waiting for temps to drop enough to start painting. Is it fall yet? Is it? Huh? Is it?

I'm not sure whether or not to be pleased that this coming weekend will be a little too hot, since it's also the neighborhood clean-up. As president of the neighborhood association, I'm kind of obligated to go, so painting on Saturday would be out of the question anyway. Still, cloudy and cool would have been great.

Still haven't settled on paint colors. Working on some mockups, though, since it's traditional on a houseblog to put them up for feedback. (Are we still pretending this is a houseblog?)

Sam and Ella

2010-08-20T21:51:00.000-05:00

I've been watching the salmonella egg recall unfold, and I expect the topic will come up at the next farmers market…in fact, I'm surprised it didn't come up this week.

The most amazing thing to me has been watching the number of people proudly proclaiming that this is why they buy only local eggs from small farmers, so they don't have to worry about these sorts of things. Um…wrong wrong wrongitty wrong. And I'll have to print up a flier for market saying so, though none of the locals have yet said this within my hearing.

We don't test our birds for salmonella. They might all be raging factories for S. enteritidis for all I know. Doesn't particularly matter, as long as you assume they are and treat the eggs accordingly. No matter how pretty and clean those eggshells look, mine or a supermarket's, treat them and their contents with the same respect you'd give a chunk of raw meat. Wash your hands, kitchen utensils, and surfaces even if they "only" touched the shells; cook eggs thoroughly (or if you're like me and don't mind the risks of eating 'em over-easy, don't serve them to young, elderly, or immune-compromised people); and don't assume that because they came in a package from a shiny grocery store that it's okay to treat them like something that didn't come out of the south end of a north-bound chicken.

Or duck.

Granted, it's a little easier for us to remember to Respect The Egg.

Oklahoma's OK

2010-08-18T09:51:00.000-05:00

School started Monday, so we took our summer vacation at the last possible moment and went to Oklahoma City last Saturday.

It wasn't quite the all-out trip we made last time, hitting the zoo and science museum and staying in a hotel with an indoor pool—one, we need to save our ready cash for the fall projects and two, prior to going we had to sink over a grand into car repairs. This one was just a day trip.

First stop, a place that didn't exist last time we went: Pops. It's a gas station on Route 66, but that doesn't really explain it. Sadly, you can't see it from I-35, so we didn't get to see the giant pop bottle lit up. We did pick up a dozen bottles of interesting carbonated beverages, however.

Next stop: the Lego Store.

That sums it up right there: mouth agape, reaching for the wallet.

Due to an amusing mixup with our GPS (wherein it directed us to the center of Oklahoma City, rather than to Penn Square Mall), we were pretty late in getting to the Lego Store and thus didn't have much time at the Science Museum Oklahoma. (P.S. Oklahoma, you couldn't think of a more creative name?) I also didn't have much left in camera battery, so was using the glass viewfinder and completely failed to get pictures of the kiddo on the Segway, so here's Carl instead:

I also rode the critter, which wasn't nearly as stable as I'd heard they were. Not sure whether that was the fact that these have doubtless been rode hard and put up wet, or the fact that you're mostly hauled around by the attendant rather than actually being in control.

It's less than a three-hour drive, so we really should zip down there more often. We also haven't taken the kiddo to the science museum in KC, which is about the same distance. Unfortunately, our weekends will probably be well occupied all this fall, if we're going to finally get the house painted.

On your mark, get set...

2010-08-16T13:05:00.000-05:00

After a record-breaking string of really hot days, it finally cooled off. Relatively speaking, that is. Today's high will be 88ish, which may not seem reasonable to you depending on what you're acclimated to, but trust me, it's nice here.

How hot was it, and for how long? Well, let's just put it this way: the high was 108 the other day and I realized it was no longer amazing. "Ho hum, 108 again." That's kind of scary.

It was below 80 this morning, so I got out and got started on cleaning up the porch and driveway, hauled dirt from the failed potato-bag experiment into the new fall-greens bed, and generally surveyed what needs to happen before the weather gets reliably below 80.

It's a little daunting, but do-able. I took out one of the six barberries along the front porch today, by way of getting a start. Despite the heat and the fact that it was losing all its leaves, it managed to grow and was menacing the mailbox and porch steps again. These are the supposed-to-be-dwarf barberries that we've battled for years, and I won't be sad to see the other five go. I'll put that off until we're ready to paint since they're hiding the need for paint on the porch foundation. (I blame them for that, since the rest of the foundation looks much better.)

I'm working on picking paint colors, and we'll have a busy few weekends getting things ready.

Trash-to-treasuring success

2010-07-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

Or at least "qualified success." It won't be a real success until someone takes one home and puts it in their yard.

I took all the glass over to Mom's yesterday, and we arranged, rearranged, and re-rearranged it until we had something that didn't look like a stack of trash. Or at least looked like an attractive stack of trash. That's our first attempt: a birdbath. Green glass is by far the most common, but 99.9% of it is a variation on the middle vase: roughly cylindrical and all the same height, impossible to use more than one of in a piece.

We made a few small pieces - a candy dish or birdseed dish, and a couple of candleholders. These three will catch rainwater, so Mom calls them indoor pieces. She lives in a neighborhood without big front porches, though. (And yeah, the birdbath will catch rainwater too, but that's different.)

This is about half the cobalt blue, and every bit of the amber, which I hadn't started picking up until today's DAV visit. By itself it's kinda meh, so I hadn't picked any up until I saw someone's mixed with cut glass and decided I do like the look.

I have one more totem ready to assemble, mixed cobalt and green and a little more adventurous (there's a blue piece inside a clear piece and other fun stuff), but I ran out of adhesive.

They'll look even better in sunlight, which we had plenty of but didn't want to move the totems to until they'd cured more. So Mom took pictures (because I am a Bad Blogger and didn't have my camera) in the house, with just flash.

This was a Lemon Boy tomato plant

2010-07-08T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've gotten a few (three, plus one that was damaged and rotted before I noticed) tomatoes off one of my earliest JetStars, and the Romas are fruiting but no blush yet, so I decided to see how the two Lemon Boys out front were doing. I found one Lemon Boy, and one leafless twig. No sign of the caterpillar, so I pulled some weeds from around the remaining Lemon Boy. Then I started to pull up a sunflower that was growing near the twig, and brushed something that felt a little too soft and squishy to be a stalk.

Oh hey, there you are.

Glad I realized it before I grabbed and pulled, because eww. Dude was even bigger than the critter I pulled off a similarly denuded 'mater last year or so. And that tomato bounced back, so this one might, but I'm not holding my breath for any yellow tomatoes for awhile yet.

And the Lemon Boy inside a caterpillar is now inside a duck. You don't want to do that with a tobacco hornworm that actually eats tobacco, since they can build up a toxic dose of nicotine, but tomato-fed ones seem to be fine for the ducks…if they weren't, I wouldn't be able to grow any tomatoes, potatoes, tomatillos or other nightshades in my garden. There's no way to keep those birds from eating anything, and I mean anything they can catch.

Antiquing in Abilene

2010-07-06T15:11:00.001-05:00

Last week, my mother-in-law, her mother-in-law, and I made our annual pilgrimage to Abilene, Kansas to visit the antique stores.

Mostly I'm looking for antique-but-usable kitchen items, and I saw a little Guardian Ware (including one piece with an aluminum lid, making it older than the glass-lidded pieces I have from Mom), and a nicely-priced (if you're a collector) Griswold waffle iron, but nothing I had to have. I was tempted by a Federal Glass sugar and creamer in pink Rose-of-Sharon, but it was "as is" and not discounted enough to make up for the chip out of one's foot.

I did come across this guy:

… and I have to admit, my bungalow is deficient in the "screaming deer headed staff" department. But I settled for taking a picture and fleeing.

And this wouldn't fit in the van, so I had to settle for a picture there too:

Scale's really hard to judge there, but my mother-in-law ducked out of the shot too quick for me. Those crystals are as big as my fist.

I did come home with one treasure, which my mother-in-law bought for my birthday: a duck-shaped egg basket.

Those are papier-mâché eggs in the basket, which I painted to show the two-green-and-four-white eggs I sell at the market. Ms. Wire Duck will sit on the market table, just like my neighboring booth's wire chicken.

I'm working on more booth signage, too…eventually, I hope to have a little banner for each of the co-op members, to signify who is in attendance on any given week. The sewing geek in me is amused to make my banner out of brown duck.

In my defense, the real duck eggs are kinda funny-shaped too. Still, I think I'm going to have to put "EGGS" across the top to make it clear.

Market booth, take two

2010-06-26T13:18:00.000-05:00

Week eight of the market, and I'm finally starting to look like I might possibly know what I'm doing. Still no permanent signage, and still using clamps to fasten the canvas roof on, but overall I think it looks good. So does the whole market… we're starting to see a lot of neighbors walking or biking in. The City gave the market manager the green light to add eight more booths effective in July, so they'll have more to shop at.

In actual house news, our Speed Heater arrived, so soon we'll pick a spot to test out its paint-stripping abilities. The only parts that need any significant stripping are the sheltered porch areas, so that's something we can do while it's relatively warm. Except for the porch columns, we won't have to worry about bare wood getting rained on if it's too hot to paint for awhile.

And we have a new, conventional water heater. We had originally planned on getting either point heaters or at least a tankless, but after considering the layout of the house, the current plumbing and venting arrangement, we went with a larger conventional. Hooray for hot water.

RIP water heater, 1988-2010

2010-06-21T10:04:00.001-05:00

Carl noticed a little water next to his pottery wheel yesterday. At first he thought he'd just been sloppy, but when he realized it was coming from under the wall, he realized it was probably something a little more serious.

And it was. Our water heater, the temperamental one we'd put off replacing, has a slow leak. Took us awhile to notice, since some of the cardboard boxes we'd "temporarily" moved into the utility room to give the sewer guy room to work had nicely soaked it all up, but it's definitely rusted out. (The utility room is curiously huge, and the sewer cleanout isn't in it.)

When last we talked to the plumber about replacing it, he'd noted its absence of a cutoff valve of its own, so not only do we not have hot water, we don't have cold water either unless and until we cap it off. Which we may do, since we're not likely to get this replaced until tomorrow at the earliest.

On the up side, replacing it will bring it up to code, so if the new one goes blooie it should drain into the drain instead of the floor, and it will get a cutoff valve. Also, we should be able to upgrade from a 30-gallon to a 40-gallon more appropriate for the size to the house… provided the venting is adequate. That, for the furnace and water heater, still goes through the house's original chimney.

Whee old houses!

Edit: Earliest install will be Wednesday, but we have the inlet capped off so we at least have running water again.

Without further ado: the market booth

2010-06-17T10:19:00.000-05:00

I know, a week later than I promised. I completely forgot the camera last week.

It's still short its signage - it will have a sign across the front top, and a banner across the back. Probably needs a more colorful tablecloth, too - that one's a nice tasteful basketweave pattern, but I didn't think about the preponderance of beige when I picked it.

It garnered a lot of compliments, though, and Carl's pretty pleased with it. It sets up and breaks down with no tools, though that front beam is seven feet off the ground and I'm going to have to pack a stepstool to set it up by myself—not to mention getting the canvas roof on. We'll be doing a little more tailoring of that, too, with maybe some gonfalones along the side indicating who's in today. This week it was just me, but I have a bread baker who sometimes shows up, and now that gardens have started producing I hope some of the gardeners who've expressed interest will follow through.

This last week saw the neighborhood association's garage sale, which I'd said I wasn't going to be involved in but, of course, I ended up there. My van's still full of crazy stuff from it, including my mother-in-law's tent that came out of a box it doesn't look like it has any intention of fitting back into.

I fail at trash-to-treasure-ing.

2010-06-08T22:01:00.000-05:00

Week six of the farmers market is upon us, and I almost have a real market stall. So I decided I needed a little more something to put in it, since Carl's flowerpots aren't fired yet (turned out the kiln was a lot bigger than he thought, when he got to loading it).

The GardenWeb forums are full of glass garden "totems," and I've gotten to be pretty good at searching thrifts for glass vases with/for Mom, so I decided I'd collect a little glass, get me a tube of GE II, and build a few.

My trip today netted a tiny bit of red, a little more cobalt, and a whole lot of green. Vases and the like are easier to find than plates, so when I saw a stack of cobalt plates at a favorite thrift, I snatched them up, even though they seemed a bit irregular. Very irregular, it turns out… they're hand-blown, with a pontil mark and everything (a pontil rod is what you transfer the thing to when you're done with the blowpipe work), but no maker's mark. Perusing antique sites tells me this sort of thing was done in Ohio circa 1880, but the technique made its way down to Mexico circa 1930. Thus, it's more likely these plates are only seventy or eighty years old.

I bought a nice big cake plate, but I won't be using it for a base: it's a Federal Glass (a/k/a Depression glass) Rose-of-Sharon/Cabbage Rose cake plate. If it was in pink instead of crystal, I'd've been doing a happy-dance right there in the thrift, since that's the pattern/color Mom and I used to search for. I don't remember if there's a cake plate in the set we were building, but since my sister and I will likely be splitting it up I wouldn't mind a duplicate.

Result? When I take out the things I can't bear to sacrifice to a garden ornament, I'm left with not quite enough. Tomorrow I need to get ready for the market (oh, and maybe do a little work on the house this blog is supposed to be about), so I probably won't get a chance to put any together. But I'll remember to take the camera tomorrow, so I'll have pictures of the booth… empty.

Still here

2010-05-29T13:49:00.002-05:00

I suppose after the last post one might think we'd been hammered into oblivion by the hail, but actually it didn't happen. (Yet, anyway.)

Instead, it's been a little of everything else. I've now done four weeks of the farmers-market booth, and kind of know what I'm doing. We've made some decisions concerning the house, but that's kind of slow going. The gardening is going as well as might be expected (pictures here), though I haven't spent as much time on it as I should.

The search for a pair of vintage windows to replace the missing ones goes on, and I've about resigned myself to keeping the plate-glass there for now. Unfortunately, that's the window that needs the most reconstruction, and I hate to do all that work only to take it out later. But on the other hand, it gives us a practice window (frame, anyway), which we may need. Mostly for psychological reasons, I think: it's a bit intimidating doing work on something as big and, you know, essential as a house.

That's not what "baseball season" means.

2010-05-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

They've reduced the verbiage to merely "very large hail," but yesterday the National Weather Service was predicting hail "baseball size" or larger, the first time I've seen that in the forecast.

Granted, the Great Delano Hailstorm of 2009 wasn't actually in a forecast, and I think folks south of us did see baseball size stuff, so it might not be worse. But my first thought on the matter was, "Oh, good, the tomato, pepper, and basil plants are safe." They're on the kitchen table, since we've had some very cold nights for this late in the year. My second thought was, "Baseball size hail? Even the kitchen table isn't safe."

The current models show the worst of things (including "strong to violent long-track tornadoes") passing south of Wichita, but it's still a measure of what certain Delanonians call "post-traumatic hail disorder" that the potential hail scares me more than the potential tornadoes do.

I need a staff photographer

2010-05-05T20:46:00.000-05:00

Good bloggers have beautiful pictures in their blogs. I am not a good blogger.

Best I can do is point to a neighbor's smartphone picture: http://twitpic.com/1lda3i. Look, I'm a farmers market vendor! I suspect more pictures of the market, though hopefully not of me personally, will show up around the Internets in the next few days. I got interviewed by a local TV station, and depending on how awful it comes out I may link to that if they put it on the net.

Anyway, that picture is me, explaining that because the city paperwork is under my left hand and not at City Hall, I cann't actually sell duck eggs at the first night of the Delano Community Farmers Market. Shortly after that, Mayor Brewer showed up and said my transient merchant license application looked fine… and then he bought a dozen duck eggs. (So, um, tomorrow I'll also take in our duck license application, which should have been in on the first of the month. Fortunately, Wichita itself is close to as laid-back about these things as Delano is.) Things went well, and I'm pretty sure that everyone who wanted eggs went home with some, one way or another.

Against my better judgment, I have that city license, a state sales tax number to be filed quarterly(!), and a federal employer ID number(!!). It's the plan to obsolete all that as quickly as possible, by raising up a local crop of farmers-market vendors so I'm not needed as filler, but until everyone's garden gets rolling my ducks (and my mother-in-law's mint, catnip, and ornamental strawberry plants) are filling in, every Wednesday night from 5-7:30.

Overcommitted? Me?

Weather? Cooperate? Ha! This is Kansas.

2010-05-03T08:54:00.004-05:00

We've had wind, and we've had rain, and we've had temperature extremes, so the weather hasn't really cooperated for house painting yet.

And my cough is still (still!) lingering, so my gardening has been a bit behind as well. At least we haven't had any hail with the crazy weather, but the wind has been ridiculous. This weekend I mixed up a batch of Mel's Mix (peat moss/vermiculite/compost) to fill containers and top off beds. This morning a pile of mix is scattered through the yard, and the kiddie-pool I had mixed it in is nowhere to be seen. But the Yukon Gold potatoes are timidly peeking out of the bigger kiddie pool (turned raised bed), the cabbages are forming heads, the peppers have bounced back from transplant shock, the strawberries have little green fruits on them, and so forth. I'm catching up.

The next step on the exterior is going to be climbing into the attic to make sure the rot on the dormer rafter tails is only on the tails. If so (and I expect so), then when they're dry enough we'll be reconstructing them, mostly with epoxy. I haven't found a local source for Abatron brand, so it's probably time to take a deep breath and order it. It's pricey stuff, but impressive, and probably overall cheaper/easier than trying to replace wood with new lumber…which no longer comes in true dimensional sizes, isn't of the same quality/species, etc.

And maybe, just maybe, by the time we're ready for it I'll have actually settled on paint colors.

A hint of progress

2010-04-05T17:41:00.000-05:00

I'm now struggling with "post-infectious cough," which is responding pretty well today to anti-inflammatories so I'm hoping we can get rolling because we're excited about stuff.

During my blog silence, Carl and I went to a seminar paid for by Wichita's pretty awesome Historic Preservation department. They brought in Bob Yapp, and we attended the Paint It Right seminar. I'd read that blog post, and actually almost didn't go to the seminar because hey, it seemed to cover most everything, right? And it does, but it was still worthwhile… if only for the entertainment value. Bob's a fun guy to listen to.

So we're all fired up to paint, soon as the weather cooperates. Which, this being Kansas, may not be until fall. We're hoping for the end of the month, though. If nothing else, we'll get the already-exposed trim done, but we're hoping to at least get the front (which is just the porch and dormer) and the south side (which will make our insurance company happy) done before it really heats up. The north side we have a little more leeway on because it'll stay cooler longer, and the back is mostly not vinyl and only needs repainted because it's white.

That's the awkward part…we really don't want to spend the summer with a half-white, half-earthtones house. But if we just paint the trim and leave the vinyl on until fall, we spend a full year with a hail-damaged house—and the siding has shed a couple of pieces on the south already.

We're fortunate in that it doesn't look like we'll have to do a lot of hardcore scraping (though I now know where to borrow a Paint Shaver if I need one), but as I mention in Larry's comments we have the sixteen-penny nails to deal with. A previous owner was really fond of them (I wish I had a picture of the subfloor in the living room. It doesn't squeak, but if we ever pull it up and restore the hardwood underneath, the scrap iron market will be flooded). The siding brackets, at least on the south wall, are installed with sixteen-penny nails every eighteen inches. The siding itself is coming off because it's structurally failing, not because the brackets are loose.

To tie up a few other loose ends, the ducks have never escaped since (leading me to believe there was an open-gate issue somehow after all). And as I phrased it on Twitter, our dog population is down by 50%, or 80% by weight. Sequoia's hips-and-back status peaked about the time of my last post, and it was downhill after that to the point where the narcotics weren't enough for the pain. I took her in last Friday for that final vet visit, and then out to Carl's mom's place because the kiddo wanted to her to be buried (something we haven't done for any previous pets). There's now a little grave plot out back by their garden, and the kiddo spread wildflower seeds there today.

Speaking of gardens, mine is doing okay. I "loaned" my box of seeds to someone in the Neighborhood Association, and haven't gotten around to getting it back yet, so I'm a little behind on things like radishes. But I have lettuce planted, my Sugar Sprint peas are sprinting, and today I prepped the bed for some Yukon Gold potatoes which will probably go in tomorrow (gotta pace myself). I also have to find space for more potatoes, since I finally discovered a local place that carries blue ones (Johnson's Garden Center, Purple Majesties, if you were wondering). The garlic all survived the winter (including some volunteer ones from the year before, in what's now the strawberry patch), as did the kale and strawberries. I'm trying a different variety of cabbage, faster-maturing with smaller heads, and those are planted out tempting the hail now.

I predict a really stormy spring.

More, better excuses

2010-03-24T22:20:00.000-05:00

This series: brain surgery, H1N1, strep, H1N1, strep, conjunctivitis, random hospitalization. Nothing's getting done on the house in March, it's safe to say.

Things haven't been all bad. Sequoia's still with us, hobbling around but slowly improving. It remains to be seen whether she'll fully recover; even if she's not in pain, she's prone to falling, and at 14 that's not good. Right now her biggest problem seems to be the fact that we've put her on a diet while she has prednisone munchies, which I admit is probably pretty annoying.

The ducks are thriving under benign neglect, and laying eggs even though we haven't set up artificial lighting. They're enjoying the weather, though they were vaguely puzzled (as were we all) by the crazy first-day-of-spring snowstorm sandwiched between days of 60+ weather. We haven't had any more escapes, so that one's still a mystery.

April is house-painting month, brain surgery or not.

DUCKVENTURE!

2010-03-15T12:14:00.001-05:00

So I was cleaning up the living room, and took the trash out, and saw birds playing in the gutter. No big thing, whenever we get puddles there the starlings take baths and play. Except this weren't little black birds. These were big brown, webfooted birds.

DUCKSCAPE!

I herded them out of the street, up the driveway… where they balked. Not going past that big white van, nohow, nossir. Usually this is a saving grace if I leave the gate open. They'll go dig in the honeysuckle bordering the driveway, and that's it. This time, they wouldn't go past it the other direction.

I tried the other side of the house, figuring I could funnel them in past the neighbor's fence (which parallels the front of the houses) in through that gate (which parallels the back of the house). Nope, they weren't going into that box canyon, neither.

So I called for help, since the kiddo's home for spring break. He came out, as did Baxter the dachshund, who promptly bolted for freedom (in the opposite direction of the ducks). Kiddo ran down the street in his socks after him.

I finally resorted to picking up one (by now very tired) duck at a time and putting her in the backyard. By the time I got to four of eight, the remaining ducks were hearing their companions call them home, and finally went past the van where I opened the gate and let them in.

Kiddo still hadn't returned with the dachshund, so I headed down the street after them, and shortly heard him yelling and crying: "I need some help here! Somebody, anybody, please help! I don't want to lose my dog!" He was in a backyard about six houses down, bawling, with Baxter howling along because the kiddo wouldn't let go of his collar and he wanted to get into a hole (partially blocked with cinderblocks) into someone's crawlspace, after a cat or possum or raccoon or who-knows-what.

We're all home, exhausted, and now I'm mystified because all the gates were closed. Either they've all really been sandbagging on their flight capabilities or they squeezed past the gate onto the driveway, then panicked and ran past the van and forgot how to get home.

The source of panic was pretty easy to spot: a Mississippi Kite (actually, I'd've bet White-Tailed, but we aren't supposed to have those around here) hanging in the air over the house, maybe thirty feet up, probably hunting mice around the duck feed. They're no threat to the ducks, but a raptor is a raptor to duck brains.

The escape point was harder to find. The only remote possibility was the gate, whose post has shifted a bit over the years (or perhaps just over this wet, wet winter) and has a larger gap than I'd like. Duck-sized? I wouldn't have guessed it, but it's blocked temporarily for now.

We're up to four eggs a day, so maybe they're feeling the need to go find a spot to lay eggs where those evil humans won't steal them (four today: three white, one green). Or maybe they want to go find mates… since "Drake" has developed neither a dark head nor curly tail feathers in the last molt, though his/her/its bill is back to green and legs back to orange. Too many mysteries!

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz...

2010-03-11T08:59:00.000-06:00

... we're back in the duck egg biz:

Mrs. Oval-Egg Duck (we don't know which one that is) left us the first egg of the spring today. Well, "first" assuming Mrs. Special Duck (we know which one that is) isn't off laying in a secret nest somewhere already, anyway.

The way to make sure things don't get done

2010-03-02T09:32:00.000-06:00

... is clearly to set a goal. Dangit.

To sum up my excuses, in no particular order: brain surgery, herniated disc, ruptured disc, strep, new appliances, herniated and/or ruptured disc... I think there was more, but you get the idea. Neither the bedroom painting nor the ceiling work has gotten done yet.

That last disc is the one that's causing the current troubles. Sequoia, our sixty-pound mixed-breed, has had some weakness in her hind legs lately, and in the last couple days turned into all-out falling-down incapacitation. She's fourteen this week or thereabouts (she wandered into our yard July 4, 1996, at about four months old), so that's not unexpected. Depending on whose math you use that puts here somewhere in her mid-80's to early 90's, human equivalent. She's been remarkably healthy overall, aside from hip dysplasia and the associated arthritis, but she hadn't been eating well recently and we figured the pain had passed what her meds could handle.

So I took her in yesterday, and the news wasn't quite as bad as I'd been prepared for. The vet thinks she's stumbling because she's hurting, but because she can't feel her legs… that a disc has slipped in her back and pinched a nerve. She may have (probably does have) arthritis there, so he wants to try some extra pain meds for a couple of weeks and see if she gets past this. She also needs to lose eight or ten pounds. We're usually pretty particular about keeping her weight down, but in the last few weeks with her not eating well and me guessing it was nearing the end, I've been kinda spoiling her with table scraps and extra treats. Oops.

She's still stumbling around quite a bit, but is doing much better (probably because she's not favoring a sore back). She needs help down the three stairs to the backyard, and we have carpet remnants (ultimately destined for a kitty condo) laid out to cover the Pergo so she doesn't slip. Guess it's time to stop putting off buying rugs for the living room.

Too early to tell if it's going to last, but at least she's comfortable… if a bit annoyed that I won't let her follow me everywhere, as is her habit.

I forgot how to buy eggs

2010-02-02T18:22:00.000-06:00

The ducks are still(!) molting, so I finally had to break down and buy eggs from the store*, which I haven't done in, um, forever. Happily, Barney's carries local chicken eggs, so I picked up a dozen.

Before ringing them up, the checker popped open the carton to inspect them, at which point I realized I hadn't done that. None were cracked (wouldn't I have felt silly?), and she ooh'd over the checkerboard of green and brown eggs. "Green eggs, that just makes me happy!"

I allowed as how that made me happy too, since our ducks laid (some) green eggs when they were laying and so I felt more at home with them. She asked the usual "are they different?" question. And then shared that her family had parrots, and that her dad had eaten a parrot egg and reported they were much the same, but tiny. You know, if I had a pet bird** that laid an egg, I would probably try it too.

It's little things like that that make me like Barney's better than the chain grocery down the road a bit.

* Melissa has offered me chicken eggs, and I'll probably take her up on that before the ducks start laying again.

** No, I don't. They're poultry, not pets.

Peter Rabbit in space

2010-02-01T11:20:00.000-06:00

I have two goals for February.

One is to start on the interior painting, beginning in the kiddo's room. We did the nursery in Beatrix Potter, with a pastel blue above the chair rail, a pastel green chair rail/border, and a pastel yellow below the chair rail. The border was actually Beatrix Potter Wallies, all very cute.

He's nine and a half now, and his room is all red-white-and-blue stars and model rockets… except the pastels are still there, and the Wallies are not entirely covered by the solar-system border (actually a set of bulletin-board borders from the school supply store). End result is a decor scheme best described as "Jemima Puddle-Duck meets the Space Shuttle." That's gonna go. Sorry, Squirrel Nutkin.

The other goal is replacing the ceiling in the back room, which has water-damaged tiles from the roof replacement back in… well, we won't talk about what year that was. Probably about the time we switched from nursery to little-boy decor.

Replacing the ceiling leads to clearing out that room, which means we probably ought to also replace the carpet while we're at it, and maybe the paneling, but I'm not going to get that ambitious with my goals just yet.

The magic of chemistry

2010-01-27T09:50:00.002-06:00

Before and after glaze firing... I forgot to take batteries for the camera, so I had to take the "after" picture at home rather than in the studio. That table runner? Yeah, I should know better than to buy table linens at WalMart, much less to wash them even when they say they're machine washable. (Yes, Mom, I did iron it. You should have seen it before.)

Anyway, that's the same glaze in both pictures. High temps and chemistry, whee. My test tile is done, the carving on the address tile is done, and I started work on a second "Est. 1919" tile with the same font as the address tile. If I had had batteries, I could show all my progress, but oh well.

Those apothecary jars, by the way, came from one of my antiquing trips to Abilene. I had originally picked up the Scrabble-tile one, thinking if it was cheap enough I'd buy them for making pendants with, and discovered it was a set. We're major game nerds, so I ended up buying them to keep more or less as-is, though I haven't gotten around to replacing the marbles with the antique Carrom board pieces I have.

House number tiles

2010-01-19T10:45:00.002-06:00

All the way on the edge of the neighborhood is a very interesting house. Someday I'll have to do a photo shoot (okay, have a photo shoot done) of it, but for now, here is what happens in the ground floor of the house.

It's a pottery studio, where we've taken classes off and on. Currently, the kiddo and I are "on," a Christmas present for him and a house project for me. Above is a tile I made to test the shrinkage of the clay. It didn't shrink quite as much as advertised, so this tile is slightly larger than 4x4".

Contrary to appearances, it's a buff clay and not terra cotta—that's after bisque firing but before glaze firing, and the color is from the dry-but-unfired glaze I just put on. The glaze will fire to a green, through the magical wonders of chemistry.

This is what the clay looks like when it's still wet, and is another test tile that might have ended up mounted somewhere except I managed to put my template down a little too high for the second "19." It's still kind of appropriate for our slightly out-of-kilter house, but I've also decided I don't like the difference in weight between the "Est." and the year. It's based on Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Magazine lettering, so should be period-appropriate.

Here's what might end up being the actual house-number tile, mid-carving. The numbers are slightly smaller than the (sad, unlit) house marker we have now, so we'll have to see how visible it is. This is based on a font that's based on a composite of old Arts-and-Crafts sign lettering, so is only more-or-less period-appropriate; also apt for our only more-or-less period-appropriate bungalow, with its popcorn ceilings and all.

Hopefully we'll be needing it less for repair guys and more for renovation guys in the future, though.

Six hundred and fifty dollars later...

2010-01-18T22:00:00.019-06:00

We have heat again.

Interestingly, we didn't use a space heater and the house only dropped about three degrees overnight. Either it's not as drafty as it seems, or the computers and water heater and warm bodies really put out a lot of heat. I'm afraid it's probably the latter.

The furnace guy said "most of a day" to install the thing (the part was covered by warranty but the labor wasn't), but by a little before 1 he was at least to the fire-up-and-test stage. Emphasis on "fire," or at least "smoke"…the smoke alarms went off, and the house filled with smoke. This is normal, since the critter arrives coated in oil, but it was unsettling enough that Carl decided to turn it off when we left for the evening. (It didn't smell like natural gas, so I was fine with it. Go figure.)

And as if that wasn't enough money to spend, the van let us know it was time for a new battery by failing to start when my mother-in-law needed a ride to the ER last week. It's currently full of stuff-to-get-rid-of, so now it has a shiny new battery so I shouldn't have to worry about getting stuck at the thrift store or the church clothes closet or all my other little stops.

Back to normal, I hope.

Again with the natural gas

2010-01-17T22:25:00.000-06:00

It's hard to get out of bed when the dream you were having when the alarm went off was of being cold and then wrapping up in a nice warm blanket and crawling into bed.

It was apparently a prophetic dream, because when I crawled out of my nice warm blanket and bed, I was still cold. I figured it was my imagination until I realized the, uh, porcelain in the bathroom was pretty cold, too. I checked the thermostat: 60 degrees actual, 68 set. Uh oh.

So we had somewhat of a rerun, only this time the furnace guy checked a little deeper, and said we have a bad heat exchanger. Evidently the first guy told Carl this was a possibility, but that cleaning the thing was a first step. Problem is, this time it requires a part and so we have no heat until (at best) tomorrow morning.

Fortunately, it's been relatively warm, and we actually went up a couple of degrees today between the sunshine and cooking and so forth, but it's gonna get a bit nippy tonight. The kiddo's spending the night with a grandma, and we'll be spending the night with the space heater.

Gas clouds and whatnot

2010-01-15T13:39:00.000-06:00

Still more natural-gas phobia. I'm going to have to add a label for that if it doesn't quit.

We've had some crazy cold weather here lately. No burst pipes, no failed furnace (though if it hadn't been cleaned/repaired when it had, well...) and the ducks did fine (though the last three finally decided to molt during the cold snap, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid. So I thought we'd gotten through it fine, until I stuck my head out the back door the other night and smelled gas. Eep.

No odor in the house, so I stuck my head out the front door: just as strong. Carl ran up and down the block and determined it faded a couple houses away, while I called it in to the gas service who promised to send an "emergency crew."

Something over an hour later, the smell had faded and a gas guy finally showed up on our porch, looking harried. Seems the new refinery(?) several miles northeast of us had dumped a cloud (whether of gas or just thiols, I didn't actually find out) which was triggering calls all over Riverside and Delano. But it being natural gas, of course they still had to check each and every call, so he scouted around our place before heading up the block to another call.

It's actually pretty rare for us to get odors from the refinery district, and I'd thought when they dismantled the old Coastal refinery that we were down to just the Cargill one, but I guess not. And as if to remind us of the latter, last night we were getting a pretty good whiff of soybean, so evidently the winds are right.

In other news, I didn't make a New Year's resolution to get anything in particular done, but maybe I should have since I'm making pretty good progress. I'm emptying stuff out of the house by the vanload; outgrown kids' clothes, another book purge, all the aquarium stuff we don't use anymore, and so forth.

That leads to vacuuming, vacuuming, vacuuming, all the spots that have been freed up. It's truly amazing how much dog hair can accumulate in places the dogs never go. It's also truly amazing how much hair dogs generate.

And then there's the back door area, where we've tracked in sand from the steps (we've seen "pet-safe" de-icer, but so far nothing labeled "poultry-safe") and grass and mulch and mud and whatnot from the (barn)yard. I burned up vacuum cleaners on a regular basis (see "how much hair," above) until I started pre-cleaning trouble spots and edges with a shop-vac.

Seriously, that handheld 1-gallon/1-hp wet-dry vac is the best twenty bucks I ever spent. Especially when it comes to cleaning up barnyard whatnot. Ew.

Christmas 2008

2010-01-07T21:09:00.000-06:00

I have been, for some time, looking for an affordable Singer Featherweight. That's kind of an oxymoron, at least for rust-free, usable machines, let alone ones that still have a bit of decal left on them.

I somewhat jokingly put it on my Christmas list last year, and in the exchange my brother-in-law got my name. My Dumpster-diving brother-in-law. He was all set to be a hero, but neither he nor my garage-sale-scoring mother-in-law managed to come up with one, so instead he gave me cash for when eventually MIL and I ran across one.

Right after Thanksgiving, you may have noticed I stopped blogging. Blame the sewing machine. Not that I was sewing, but that I was waiting to make the post until I got around to getting a picture of it. And suddenly it was after Christmas 2009. Oops.

It's neither a Singer nor a Featherweight, but I fell in love with it. It's one of the millions of Singer 15 clones made in Japan at some point anywhere from the 1940's to the 1970's. It's well-nigh unused, with a nick in the enamel and a missing thread post, so the only restoration needed was a replacement of the bobbin tire (which had sat against the wheel so long it had a flat spot) and the main belt (which had lost any hint of tension). That and a clean-oil-n-adjust and it's like a new machine. (Only, you know, made of cast iron instead of plastic so it weighs 38 pounds.)

I haven't sewn with it aside from some test scraps, chiefly because it takes a regular Singer bobbin and all I have handy are the weird plastic bobbins Oscar the Viking takes. But I've been working on getting the sewing room downstairs put together again, so sometime soon I'll get to play with it. And get, yes, a picture of it.

…Hopefully before Christmas 2010.

Christmas-break progress

2010-01-03T14:46:00.000-06:00

The Christmas break—which husband and son both get—is always kind of odd for me, since I get more of a "break" when they're not around all day.

Still, I've managed to get some things done. We got the furnace cleaned, which would be more of a bragging point if it hadn't happened on overtime, when the thing wouldn't light. We'd gotten the HVAC serviced last year, or so we thought, but actually it turned out that was just the AC and such bits of the V as they share, not the H. Oops. Also, by "we" I mean Carl, since I just put the kiddo to bed while he called and then let the guy in and showed him to the utility room. (Have I mentioned my phobia of natural gas? Oh, yes, I have. Okay then.) Considering it's supposed to get well below zero this week (one day's high will be single digits if the forecaster's got it right) I guess it's a good thing it happened when it did.

New Year's Day I cleaned out the fridge, since it was nice and chilly outside. I put everything in boxes on the porch while I powered the monster down and went all-in. Almost literally. While I was in there, I noticed its manufacturing date: 1994. I have a new unit picked out, but In These Economic Times we're holding off.

Today I cleaned out the utility room, rather than just chucking in the few Christmas decorations we got out this year and slamming the door. It's a sizable room, even leaving plenty of clearance around the water heater and furnace, so now that I've purged the Christmas decorations we don't use it's pretty empty. I feel like I should invite the furnace guy back now, so he can see how it's supposed to look.

Our big goal for the break isn't happening, though: emptying the family room so we can replace the ceiling back there, and possibly the carpet. I haven't quite decided what sort of ceiling we're putting up: I'd settled on beadboard, but now I've learned from the next-door neighbor that there used to be a tin ceiling. Supposedly they were tiles from one of the buildings on Douglas (which is now a protected historic district) so probably not original to the house, which really was never fancy enough for a tin ceiling. But that still may be enough of an excuse for me, especially since that frees up the possibility of using beadboard to replace the paneling.

I also have finally figured out the original window layout of the living room: the picture window was once two side-by-side double-hungs. Now I just need to find replacement windows of the right size and pane layout. Sadly, that should be easy: the aluminum-window pushers are doing well in the neighborhood post-hailstorm, and a lot of wonderful old windows are going to the curb.

The mandatory 2009 recap post

2010-01-01T13:25:00.093-06:00

"In 2009, it hailed on our house. We got a new roof."

Yep, that pretty much sums up the houseblogging for last year, and the renovation progress it was supposed to cover.

It wasn't that I wasn't busy around here. But in January, I launched DelanoWichita.com for neighborhood news, so I could quit bothering my readers here with local-specific stuff. And then I says to myself, I says, I may as well talk to the neighborhood association's newsletter editor so we can share articles. And then I ended up running the neighborhood garage sale in June, and typesetting the neighborhood newsletter, and then I became the VP of the neighborhood association in July, and then the president in September(?), and then we started forming a community development corporation in November, which is probably going to be my full-time job.

(My full-time paid job, that is. It's already a full-time job.)

So if you look at it right, instead of renovating my house I've been renovating my whole neighborhood. That's progress, right?

Making a list, checking it twice

2009-11-26T19:26:00.000-06:00

I had resolved to back off a little bit on the Thanksgiving cooking, so that things weren't quite so crazy. Got myself all organized, made a list of what I needed to do the day before and then a list of everything that needed to go in the car the day of. It mostly worked out, too.

We did have one small snag. Loaded everything up, got in the car about twenty minutes later than I'd wanted, but still with plenty of time. Two and a half miles down the road, I blurted out a sudden thought.

"We forgot the turkeys!"

Yep, it was right at the top of the list, and I was so busy getting all the little detail stuff and thinking "…then we'll grab the turkeys and we're done" that I didn't remember to actually, you know, grab the turkeys.

It still worked out well, even with that delay. Turkeys (one smoked, one "gravy donor") were on the table and we were just pulling the rolls and stuffing out of the oven when the last family members (well, a family member and a friend) came in the door.

And then we got to see Endeavor and the ISS go by tonight…just bright dots, even in our (birdwatching 7x35) binoculars, but very bright with the sunset angle.

It was a good day.

Psst... wanna buy a duckling?

2009-11-25T10:43:00.070-06:00

Actually, wanna buy a flock of ducklings?

From the Heifer International site:

Ducks are delightful creatures – good for both people and the environment. Ducks add protein to a project partner's diet from eating eggs, money in their pockets from selling eggs and ducks, and better crops in the fields, as ducks remove weeds and bugs and add fertilizer.

In Xiang Qian, China, ducks are as much as tripling some families' incomes. People like Zonglin Zhou began with a starter flock of ducklings, and now they manage hundreds of ducks that enable them to send their children to school and offer them secure futures - and help others achieve the same success through Passing on the Gift.

So if you've been following the duck saga here in the blog, and thinking, "Man, I wish I had my own crazy ducks," here's your chance. For only $20 you can buy a flock of ducks (sort of; Heifer has always been clear that you're not sponsoring a literal single flock. But that's how much a flock of ducks would be, so just play along), and you don't have to go out and water them in subfreezing temperatures, worry about them bothering your neighbors, rescue them from hail, and so forth. Granted you don't get to eat the eggs either, but you do get a tax deduction.

And here's an even better deal. If you buy ducks I'll match you flock for flock, up to five of them. Heifer has a fancy-pants corporate matching system but I'm not going to ask them to set it up for a little bitty match like this. We'll just go by the honor system. Buy a flock, then comment here, leave me a Heifer e-card, send me an email, whatever.

(Our own, literal ducks? Well, even before yesterday's post went out, our own flock decided that yes, the lack of tarp was what they'd been yelling about. They confirmed it for me this morning by yelling again when the door to the pen got closed by accident. So if we keep them fed and tarped, they're quiet. If you want to buy our real ducks we're still open to it, but it's not such a pressing need. Whew.)

Psst... wanna buy a duck?

2009-11-24T10:55:00.002-06:00

We've been pretty close to getting rid of the ducks lately, because they've gotten ridiculously loud. Nobody's complained, but if nothing else it annoys me.

At first, we assumed it was a food issue. They've been "underfed" to trigger the molt: all they can eat, but a higher percentage of grains, which they don't like as much. So I tried giving them 100% grower, which is actually overfeeding them but which won't hurt for awhile. No dice, and the lack of barley in the diet made for a nice algae bloom in their pool.

Then I decided it must be a dominance issue. Maybe the changing plumage was triggering a reorganization. So I spied regularly on the ducks, and while there's always a bit of jostling, the obnoxious noise is when one suddenly decides everyone's too far apart, and gives an alarm call.

So we were worried someone or something had been harassing them. The neighbor behind us had made his kids apologize for throwing things at the ducks awhile back, but as far as we know that was a one-time incident. Even their Labrador Retriever doesn't show the slightest interest in the ducks (which is a good thing, since neither of us has a high fence). They've been pretty skittish even around me, but of course that could be attributed to me telling them to shut up or they'll be Thanksgiving dinner. Not really sure how much tone of voice they pick up, though.

Finally, we decided it must be a security thing. The leaves are off the tree in back, and I took the tarp off the pen when it started to fray and I was afraid they'd eat strands of it. They have plenty of shade from the house and garage, and we really wanted to put up a more permanent (and more attractive) rain/snow shelter for them. That hasn't happened yet, so I bought another tarp, in a highly attractive neon blue. That seems to have quieted them down for now, so maybe they've just been bothered by seeing all the migrating hawks. Agoraphobic ducks? We'll see.

If we're going to get rid of them, we'd prefer to sell them as a laying flock. Right now they're mid-molt, though three are persistent about laying almost daily. Campbells don't make a bad meat bird, but ours are old enough to not be young fryers, young enough to have most of their laying life ahead of them. It's not an optimal time for slaughter.

Then there's the weather. We're going into the hardest time to keep ducks, what with the nuisance of dealing with keeping clean water available when it's sub-freezing. Nice for us, but perhaps a bit much to take on all at once if we sold them to someone new at poultry-keeping.

It's a tough decision. On the one hand, the critters are a lot of work, and we don't want to annoy our neighbors. On the other hand, we'd certainly miss the eggs, and I suspect the success of my squash and cucumbers is partly due to ducks taking care of the beetles that usually wipe them out. Not to mention the snails and slugs we don't see anymore, and so on.

For now, we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for a likely home for them, especially if someone wants to buy them and their (very nice) coop. But we're not ready to put up a "Free to good home" sign… yet.

Road trips, day 2

2009-11-23T09:52:00.000-06:00

Friday's road trip to Newton and Hesston was just practice. Saturday I went all the way up to Salina, which I always think of as "about an hour" but which Google Maps tells me is half again that.

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This was for the See and Sell, a big arts and crafts show at the Salina Bicentennial Center. A couple of friends from the Teddy Bear Guild had a booth up there, and I'd never been, so my mother-in-law and I went. It was a pretty good show, much bigger than I'd expected. Unsurprisingly, we ran into someone my mother-in-law knew, walked our feet off, and bought things I can't talk about because they're all presents.

Headed back out of town, MIL said "Antiques..." as we passed an antique store, so I whipped into the next parking lot to turn around. Except that turned out to be the DAV Thrift Store, so we popped in to look for Mom's vases. No luck there, which was pretty amazing considering it's a gigantic, well-organized store.

The antique store was actually an antique mall, and we spent quite a bit of time there, I broke down and bought another loom, a Whiting and Strait adjustable metal one. It's not quite as nifty as the Weave-It, but it's much larger.

On the way home, we stopped in Newton again, at Metcalf Sisters. This is one of our regular haunts; we've often parked the kiddo on their stairs with a book or video game, or in front of the player piano with a bunch of quarters. (If you need Christmas ideas for me: that player piano would go marvelously in the living room.) I made one purchase there: a green Degenhart Liberty Bell. I try not to buy Degenhart much; the point of buying it when I did was so that it would gain in value, and now that it's done so, I'm supposed to be selling. Couldn't pass this one up, though: two bucks. That's the sort of prices I used to pay back when I was a kid, at antique shows at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

After that, we collected the rest of the family(ies) and drove north again, for a birthday dinner at Cy's Hoof & Horn in Sedgwick. (For a change, this wasn't someplace on I-135, though it's close.) Cy's is kind of a dive, a little bitty smoky bar where you come in a sort of cattle chute, the decor is rustic-with-taxidermy, and the chicken fried steaks are enormous. And quite possibly the best I've ever eaten.

I had a sandwich, which doesn't look all that large in the picture there, but that's an oversized bun. That thing's the size of my head. I ate half, and that was more than I should have. The chicken fried steak dinner I got last time fed me for four meals, though of course we were naive and also ordered an appetizer plate beforehand, resulting in enough food for all of Sedgwick.

Growing up in Indiana, "chicken fried steak" was one of those mysterious items that only ever appeared on school lunch menus, and was a soyburger breaded in cornflakes when it did. So it took me awhile to come to appreciate the real thing, and it's still rare that I order it in a place that also serves steak. At Cy's, it's worth it.

I wasn't driving, or I think we'd have had to visit Newton on this trip too, just out of habit.

Flat on the table like Kansas

2009-11-22T12:19:00.000-06:00

It's been a weekend for micro-road trips.

Friday, Carl and I had a date. I had heard, not too long ago, that Vienna Teng was going to be playing Dyck Arboretum. Those who know me will be unsurprised to learn that the fact that I had to make a phone call to get tickets made me put it off. Then I heard that the concert was (unsurprisingly) sold out. Then I heard that a second concert had been scheduled, so I got over my phone-o-phobia (a real issue for me, flippancy aside) and got tickets.

Amusingly, Dyck is in Hesston. Carl worked from home Friday (which he does three days a week now), so he was spared a double-commute. We went to the Bread Basket in Newton for dinner, not exactly romantic candlelight, but hey: German buffet. Some of the best German sausage and hot potato salad around, and bohnen biroggi for dessert, and of course we ate way too much.

The concert was very good. I'd never been to Dyck, so wasn't sure what to expect, but knowing that we were in seats 67 and 68 after a last-minute ticket purchase meant it couldn't be very big. And it wasn't: the room is something like 30x30, and probably maxed out at a hundred people. Ms. Teng was touring with Alex Wong, and my only disappointment was that I couldn't see most of his percussion work.

The title of this post comes from the lyrics of her song "Kansas" (inspired by I-70, not the most flattering view of Kansas), which of course was part of the set:

That's from the Friday concert but is not my video; based on the angle I'm pretty sure it was not the person in the row ahead of me who was occasionally surreptitiously recording (please, people, dim or turn off the LCD monitor if you're gonna do that). I actually did have my camera in my purse, but had forgotten about it, so I didn't take any pictures of my own (d'oh!).

After picking the kiddo up from Mom's in Andover, we got home a little after midnight. Fortunately, Saturday's road trips were not early-morning ones…I'll leave those for another post.

Duck update

2009-11-03T11:54:00.000-06:00

Some while back, we turned off the timed lights and cut back the ducks' feed, which was supposed to stimulate the molt. It's worked… kind of.

Khaki Campbells are so named because they supposedly reminded Mrs. Campbell of the British army's khaki uniforms. Ours haven't quite displayed that plumage because, due to the timing of when we got them, they didn't have a fall molt last year and so are still wearing their "teenage" feathers. In particular, Mr. Drake still looks pretty much like a hen, complete with lack of curly tail feathers.

It's been quite a few weeks, and some of the ducks are very persistent layers. We still get two, occasionally three eggs a day. Four of the hens have definitely molted, usually with a very abrupt "dump" of all their wing feathers in a single day.

They look pretty scruffy when that happens (forgive the fuzzy picture, they are reasonably sure cameras are dangerous predators):

Not sure which bird this is, but she's lost most of her right wing, and has loose feathers on the left. As I recall, while I chased her around for pictures she was flapping for balance and losing feathers along the way.

Watching the big wing feathers come in is interesting. First they get a hollow tube that's the feather's outer shaft. Then the feather starts to come out the end of the tube, and gradually spreads out. Here's a closeup of Squeaky Duck's primaries just starting to show:

You can see her body feathers are still very ragged. Since that picture, she's fully molted, and is now a lovely chocolate brown again, along with three other hens. Interestingly, during the molt we had to refer to her as Yellow-Band again: her voice changed and she had a conversational quack, which she used pretty much continuously—none of them are very impressed with their mostly-barley diet, meant to reflect the reduced feeding conditions of a wild duck in the fall. Once she was done molting, though, she went back to her regular rusty-gate squeak, only quacking when she "shouted."

One of our other hens is in some distress, and we're probably going to have to end it soon. At first, we thought she was egg-bound—a risk when you cut the calcium but the duck continues to try to produce eggs. She hasn't gone septic, though, so that's not it. We're thinking it might be "water-belly," though that doesn't seem quite right either. At any rate, she's carrying a lot of excess weight, to the point she's nearly dragging the ground and has trouble walking. It's particularly noticeable now that most of the hens aren't laying and have lost weight due to their diet—compared to their usual egg-heavy look, they're kind of long-leggity beasties right now.

Water-belly isn't necessarily fatal—apparently it usually involves fluid retention around the heart (i.e. congestive heart failure), but we're not seeing her panting more than the effort of moving her bulk seems to warrant, so we're not sure. However, its effect on internal organs seems to mean you don't eat a bird you put down for it, so it doesn't look like we'll have duck for Thanksgiving—though we won't know for sure unless and until we slaughter her. And maybe not then; we're not exactly ducky autopsy experts.

Drake, as I said, is being a tease—he hasn't dropped many flight feathers, is only very slowly getting new body feathers, and still shows no sign of curly tail feathers. And he still quacks instead of trilling like drakes normally do, all of which has led everyone who knows anything about poultry to knowingly tell us we don't have a drake. But he has distinctly orange legs, and a distinctly green bill, and we regularly got seven-not-eight eggs, and I candled Broody Duck's stash once and there was a definite shadow (I was too squicked to actually open the egg), so we're pretty sure.

If he and the last three hens will get their act together and dump their feathers—as they probably will soon as the weather turns cool for sure—we'll probably ramp their feed and lighting back up and get them all laying again. Though I have to say, two or three eggs a day is about right for our family's use. If it weren't about the same amount of trouble to keep eight as three, we'd probably consider cutting the flock back.

Green tomato mincemeat

2009-10-20T22:37:00.000-05:00

The problem with having local readers to your blog is that sometimes they track you down in person to insist that you not leave an entry like the last one hanging.

So, for Jim and the Delano Community Garden (whose tomato plants are still in the ground, but still likely to produce plenty of green ones), here's the mincemeat recipe.

6 lbs green tomatoes
2 lbs tart apples
2 c raisins
4 c brown sugar, firmly packed
2 c strong coffee
1 lemon (grated peel and juice)
2 t grated orange peel
1/2 c vinegar
1 t salt
1 t nutmeg
1 t allspice

Core and quarter tomatoes and apples; put through food chopper with raisins.

Combine all ingredients in large saucepan. Simmer 2 hours, stirring frequently.

Pack at once in hot pint jars. Adjust lids. Process in boiling-water bath 25 minutes.

Remove jars from canner and complete seals unless closures are self-sealing type. Makes about 10 pints.

Basic pie is four cups of mincemeat dotted with butter in a two-crust 9" pie, baked for 40-45 minutes and served warm.

My assessment of it was "apple pie with sweet relish in it," and to be honest, we didn't finish the pie. It wasn't bad, but it was… alien. The Farm Journal's subheader for it is "Decidedly different—on the tart side." I think I used apple cider vinegar, which in hindsight was not a good choice even though the following recipe, "Blue Ribbon Mincemeat," calls for cider (not cider vinegar).

I plan to pop a jar of it later to try some mincemeat cake…but for now, I'm going to crawl back into my non-blogging hole until I get over the bronchitis that's made me so "quiet" this week.

Green-tomato-and-coffee pie

2009-10-12T14:41:00.000-05:00

When life gives you green tomatoes, make…mincemeat.

I mentioned the quantity of green tomatoes I picked before the freeze, but I forgot to mention the other green tomatoes I picked: the second-generation JetStar volunteer had had a pound or two of green tomatoes on it. I picked those Friday night to take to my mother-in-law's neighbor (the one who grew up in That House two doors down the street) so she could make green-tomato pie.

That left me with over six pounds of green tomatoes, so I decided to look into this green-tomato pie thing. Mom's Farm Journal pie book had a recipe, but next to it was one that called for six, yes, six pounds of green tomatoes:

Mincemeat.

I have only encountered mincemeat in figures of speech before, but I couldn't turn down something that called for exactly the amount of tomatoes I had, right? So my trip to the store today involved picking up some raisins and a lemon, the only ingredients I didn't have. But this is one of those recipes that seems incredibly unlikely. I can buy into the green tomatoes, and the apples, and the lemon juice, and the raisins, and the vinegar…but who decided to put coffee in their pie? Coffee? I was beginning to wonder if this wasn't Farm Journal's idea of a joke played on us city folk.

If it is, I'm playing along. Real farm wives don't have to process eight pounds of tomatoes and apples in a two-cup food processor, though. But my little Kitchenaid chopper survived, and the mixture is simmering now—minus the brown sugar. I'll split the batch and put Splenda in some of it. I have to say, it started out smelling like some kind of weird spiced coffee (allspice, nutmeg and vinegar, yum!), and then the green tomatoes and Granny Smiths (Grannies Smith?) made it look like some kind of mutant guacamole, but it's all mellowing together now in both smell and appearance.

It's supposed to make ten pints, which is enough for five pies. Assuming I bake two pies (one sugary, one sugarless), that leaves six jars, which is one load in my mother-in-law's canning thingummy (technical city-folk term there), so I might actually borrow that and try it…provided we like the first pie, anyway. (Coffee?!)

The end of the garden

2009-10-11T15:00:00.074-05:00

The first frost date in Wichita is usually a whole lot later than October 10, but this year we got a cold front early and expected to get a frost or killing freeze last night. Didn't quite happen (I think the low ended up 34), but it's been unseasonably cold long enough that the tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers have mostly given up already. Between that and the July hailstorm, I had a pretty short summer growing season.

I just picked six or seven pounds of green Roma tomatoes off two plants. I think I got half a dozen ripe ones all told. There were a few green JetStars, and that was it.

The strawberries survived being overgrown by the Romas, and I just mulched them for the winter. They've thrown out a few runners, but it'll still be a year or two more before they fill that square and I start harvesting berries.

The green beans did remarkably well, considering I didn't plant any this year. I got volunteers that took over the north fence, from the overripe pods that I missed last fall. I tore those vines apart yesterday, getting the last couple pounds of beans off them.

I've also been invited to help myself to the neighbor's Purple Hyacinth Beans, which they've grown as an ornamental. My scarlet runners didn't do well (only one sprouted, and it died in the hailstorm), so next year I'll try the purple out front. They're technically an edible-pod bean, though I gather they're not the best-flavored, and like most purple beans the color fades when they're cooked.

The Marketer cucumbers recovered from the hail, and I got plenty to give away as well as a moderate amount to pickle. The Lemon cukes never showed up, or if they did they cross-pollinated with the Marketers and came out the usual shape and color. Next year I may consider Lemons only.

The spring/summer cabbages did well. I got Early Dutch instead of (IIRC) Stonehead, and between that and this year's more reasonable rainfall, got much larger heads without splitting.

The Malabar spinach has done impressively well after a very slow start. It sprouted well after I'd given up on it, and almost uprooted the first few assuming they were from windblown weed seeds. It loves heat, so I expected it to have wilted like the cucumbers well before the actual frost date. Instead, it's hung on enthusiastically even through the mid-30's nights. It's just starting to bud, so maybe I'll see flowers, or even some seed to save.

The sweet potatoes are the one thing I'm worried about. Poking around turned up a potato just a few inches long, and the vines are very frost-tender, so if they don't survive awhile longer I'm not sure I'll get anything out of them. Fortunately, they're easy to throw plastic over. They're not really suited to small raised beds, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try them this year.

I replanted zucchini and summer squash after the hail, next to the winter box where I'd spilled a fair amount of Mel's Mix and figured, why let good growing medium go to waste? While only the summer squash came up, for a wonder it didn't get eaten by squash vine borers this year (perhaps the ducks are doing their job?) I got enough of that to give away without making everyone run in fear, and like the Malabar it has thrived even in the much cooler weather, so I might get some more yet.

The potatoes did moderately well though they didn't set fruit in the compost piled on top of them, only in the box itself. I think that's because the duck bedding (cedar shavings) wasn't dense enough to trigger the "roots" that carry the potatoes. I put in some peat moss, but I think that was a bit late to trigger anything. I also lost a bit to what I suspect was late blight, so maybe next year I'll skip potatoes or plant them only in fresh beds.

The Hungarian Wax ("Mr. Pepper-Nose") Pepper and the "Fooled You" heatless jalapeño are in pots. The former came indoors, the latter will get left to the elements. The bell peppers fought back after the hail, and I have a couple of smallish peppers that might possibly get big enough to harvest, though I seriously doubt I'll learn whether the survivors were red or yellow peppers.

The fennel is also in a pot. It's supposedly Florence fennel, but as far as I can tell it hasn't even considered formed a bulb. Maybe this is because the black swallowtail caterpillars kept eating its leaves, I don't know, but I suspect it's actually the wrong kind of fennel. It's inside, sharing a pot with parsley (which was supposed to give the butterflies something other than fennel to eat).

The cherry tomato was in a pot, which came indoors but only because of the Swiss Chard that's finally coming up in that pot (after I gave up on it and planted the cherry tomato seedling in with it). There's more chard in the winter frame.

Also coming indoors briefly is the worm bin. I wasn't sure how the worms were doing, since they don't care for temperatures below 40. I opened the bin to take a look…and discovered it was full of water. Oops. Not quite full, though, and the couple inches of mulch above water level were absolutely swarming with very active worms. Whew. I drained the water, and brought the thing in, but it's going back outside as soon as the weather gets above freezing. A worm bin is supposed to have aerobic decomposition, which isn't smelly. Underwater, the anaerobic bacteria take over, and they stink—stick your head inside a restaurant Dumpster to get an idea. Once it dries out a little and the anaerobic bacteria die off it'll be fine again, but in the meantime the worms will just have to be chilly. Hopefully things will warm up enough and I'll feel healthy enough to dump the bin and sort out the finished compost to top-dress the empty frames.

Overall, a pretty good season considering the amount of neglect that went into it. I'm probably going to revisit the allergist as soon as our insurance rolls over. I love the veggies, but it's not worth being half-sick all summer. If it turns out to be the garden, I guess I'll have take up hydroponics or something.

Going to Abilene

2009-10-10T19:30:00.000-05:00

There's a saying in our household that comes from a training session Carl went through at the aircraft plant: "Are we just going to Abilene?" I should have Carl explain it properly, but in the example, a group went to Abilene because everybody thought everybody else wanted to go.

See, I ended up going to the State Fair this year only after it was over, because we were all round-robining various sinus infections and the like and didn't get to the Fair proper. I was picking up my mother-in-law's entries (her scrapbook of her dad's WWII memorabilia took second place), and while I was in Hutchinson I decided to swing by some of the antique stores there. I think I ended up in just one, plus the Ten Thousand Villages/Et Cetera Shop combo, but while I was there I scored a nifty little purple china salt dip for MIL's collection. (Or her eBay store; anything she already has enough of goes there. But I think that one's a keeper.)

When I told my mother this, she asked why I hadn't invited her along. One, because I didn't know she was interested in antiquing, and two, because I kinda only went antiquing on the spur of the moment; wasn't sure stores would be open on Mondays, especially Monday-after-the-Fair when I think all Hutchinson doesn't want to see another tourist ever again. But, we decided, we'd plan to do that together sometime soon. So this week, I invited her to go to Abilene. I mean, Hutchinson.

The night before, somehow or other we managed to figure out that she was chiefly going antiquing because she thought I wanted to. I like doing it, but I pretty much only go because my mother-in-law does; my interests are narrow enough to make it more of a museum visit for me. However, my mother is on a bit of a scavenger hunt for a particular kind of bud vase, one that turns up in thrift stores instead of antique stores. So after some discussion, we decided to go on a thrifting road trip instead. She'd exhausted all the Wichita thrift stores' supplies of this type of bud vase, so we headed out of town.

First up was Newton, where we hit the Salvation Army store and promptly scored four bud vases. (Her friend needs sixty.) Next up was the Et Cetera store, where we found zero bud vases, but scored a singularly awesome find which I can't talk about because it's for my sister (hi Sis) who reads this blog but never comments, same as Mom (hi Mom). I also introduced Mom to Ten Thousand Villages, where I failed to convince her to buy more giraffes, and the office supply store, which is a much more interesting place than it sounds.

Then we zoomed out 50 to Hutch, where we hit the Anchor Inn for lunch. It's a pretty famous Mexican buffet that we'd never been to. It was good, but we were not sure it deserves the fame. It was next door to the Salvation Army (zero bud vases) and catty-corner to the Apron Strings kitchen store (zero bud vases), where I spent too much money but I now have an industrial-strength apple wedger. We wear those things out fast.

On the fourth corner of that intersection are antique stores: zero bud vases, but some cool Victrolas and such. Then it was back to the Salvation Army store since my sister (hi Sis) returned Mom's phone call and told us yes, she wanted the punch bowl we'd seen there. (She'd wanted to borrow Mom's, which just got sold in the garage sale. Oops.) No bud vases had shown up while we were gone, nor had the punch bowl been sold. We drove around a bit looking for the Goodwill store, but since I hadn't brought the phone book and we'd taken my car instead of Mom's with the GPS, we were kind of blindly looking and didn't find it.

After that, we headed home, this time through Yoder. We didn't stop, since Mom was worn out and pretty much the only place worth stopping in anymore is the quilt shop. It replaced the little consignment-booth craft shop that I think was the last surviving source of made-in-Yoder things (discounting the quilts at the Carriage Crossing Restaurant entrance, which are out of my price range). I did stop there on my post-Fair trip, though there again, I can't say what I got since it might be Christmas presents, on the off chance I get around to doing some sewing before then.

So yeah, we basically could have hit the Newton Salvation Army and come straight home, and saved a whole bunch of time. But hey, that's the adventure of thrifting.

Oh, and the funny thing about "going to Abilene" in this case is that the real Abilene (specifically, the Kansas one) is one of the places I go antiquing, and I almost invited Mom there instead of Hutch in the first place.

Cow in my driveway

2009-10-05T20:23:00.001-05:00

Mother-in-law and I made a road trip to Grenola, Kansas, this morning, and came home with a very large passenger.

Seven hundred and sixty-four pounds large, to be specific. Of course, it had gained weight since that picture and was over 1,100 pounds, but it's lost weight since then. Yep, we got a side of beef for the Freezer Of Dooooom. But not exactly.

See, there were supposed to be three cattle. A whole one for my mother-in-law, a whole one for her brother (who's doing the raising), and one to split between us and her brother's daughter. But one calf died, so we ended up with a "third of a cow"—we split one with my mother-in-law, her brother split one with his daughter.

I assumed MIL knew the way to the processor; it was down near her brother's place in Elk Falls. Turns out she didn't, quite, so we got to Grenola, Kansas by way of Winfield, and what I thought were pretty back-country roads. I busted out the map after she missed the turn for 160.

We made it to Grenola, after which we followed signs to Family Tree… and left the pavement for some real back-country roads. Two-lane gravel became one-and-a-half-lane gravel, and we were there. They helped us load up bags upon bags of frozen beef, and advised us to "drive slow" on the way out so the van didn't bottom out. The road isn't quite that bad, and the van wasn't quite that overladen, but we took it easy.

We stopped at the 160 Cafe in Burden, beef and all, and had an early lunch. MIL had a hamburger (to my amusement; we had a couple hundred in the van, and she had already said she'd taken some Schwan's burgers out to thaw for dinner), I had a chicken-fried steak sandwich. We then wished we had our cameras, since her burger looked like it was surely a full pound, and my steak was about twice the size of the bun. And her "homemade fries" were probably two large potatoes' worth. (The menu, also to our amusement, lists "frozen fries" as an option, apparently for those sad souls who dislike potato skin so much they'll skip homemade fries.)

We managed to take the correct route home, and pulled into my driveway to divvy up the beef. I pulled out laundry baskets and we sorted beef right out of the back of the van, two for her, one for me, until we had bags of beef all over the yard. The neighbors, by now, have learned to ignore our crazy antics, so this drew no attention beyond perhaps a muttered "at least they're not slaughtering it there." Then it was time to heft approximately 509 pounds of it back into the van, and approximately 255 pounds of it into my house, the latter to the delight of Baxter the dachshund, who almost dove into the bag of fat scraps. I barricaded myself in the kitchen and sorted beef, then lugged it down to the Freezer Of Doooom (henceforth FOD), and managed to make it all fit.

Then I came back upstairs and realized I'd left one bag: the frozen fat scraps, which was frozen into a block the size of one of their freezer trays, and that unless I took everything back out of the FOD and removed some of the dividers and baskets, it wasn't going in the FOD no way, no how.

That was all the excuse I needed to toss it in the van and head up to help MIL unload hers…where I happily discovered my husband's brother had already shown up and loaded all the beef. My tray of fat went into one of her several freezers nicely.

So now, aside from a lot of fat (some of which will get rendered down for soap and suet), I have quite a few cow parts I don't normally buy at the butcher shop, which will make for some interesting adventures in cooking. Kidneys (steak and kidney pie!), heart, and tongue.

Yes. Tongue. Be glad I can't figure out why the camera's not transferring to the PC, because otherwise I would take pictures of this lovely frozen cow tongue, which will undoubtedly traumatize my son if he sees it, and probably some of my readers. Because it's unmistakeably a tongue.

Frozen. Cow. Tongue.

And now you're all hoping I'll go back to monthly posting, if not less often, right?

So now we're blogging monthly?

2009-09-30T20:18:00.001-05:00

How did that happen?

And how is it that our house isn't painted, if I haven't been wasting time blogging?

It's not been for lack of blogging possibilities. I could blog on the ducks' molting. Or on the garden's decision to make up for time lost to the hail storm. Or on the dining room "remodel." And the neighborhood association work could be a blog of its own.

I'll probably recap some of those, once I get around to taking pictures off the camera. But for now, I'll just say I'm not dead (yet), and hopefully I'll have some exterior progress to blog about in October.

And now, back to the interior

2009-08-26T11:46:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I took a much-needed break from the worst-cases, and went with my mother-in-law and her (visiting from Arizona) mother-in-law, to a large antique mall here in town.

I'm not so much of an antique shopper, myself. I collected Degenhart glass as a kid, but since the theory was I'd sell after Mrs. Degenhart died (1978; yes, I just dated myself) I just look at prices nowadays. I do "collect" vintage kitchen stuff but only for using, so garage sales and thrift stores are better for that.

So I came home with very little—an umbrella, of uncertain vintage but quite functional, and with a faux-ivory duck handle. A couple of books: two former Wichita-schools textbooks, Early Days in Kansas by Bliss Isely, and a little primer that I'll say no more on since it's a gift.

I've changed my mind on my favorite treasure, though. The duckbrella held first place until I got the pair of Weave-It looms home. I'd seen them and related projects on eLoomaNation awhile back, and thought "hey, someone on the Internet can make use of these." Then I opened them up for closer inspection, and I think I might need to keep them myself. I've been thinking about hanging out at yarn-shop-and-neighborhood-meeting-place Twist, but I neither knit nor crochet, and unlike needlefelting the little looms would give me an excuse to buy (small quantities of high-quality) yarns. Admittedly, the needlefelting turns Stitch-n-Bitch into Stab-n-Bitch, which amuses me no end, and weaving doesn't.

These are the original gray-box looms, 2" and 4" sizes, and they seem to do very well on eBay when I get tired of them. The instructions, original needles, and even the original yarns are still in them. The yarns are out of their bands (which are neatly folded in the bottom of the box) and partly made into an unfinished project: there's one baby-bootie from each, large and small (even the large is likely doll-sized), and one unsewn set of squares for the other part of the pair. (Yes, I did just publicly admit to purchasing yet another UFO*.) I will totally have to get pictures into my Flickr stream (and backported into this entry) when I figure out how to make the camera work here.

* Un-Finished Object.

Worst case situation

2009-08-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

We have our preliminary quotes all in, and we're adding up all the money. One quote I think I mentioned was worst-case: the wood siding unsalvageable, everything replaced from the framing out. The grand total:

$41,826.93

Um. Yes, won't be going for that anytime soon. But that's practically a new house: roof, siding, windows (don't worry, just two of the three non-original ones, and those replaced with custom wood ones), new back door, all the damaged trim rebuilt, the storms all removed and cleaned, the windows all reglazed…everything. Well, almost: we're keeping the faux-wrought-iron porch rails for now, on the ain't-broke theory. And the aluminum storms, though we'll be removing them to properly paint under them, in case someday they get replaced with wooden ones.

That total includes the roof that's already done, though, and I spent much of this week on the phone with the mortgage company arranging to spend our joint insurance check. The paperwork and phone calls are a full-time job, never mind actually doing work on the house.

So we're looking at out-of-pocket costs somewhere around $10,000, with the insurance company covering almost that much again. Still a good chunk of change, but not "we could buy a new house for that!" level. Yet.

Duck lifespans

2009-08-18T09:25:00.000-05:00

My mother remarked that our ducks would die of old age before we ate them, and asked how long they lived. I looked it up: average 9 years, as long as 20. She was surprised, and I said they didn't normally die of old age (either in the wild or captivity). I said no, we'd get rid of these when they stopped laying, though we might not be the ones that ate them.

So she sent me this:

Perseids

2009-08-14T13:38:00.000-05:00

Partway home from Worlds of Fun on Wednesday, we pulled off the interstate at one of those fun little exits that's for a town a mile or more away, via gravel road, because it was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. We turned the car around, turned off all its lights, hopped out and looked at the sky. We almost immediately saw a pretty impressive fireball, and a second a little while later. And the Milky Way, and a bajillion stars that we can't see from the middle of Wichita.

There's something a bit spooky about standing on a strange road in near-pitch darkness (we were still close enough to get some city glow from KC on the northeast horizon), and after a fairly short while the kiddo decided he'd had enough of stars, shooting or otherwise, he wanted to get back in the car. I did too, especially when a big pickup rolled up from the interstate and turned onto the side road we'd chosen. And, of course, stopped and rolled his window down, on seeing a little car pulled over on the shoulder, with a mom and kid in the cabin and dad leaning on the fender with his arms folded. Did we need help?

Well, no, we're just city folks taking advantage of your relative lack of light pollution out here, thanks.

Reliving my youth

2009-08-13T11:57:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different…

We took the kiddo up to Worlds of Fun (KC theme park, for you non-locals) for the first time yesterday. Kiddo had never ridden a real roller coaster before. Now he's a veteran.

For some reason, the first one we got on was the Boomerang, which is hands-down my least favorite coaster in the world, so much so that I'd never ridden it before. It's a simple pull-back-and-launch shuttle coaster with one simple loop, one slightly complicated one. Neat on the forward trip, not so much on the backward one (which is my gripe with all shuttle coasters).

Kiddo tolerated it about as well as I did (especially considering he'd ridden the barrel-o-puke Finnish Fling first and I hadn't), which was well enough to head onward. After lunch, we hit the Timber Wolf, which is a pretty good wooden coaster, which is my preferred type. He came off that one raving about it, and we went around and got right back on. (Hurrah for mid-week end-of-summer visits, and almost no waiting on anything.)

He rode the Mamba, which is a very intense steel coaster, with less success…it's a long ride, and he was pretty much "done now!" about two-thirds of the way through, and just when he thought it was over the last hard right coming into the station whacked his head on the corner of the car. Foam rubber, but very hard foam, and he worried us (and the ride attendants) a little since it caught him on the temple. Turned out it hit bone, though, just at the edge of his eyebrow. Fifteen minutes later, tears were dry and he was raring to go.

We worked our way across the park, and kiddo and Carl stood in line for Spinning Dragons. Which had a maintenance problem just before they got on, so we walked back across the park and rode the Prowler, which is a rowdy little wooden coaster that's new this year. We all liked that one a lot…it's well-designed, and does a lot of unexpected dipping and twisting, without being as rough as Timber Wolf (give it a few years and some settling, maybe).

Spinning Dragons reopened, and that was our last ride of the day despite the kiddo's pestering. Weird little coaster with, as the name suggests, spinning cars that mean you spend a lot of time looking down with no track under you, and a lot of time going unpredictably sideways or backwards. (I miss my Zambezi Zinger.)

Kiddo was disappointed to find out he was too short for the Patriot, and he scorned the kiddie coaster in Camp Snoopy, but otherwise he hit every one in the park.

In hindsight, we decided we should have arrived later and stayed later, so as to get the benefit of seeing the place after dark. In particular, the Prowler runs through the trees and is supposedly almost unlit, which would be cool to ride. As it was we rolled back into town at midnight, after being treated to the kiddo belting out Miley Cyrus and Go-Go's tunes from the backseat before falling asleep. We'll leave the park-after-dark thing for a future trip.

When it rains, it pours.

2009-08-11T16:46:00.000-05:00

No sooner had I written the last post (yes, two in a day) than I had another visitor: a painter. I spoke too soon about the ducks: they spook real good when someone with a ball cap enters their yard.

He inspected our ratty rafter tails, and our rotted window sills, and pronounced this a job for one of his subcontractors. Said subcontractor was working a job not far away, so he took a break, came over in his ball cap and spooked the ducks, and we all looked over the house.

Subcontractor wanted to cut all the rafter tails off even, which I vetoed…it's a mighty plain bungalow, and pointy rafter tails are one of its few extravagances. After I whipped out Bungalow Details: Exterior and pointed out some of the ridiculously overdone rafter-tail shapes that are out there, they agreed that perhaps my simple pointy ones are worth saving. The ones on the corners of the porch are, of course, already hacked off (and will stay that way for now), but the little ones on the dormer that are present but rotting out will get rebuilt.

Painter and I pulled up chunks of siding and underlayment and peeked at the wood underneath. There is so little paint left on it that it's not going to need any scraping or sanding (and thus lead-abatement stuff), the primer will just go on over and encapsulate it all. And there's not a trace of rot evident in any of the expected problem spots. It sounds satisfactorily solid when you tap on it. Best of all: painter loves old houses (his dates to 1923).

My excitement will probably abate when the quotes come in, but for now, I and my giant books of paint chips are very happy.

Fancy butt shingles

2009-08-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

The ducks are getting very tolerant of strangers in their yard. It's a regular thing these days.

Last night, I went and got Bungalow Details: Exterior out of the library again… I own Bungalow Details: Interior because we were planning to get that done first, but of course it's not working out that way.

It's not been very helpful for a change. Bungalow exteriors are amazingly variable, so everything is touched on very lightly. "Everything" is everything from stucco to wood to brick to stone to crushed beer bottles. And shingles, of which we have some, though I'm kind of disappointed we don't have fancy-butt shingles, because that's fun to say. (It refers to the shingles with shaped ends: octagonal, fish-scale, and so on.) Ours aren't even staggered.

One thing it does tell me: wood siding on bungalows doesn't have to be narrow planks. Our vinyl is 4", while our wood is 3" and the dormer has 2" (all referring to visible width, since that's all there is with vinyl and I don't think even modern plank siding is 2x visible width). HardiePlank comes in 4" only, which means we either won't match the back, or we replace the back even though it's in good shape. Or we install the stuff at 3" overlap and use more of it and (probably) void its warranty.

I happen to like the look of the narrower siding, if only because it clearly says, "In your face, suckers, this ain't no modern vinyl!" But they (literally, unless we custom-mill it for big bucks) don't make it like that anymore.

I learned all this about HardiePlank this morning because the first remodelers have been out, clucked at the hopelessness of the big picture window (expected) and the back window unit (unexpected, but I imagine I'll talk them into salvaging it; it's not exactly original, but it's still old), took notes on all the wood that needs replaced, and will be giving me various quotes.

One will be on repairing the windows and taking off the vinyl. Another will be worst-case, assuming the wood is 100% unsalvageable, and on replacing everything rafters-down with fiber-cement, house and garage. (Anyone care to place bets on whether that will be higher than what we paid for the house?) No in-between quotes, the problem being that that's kind of up in the air until the vinyl (and backer) is off it.

And therein lies the big complication. Once that comes off, the clock is ticking. They'd strongly recommend taking it off one wall at a time, and restoring that wall before taking off the next one, which means they need to give an estimate and we need to make a decision pretty much on the spot. Hence the worst-case estimate, so we know what range we're looking at beforehand.

It's not as bad as it could be. The front dormer is fine (other than the panes needing reglazed), and the only other "front" is under the porch, so no weathering to speak of there. The back is already wood, in good shape. The north is sheltered and likely to be in good shape, though we'll want to spot-check it for rot.

That leaves the south, which is the most weathered (our "truth window" faces south), and also involves the most reconstruction (since we almost certainly have had drastic window changes in the living room, likely to leave us with spots with no historical siding). So it's likely we'll have a vinyl-tearing-off party, but leave three walls of underlayment to the pros either way.

It'll be about a week for the estimate (they're kinda backlogged), so in the meantime I need to talk to the painter, in hopes we have a best-case situation.

Dill, fennel, and vinyl

2009-08-09T11:49:00.000-05:00

I should have planted dill. I have plenty of cucumbers, and they're dual-purpose since I planned from the start to pickle some. I'm out of dill seeds, though, even if it'd grow in time. Storebought pickling mix it is, then.

I went out this morning and discovered one of the two main branches of my only other herb, fennel, was stripped completely of leaves. The culprit, a big fat caterpillar, was starting in on the second. Closer examination revealed it wasn't a monarch, as I thought at first, so I looked it up on the Internet: black swallowtail. Neat!

Turns out there were five of them, in varying sizes. My fennel won't support that kind of population, so we might have to go shopping for some parsley and such and see if we can take them into school next week…or go track down some Queen-Anne's-Lace to deposit them on. The fennel will recover; it's bulb fennel, and seems to decide to shed and regrow its leaves spontaneously anyway.

The big one is about ready to pupate, though, so I'm hoping he will soon. I touched him and he stuck his "tongue" out at us—they have bright yellow-orange forked thingies that they extrude with slimy stuff on to discourage predators. It's supposedly stinky, but we weren't close enough to tell.

Meanwhile, I finally got to talk to one of the remodelers, and they'll be out on Tuesday morning to give us an estimate. The problem is, they really can't give us an estimate on restoring the wood until they've had a look at it, which means tearing off the vinyl. Which means then we need to get things going ASAP. If we don't do the vinyl ourselves beforehand, they'll mostly be able to give us an estimate this time on the windowsills and taking down the vinyl, and (probably) an estimate on replacing the whole thing with fiber cement. So tomorrow I'll talk to the painter, and perhaps invest in a home lead test kit just to get an idea of what we're looking at. Oh, and the mortgage company, to see how cooperative they're going to be about dealing with this joint check.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature

2009-07-31T20:12:00.000-05:00

The last week or so, I've been fighting hay fever like I haven't had in years (since I got allergy treatments after the kiddo was born). I finally broke down yesterday and added a decongestant to the antihistamine. Woo, I could breathe again!

So feeling all invincible and stuff, I did some long-needed garden maintenance—the gardens are relatively weed-free, but the pathways and fences where the lawnmower can't get are kind of out of control, what with the rain. I uprooted crabgrass (the only kind of grass we have out there, I think), mulched the paths and under the fence, and got about a quarter of the way through before deciding my back had had enough. And my nose didn't run at all.

Until, that is, about two o'clock this morning, when I sneezed myself (and the rest of the household) awake. Oops.

Today I stayed inside, mostly, and played phone-tag with (wood-)siding people and my insurance adjuster. (No new news there.) Except for changing the duck-pool water. Oh, and as long as I'm watering them, training the cucumbers (which are recovering amazingly well) on the trellis. And, uh, permanently planting the strawberries. And pulling some crabgrass. And digging up the last of the garlic.

I'm hoping Mother Nature won't notice. I did, after all, stop short of digging up the potatoes, though one box seems to be ready. That's gotta count for something, right?

"No, would take too long. Let me sum up."

2009-07-28T16:42:00.000-05:00

I was 99% of the way through a long post last week when my computer (more correctly, its WinXP install) up and died. Blogger saves the post as a draft, but I forgot it hadn't actually been posted.

Then I went to make another post, reread the blog, and picked up where I appeared to have left off. I was having deja vu the whole time I was typing, but I've written so many emails about it I kept dismissing it. 80% of the way through it, I thought to go check the drafts folder, and there was my post.

So now I have two drafts, one of which is halfway a followup to the other and halfway a replacement for it, so I think I'm going to scrap them all and just sum them up:

We have a new roof, a lovely shade of brown. (I have pictures, but they're in the camera until I get the camera software on the new computer.)

We have a "totalled" car (in the sense that the small but extensive hail dings will cost too much to fix), and a surprisingly big check for the non-totalling damage on the van, which we probably won't get fixed since we have an interested buyer. Now if we can just find a hail-totalled truck…

We also have settlement paperwork and a medium-sized check (relatively speaking) for the house. Now I just have the headache of figuring out how to "fix" the siding (and what to do about the probability of lead paint being involved), and then how to turn a check for everything made out to us and the mortgage company into a check for the roofer and a check for the siding-fixer.

Harrumph. I think if the mortgage company expects a piece of this check, they need to share in the hassle of getting it spent.

All I want for Christmas is a new paint scheme?

2009-07-23T11:04:00.000-05:00

I found the company I want to have do the siding, but there's a problem: part of the thing that makes me want to use them also means they can't do the job.

See, I called the company that's doing our roof, the one that does non-vinyl siding, and asked if they did old-house siding and window repair/restoration. Oh yes, they do. But (there's always a "but," isn't there?) they're so swamped right now they're focusing on roofs.

…For the next six months.

I love that they're not hiring a bunch of fly-by-night subcontractors to grab as much business as they can, and that makes me really want to use them. But I just don't think we can wait until Christmas to get the siding/trim done. Yikes.

I guess we're a preferred customer, though, since it's been just over two years since the last roof replacement (I wonder if they have a subscription plan?). We're not waiting six months: they delivered the shingles today, and the crew comes out bright and early tomorrow morning. I need to take some "before" pictures since it won't be "white house, gray roof" for long. Hopefully it won't be "white house, brown roof" for long either. Six months? Wow.

The story the siding failed to tell

2009-07-21T17:17:00.000-05:00

You may recall that the roofing estimator said, "I guess your siding tells the story." There's a bit it failed to tell him, though.

Today, in between my other errands, I stopped by the local HardieShingle dealer. The verdict there: expensive, but not as bad as I'd feared. Good to know, but we still haven't gotten the insurance estimate, so I didn't exactly ask them to load up the car yet.

I did, however, ask if the dealer installed it. They don't, but he pulled up the list of contractors on their website and pointed out there was a siding-installer section (which I knew), and pointed out that Star does not sell *snort of disdain* vinyl siding (which I did NOT know). Ergo, I can call up any of the folks on that list and know that they install real siding (for various values of "real"). Some of them are bound to know old construction.

One of the companies on that list…is the company whose estimator I quoted above. I guess he missed where I mentioned we were looking at yoinking the vinyl off, since he didn't mention that his company did that sort of thing (I did say, back in the comments, that roofers are a different breed from the hard-sell vinyl siding guys).

So tomorrow when I hopefully have the insurance estimate in hand, I'll call to tell them we're ready to sign a roofing contract (which, incidentally, only requires one of us), and for them to come back out and look at the siding. The real siding.

I'm already collecting palette ideas. Here's a couple of tiles, from the wall of the classroom at Wichita Pottery.

The color scheme is perhaps a bit edgy, for a bungalow, but we're not obsessive restorationists. And any turquoise would be very minimal, I think.

Truth window

2009-07-18T12:45:00.000-05:00

There's a tradition, in strawbale construction, to leave a "truth window." The straw bales are left visible (usually behind glass) in one place, to demonstrate the structure of the wall.

Among other bits of storm damage, we had some intermittent problems with our DSL, and the AT&T guy came out and replaced quite a bit of stuff, both on the pole and the side of the house. He moved our demarc point from the rear addition to the side, around the inside corner on the back. In the process, he left us a truth window of a different sort. The old box was there when the siding was put on, and as with other details the siding guys went around it:

Aside from being really, really dirty, it's certainly in need of repainting, and based on this and some of the exposed parts of the back, the wood is pretty weathered. We have some work ahead of us. Hopefully the insurance settlement will go a good ways toward paying it done.

The estimator just left, so we'll get the paperwork back in a few days. The roofing estimate looks good and we can sign a contract there. Siding guys are, I think, still trying to figure out this insurance thing. That's okay, I don't think we'll need them.

I wonder if there's a secret handshake?

2009-07-16T17:16:00.004-05:00

I got a call from the siding folks today, wondering when they could reschedule the appointment since my husband wasn't there last time.

Oh, he was there, I informed her, he was just busy, and there didn't really seem to be any need for him.

She told me they "like to have both spouses there in case there are questions." Uh, questions? There aren't any questions. We have a house with holes in it. We need a house without holes in it. Easy-peasy! For a starting point, we need a house with the exact same siding setup, and if that doesn't agree with what the insurance company is willing to pay, we stop there. No questions asked.

She persisted. Really needed both of us. I finally said "You can't just mail us an estimate? The roofers didn't seem to have any trouble with that." (Actually, now that I think about it, this time the roofers printed it right from their truck. Details, details.) She didn't quite commit to doing that. Apparently there's some secret rule of How To Buy Siding that I'm not going along with. They get great reviews, perfectly good BBB rating, they're a local company, so as far as I can tell it's not any kind of scam. I'm just not carrying out my side of the process properly somehow, because (as she reminded me a couple times) this estimate is free. I think that was a secret code word for something, but I didn't know the countersign. NOBODY TOLD ME THE VINYL-SIDING COUNTERSIGN, OKAY?

Oh, wait. I bet I'm supposed to get that from the insurance adjustor on Saturday. I'll ask her for it and report back.

Unless I'm sworn to secrecy.