Birthday Cup - April 28, 2023

Well, that was something of a flop.  :-\

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was culling fabric and dishes and such?

I had loaded my car with boxes of dishes and other things to donate.  When The Husband came home and discovered I had emptied his grandmother's china cabinet, he worried that I had included his great-grandmother's "pepper sauce bottle" in the donation box.  We went out to my car to search the boxes.  Sure enough, the pepper sauce bottle was there, along with a set of six black coffee mugs that had taken up way too much space in the cabinet.  The Husband tried to snag one of the mugs, but I wouldn't let him.

Fast forward a few days.  I opened the dishwasher, and there was one of the black coffee mugs.

I thought, You rascal!  You sneaked a mug, after all!  I'll fix you!  I started to throw the mug in the garbage can . . . then I had a better idea;  I'd give it to him for his birthday.  I hid the mug.

I expected The Husband to notice that the mug was gone and say something about it, but he didn't.  

This morning was the big reveal.  There was a tense moment or two when I could not find the mug, but it finally turned up.  I washed it, put a "Happy Birthday!" sticky note on it, put it in the cabinet, and waited for The Husband to wake up and go to the cabinet for a coffee cup.  

He went straight for the cabinet, as usual.  I heard him pour his coffee.  In a minute, he came from the kitchen with his black mug in one hand and the sticky note in the other.  He said, "Aww...you gave me a coffee mug," and sat down in his recliner and turned on the morning news.  

And that was it.

Turns out, he hadn't sneaked a mug from the car; I'd just missed the one in the dishwasher when I was culling.

Damn.  

  

The Keeper - April 25, 2023

Our house is probably cleaner than it has been in years, thanks to the flooring project.

I have never been a good housekeeper - not when it comes to the deep-down stuff, like baseboards, ceiling fans, and the tops of tall cabinets.  When the flooring work began, it had probably been three months since I'd vacuumed behind the couch.  The baseboards had grown fur in the interim.  Even behind the television cabinet, where I'd cleaned just a couple of weeks ago after Duffy the GrandCat knocked a violet off the nearby windowsill, there were cobwebs.  How could this have happened so soon???  I was ashamed for the workers to see it.

And do you know what else was everywhere?  Spider sh*t.  Seriously.  Little "dustings" of white specks in dark corners, behind heavy furniture that is not often moved.  There were even spider egg sacs on the back of the bookcase and under the extension on my sewing-machine table.  We hardly ever see a spider, and when we do, we kill it.  Yet, evidently, a bunch of them live here, undetected except for their poop.  It gives me the creeps to think about it, and I have been on a spider-hunting mission since the flooring went down.  I started with the back porch this weekend and worked my way through the house.  Everything but the beds has been turned upside-down and vacuumed, and I may get to those today.

* * * * * * * * 

Saturday, when I began the porch-cleaning project, there were still some things on the porch that belonged in the house.  Among them were four metal support pieces of my quilting frame.  We disassembled the quilting frame several years ago after I sewed through my pinky finger and got squeamish about machine quilting.  Pieces of the frame have been stashed all over the sewing room.  These four metal support pieces are big, and not easy to stash.  I have toyed with the idea of selling the frame, or giving it away, but I am no longer sure I can find all the parts.  Saturday, when I encountered them on the porch, I made a deal with myself: if the support pieces would fit in a certain corner in the sewing room, I'd keep the frame; otherwise, I'd take it to Goodwill.  

Here's what happened:

I guess I'm keeping it.  :-\

Busy weekend - April 24, 2023

It was a little chilly this weekend, but the sunshine lured us outside to work in the yard.  The Husband has a new battery-powered chainsaw, and he roamed the yard, looking for stuff to cut down.  I pulled weeds, turned the compost pile, picked up sticks from the yard.  Around noon, I decided to tackle the back porch, which was loaded down with odds-and-ends that belong in the house, a few boxes of un-used flooring, and a thick layer of dust and cobwebs and pollen on everything.  Nearly burned my vacuum clean up with sticky, cobweb-y dust.  

Granddaughters #2 and #3 spent the night with us Saturday night while their parents took Granddaughter #1 and the Little Rotten Baby to view the college campus where #1 will start school this fall.  (She wants to be a veterinarian.)  It was late afternoon when they got here.  They were stunned to see how clean the sewing room is.  #3 immediately started making plans to dirty it up again.  We fed them pizza, made them shower, and sent them to bed about 10 p.m. after promising to take them to a movie the next day.  

Sunday morning at 6:30, I woke up with #3 breathing in my face.  When I opened my eyes, she said, "Grandmama, I'm hungry."  Her dad used to do the same thing at 6:30 on a weekend morning.  I got up and cooked.  It was nearly noon when #2, the almost-teenager, rolled out of bed.

By that time, #3 was bored.  We made some bracelets, but she got bored with that, too, so I sent her outside to paint a mural on the side of my compost bin.  It wasn't long before #2 joined her at the "canvas."  

Of course, by that time, #3 was bored with painting and had the idea that we should make her a dress.

She picked out some fabric from the remaining stash (yes, I did keep a little bit of fabric).  I'd boxed up all my sewing patterns and have been riding them around in my car for a week, intending to give them away.  I hauled them back into the house and let #3 pick out a pattern.  She helped me pin and cut.  I sewed the bodice together and tried it on her.  It was too tight for her poochy little kid belly; I will have to start over.  But since movie hour was approaching, I didn't have time for that.  

The sewing room table is still junked up.  Kinda feels natural.

If it doesn't rain. . . - April 21, 2023

The Husband and I made a pact last fall (and I never let him forget it over the winter) that this year we would plant the garden earlier than we usually do.  We've had a wet spring, and it wasn't until last weekend that were able to work the soil.  We plowed and tilled but did not make up any rows or put up the tomato support system (hog wire on metal fence posts) because it was getting dark.  It rained that night, and the garden has been too wet to work ever since.  

Last night, the evening news weatherman said it was going to rain before morning.  I thought about my 50-something tomato plants that have been living on the patio table for a couple of weeks.  Should I move them to the porch?  I decided against it.  After all, if we'd planted them last weekend, they'd be out in the rain, wouldn't they?  I left them on the table but barricaded the trays with heavy stuff so that a strong wind wouldn't blow them off the table.  

When I checked them this morning, they had not blown off the table, but their water-catching trays filled up, and the little pots were about to float.  And it was still raining.  I poured off some of the water and slid the trays under the table for the day.  I'll need to dump the water again when the rain passes.  The peat pots may not survive all this soaking and jostling.  With this rain, it will be another week before we can put the plants in the ground, assuming it doesn't rain again.  We will need to re-loosen the soil, make up some rows, set the tomato stakes, and put up the support wire before we can plant.  And before we can make up the rows, we'll have to resolve this "hiller-hipper" situation.

Last week, we decided to buy our own hipper instead of borrowing Uncle Jack's every year.  This week, we investigated local options, but didn't find anything that we could load up and bring home.  Meanwhile, word traveled amongst the family that we need a row-maker, and a different uncle called with a solution: we could bolt individual discs onto a cultivator we already own, and he may even have some individual discs to donate to the experiment.

* * * * * * * * * * 

The flooring installers have finished their final little jobs, and now I have no excuse to delay putting everything back where it belongs.  The big stuff is already in place, and most of the boxes and tubs have been emptied.  Now, I'm down to the little stuff that needs to be organized and stored.  I guess that's as good a task as any for this rainy day.

I must confess that yesterday's tractoring efforts left me worse for the wear.  All the sledge-hammering and water-toting wreaked havoc on my arthritic hands and wrists.  They ached all night, and I hardly got any sleep.

This morning, The Husband decided to remove an empty bookcase from the ukulele room.  When he tilted it down, a half-smoked doobie rolled off the top and landed at his feet.

I bet I sleep tonight.  |-)

Gardening! - April 15, 2023

We made our final run to the dump today, hauling away the remnants of my purging fit.  Had almost a truck bed full of stuff.  

As soon as we came home from the dump, we went to the garden to start preparing the soil for planting.  It was just The Husband and me (Nanny was gone to the store), and he had to be on the tractor to work the levers, so guess who got the job of attaching the breaking plow to the tractor.  It took a while, but we finally got it attached, but The Husband plowed a row or two and said that something wasn't right.  We took the plow off and tried to figure out what was wrong.  The hitching spot was off center of the tractor, and we could not figure out how to correct the problem.  The whole business needed to slide 6" to the left to line up with the screwy bar thing on the back of the tractor.  We had to find big sockets and wrenches and a B.F.H.  By the time we'd gathered all that up, Nanny came home and, bless her heart, came out to help.  Nanny kept insisting that "this has got to go under there," but The Husband had other ideas about what was wrong but didn't know what to do about it.  

About 3:30, I called Son #1, who knows things about tractors.  I said, "Can you come help us put the plow on the tractor before Dad kills Nanny and me."  He was at work, but said he'd be there about 5:30.  

I lured Nanny away from the tractor by suggesting we work on the fire ant hills in her yard.  They have popped up everywhere for the past couple of years.  An exterminator comes and sprays the mounds, but the ants just open up shop somewhere else.  Nanny has bought some granulated stuff that's supposed to kill everything, including the queen.  I told her I'd do the dirty work if she'd show me where the new mounds are.  It worked like a charm, but I regretted it once I saw what we were getting into.  There were a couple of mounds in her back yard, and several more up that l-o-n-g driveway.  The granules were to be sprinkled on the mound and then wet with a gentle sprinkle of at least a gallon of water.  Of course, the mounds were nowhere near a water hose.  I came home and got my 1.5-gallon watering can that has a sprinkler nozzle and took it back to Nanny's and went to work on the ant mounds.  

Son #1 arrived before we finished with the ants.  He figured out what was wrong with the plow, and fixed it, and hung around long enough to swap the breaking plow for the disk, and then swap the disk for the tiller.  By 7:30, the garden was tilled.  By then, I was so tired and hungry that I didn't even think about driving the tomato fence posts into the ground.  

We need a hiller/hipper/row-maker-thing.  Uncle Jack lets us borrow his, says there's no point in spending money on something we only need once a year.  But if we'd had one on the premises this evening, we could've made up the rows and been ready to plant tomorrow.

(Now that I think about it, I do believe that the big black tiller has an attachment that will make rows.  The last time I tried to use it, I gave up after one row.)

Anyway, we couldn't plant tomorrow if we had rows, because it's raining now - storming actually.

Tomorrow, I'm going down to the garden to see where the water is standing.  I've dumped loads of shredded leaves and tiny wood chips in the low spot, and The Husband plowed them in today.  I do not expect that my piddly efforts will amount to much, considering the size of the garden.  But I guess every little bit helps.  Meanwhile, I'll do the smart thing this year, and not plant anything in that end of the garden until the monsoon season is over.

Flooring Done - April 14, 2023

At 11:34 a.m. today, the flooring installer stepped out on the back porch where I was working and said they were finished. Four days.  But.

They've got to come back and do some trim work - not a lot, just a few places.  The main dude is out of town and won't be back until Wednesday, but we've been able to put most everything back where it goes.  

We put the office back together last night.  I had spent the whole day throwing away things that have been living in that closet for years.  I pared SIX big tubs down to TWO, and FIVE stackable drawer units down to TWO.  This left enough room on the closet floor for the Marshall amp (that doesn't even belong to us) and a stackable drawer unit or two for all The Husband's ukulele knick-knacks and music.

We expected to have extra room in the office because I have donated literally two car-loads of books (and some besides).  Yet, when we moved the "keeper" books back to the shelves, they still filled up three bookshelves, with little room left over for pictures and my three bobbleheads (Shakespeare, RBG, and Bob Ross).  

This morning, I tackled the boxes in our bedroom - knick-knacky, dust-coated stuff, mostly.  Some of that went in the garbage.  But there were family pictures mixed in with every box, and it took about an hour to gather them all up and go through them.  Next, I went to work on the shelf in the office closet.  It was piled to the ceiling.  I didn't know what to pull out first for fear of an avalanche.

Some of what was up there went to a burn pile.  

But, y'all. . . the front bedroom. . . that's where all the stuff is that came out of the sewing/craft/office room.  I've been hauling boxes out of there all afternoon.  I was hoping to have left-over space in the craft room, but it's not looking too promising.

Addendum:

8:30 p.m. - The craft room was shameful.  Shameful.  I vacuumed the walls, washed the curtains, dusted.  The machines are all back in the room, though not plugged in.  I'm missing a power strip.  It'll turn up.  

Floored - Day 2 - April 12, 2023

The flooring guys showed up here yesterday morning to begin installing the floors.  They finished one room, the kitchen.  Errrrrthing had to be moved.  I emptied the contents of a small hutch (pint and quart jars full of dried beans, rice, jellybeans, and buttons, and miscellaneous other stuff) onto the stove top, which the installers then had to move when the moved the stove out.  Probably would have been better to have left everything in the hutch.

Today, they did the living room, the bathroom, and the hallway.  Tomorrow, a bedroom and the ukulele room.  He says they'll be done by Friday.  He replaced the seal on the toilet to accommodate the new flooring, and it is leaking.  

When I came home from work there was a pile of junk in the entry hall.  A guy was flooring the closet, where the pile of junk had originated.  Four bicycle helmets.  A pair of baseball cleats (it has been 20 years since anybody in this house played baseball).  Four pairs of flipflops.  A pair of winter boots I didn't even know I owned.  A kite.  A pair of work boots that once fit a 3-year-old boy.  And so many coats and sweaters we couldn't hang another one in there if we wanted to.  Most of the shoes belong to The Husband (except for the ones we could not identify).  The minute he got him, I handed him a garbage bag and told him to get busy.  To his credit, he threw away everything that needed to go.

I am ashamed of how nasty my house is.  I swear the dust on my baseboards could be spun, like yarn, and knitted.

Mowing - April 10, 2023

Shhhooooo-WEEEE, I'm tired!

Worked on the back porch most of the day - my job work, plus some side-hustle digitizing - and every time I'd glance up, I'd see the compost bin I built Saturday and think about painting it.  But the flooring guy was supposed to show up after lunch.  About 3 o'clock, he texted me and said that he wasn't coming today, so I fired up the Wrangler and went to the hardware store for a can of paint and some long wood screws.  

As I was backing out of the driveway, I noticed how shaggy our yard was looking - dandelions standing up everywhere - and decided that instead of painting the compost bin, I should mow the lawn.  It might rain tomorrow.  When I got back from the store, I went straight to Nanny's to get the lawnmower (we keep it in her big shop).  She came running out of the house..  "Did you check the oil?"  I waved her off and said, "I'm going to mow our yard, and then I'll come do yours."

Our lawnmower is a bitch to steer.  It's supposed to be a zero-turn mower, but it's not quite zero.  I make a lot of figure-8s instead of 0s.  It was nearly 7 p.m. when I finished Nanny's yard.  The Husband was home by then and said that one of the front tires is low, and that's probably why it was so hard to steer.  He can air it up when he mows the steep bank at Nanny's that I'm scared to mow.

If it doesn't rain, we're going to get the vegetable garden ready for planting this weekend.  I gave away a few tomatoes to my siblings.  Still have 50-something, but I AM NOT PLANTING THAT MANY TOMATOES.

I B Compostin' - April 9, 2023

Thanks to the two margaritas I had on Friday night, I woke up grouchy and mean yesterday morning.  After breakfast, I parked in the recliner and stayed there for two more hours until I shamed myself into moving.

I ended up working in the yard ALL DAY LONG, just "piddling."  Pulled up weeds.  Dug up volunteer trees growing in flower beds.  Transplanted some stuff.  Scattered some grass seeds on bare spots.  Picked up a pile of sticks to grind.

Built myself a compost bin out of the pallets the flooring came on.  

Go me.  :)

Tomato transplanting - April 8, 2023

Last summer, as I was dragging a heavy 2-gallon sprayer down the tomato rows, I said to The Husband, "Don't let me plant this many tomatoes EVER AGAIN."  Trying to keep ahead of the blight and the tomato worms and the critters that eat the tomatoes right off the vine was a never-ending battle.

I can't remember how many tomato plants we ended up with last year.  We started with 24 from a greenhouse, then added a few that I started from seeds.  A tree fell across the garden at some point and took out several tomatoes and some peppers.  In any case, we had fewer tomato plants last year than we'd planted in years.  

A few weeks ago, I found packets of tomato seeds - 4 different kinds - in the freezer and decided to start all my plants from seeds this year.  Around the 1st of March, I planted some of them and set them in a tabletop greenhouse that came with its own lamp.  I planted about 40 seeds, some of which I imagined would not sprout.  I tried to be careful to just get ONE SEED per seed-starting "cell."  

Well, they all sprouted.  And there was more than one plant per cell.  About a week ago, I took out the extra plant from each cell and put it in its own bigger container.  Had about 8 or 10 of those.  Of course, the extras no longer fit in the tabletop greenhouse, so they've been living on the front porch for a week and are doing fine.

With all that's been going on around here this past week - almost getting hit by a tornado, starting a flooring project, work stuff - I have more or less ignored the tabletop greenhouse crop, except to keep water in the saucer.  Today, I noticed that the plants had grown tall enough to touch the light.  They were a strange yellow/gold color, as if they'd been sunburned.  And there were 5" long roots growing out the bottom of the cells.  

I went to the Dollar General, got some peat pots, and came home and began transplanting the sickly-looking things.  Some of the cells STILL had two plants in them, though I thought I'd thinned them all.  One or two cells even had THREE plants in it.

Long story short (I know, too late), we have 60 tomato plants now living on our front porch.  There are 4 varieties - Black Kirm, Ruby something-or-other, De-something or other, and one more that I can't recall at all.  I have no clue which is which.  Some of them are smooth-leaved, some are kind of hairy.  Some have reddish stalks.

WE ARE NOT PLANTING 60 TOMATO PLANTS THIS YEAR.  

There's probably no need to worry.  If half of them survive this transplant and their sojourn on the front porch until planting time, it'll be a miracle.

Well, damn.  

This flooring project is going to drive me nuts.

We bought the flooring Sunday and paid to have it shipped to our house.  The projected delivery date was April 12.  

Monday morning, I got an email from the store saying it would be delivered April 5.  (Hence the frantic book purge Monday afternoon.)  I called the installer and told him the flooring would be here today.  He rearranged his schedule to work on our house.  A couple of the workers arrived before 9 this morning to start work, but they asked if I had any idea what time the flooring would be delivered.  I checked the tracking link sent with Monday's email.  It says the flooring will be delivered on April 10.  Another schedule rearrangement for the installer.  

Actually, I'm kind of glad the flooring won't be delivered today.  It's supposed to storm again tonight and tomorrow.  If it had arrived today, we would have had to move it all - two whole pallets of it - to the back porch (The Husband bought a hand truck yesterday just for that purpose).  I wasn't looking forward to that job, especially during a storm.

So we wait.

Ruthless - April 3, 2023

I was ruthless today.  Perhaps a little too ruthless, so I built myself a safety net, of sorts.

It all started with the decision to get new flooring because our existing flooring is going to cause one of us to fall and break a hip.  We bought the flooring yesterday and had it shipped to the house.  The store said we'd get it by April 12.  Today, I got an email that it's been shipped and will be here Wednesday.  Since that minute, I've been hauling boxes and printers and you-name-it to the two rooms that are not getting flooring.  Aaaaalllll this sh*t gotta be moved, and I don't want to put it back.

You've already heard about the fabric purge.  Today, I finished emptying the craft/sewing room of all but the big stuff.  Made a trip to the dump when I filled up the garbage can, and when I got back from the dump, I did the book purge.  

I have (had?) three book "collections" built from studies on some s-t-r-a-n-g-e historical topics.  Nothing kinky, no devil worship, or anything like that.  Just people.  Francis Bacon.  Benjamin Franklin.  William Shakespeare.  Clarence Darrow.  Mark Twain.

One of those things is not like the others.  ;)

Anyway, I have (had?) four five-shelf bookcases full of books, plus some biographies that I will probably never read.  I once thought some of it might be "worth something" as a "collection," and actually made overtures at trying to sell them to a rare book store, but they wouldn't bite.  Not their niche(s), I reckon.  Anyway . . . . 

Francis and William and Clarence are in the back of my car, along with a bunch of coffee table art books and what-have-you.  I can't bear to part with Benjamin and Mark.  I love their wise-ass voices.  And I may ride the other three fellows around a while before I donate them to the local library.

The "keepers" are stacked on our bedroom floor, along with random stuff that had accumulated on the shelves.  I made The Husband move his music stuff.  We've got to un-hook all the computer/internet junk and find somewhere else to hook it up because we both need the wifi for our work.  I reckon our bedroom is about to become a library and an office.

I worked on the toy closet today.  Tomorrow, the craft closet.  

It's supposed to storm here tomorrow night.  I hope it's over before the flooring arrives.  :-|

Tornado - April 1, 2023

Last evening about 6 p.m., the western sky turned green.  The television was announcing weather alerts.  My cell phone was repeatedly screaming that there was a tornado warning in effect in our area. 

I wasn't much worried.  Storms don't frighten me much.

I and my oldest two granddaughters had just come home from the town where I work, having been shopping for a dress for Granddaughter #1.  We hadn't found a dress, but we had a back-up plan to shorten a formal-length dress my granddaughter already had.  She put on her dress and I chopped it off and was sweeping up scraps when The Husband came home.  The wind was kicking up pretty good, and in a few minutes, marble-sized hail started falling.  I could see sheets of rain moving toward us across the field.  

The girls' parents arrived to pick them up just as the rain got here. We made our safety plan, then I stepped out to the front porch to look at the sky.  To the west, a tendril of cloud looked suspicious.  

The wind started whistling,  Sticks and leaves were blowing around.  Then I heard a rumble and thought it best to go inside.

The power went out.

It got loud, with wind and rain pelting the windows, and then it suddenly got quiet, and the sun came out. 

We all kind of joked around about how quickly it had passed.  I walked out to the back porch to get something off the table, and when I turned around, I saw that a BIG-ASSED TREE had fallen in our side yard.

I could not believe the shed wasn't crushed.  Looked up.  Two other trees had caught it before it hit the ground.  Had they given way, it would've flattened the front corner of the shed.

There was a big limb in our back yard that had come from a tree in the front.

When we all finished gawking from the back porch, we moved around front.   At Uncle B's yard across the street, the top of a big pine had been twisted off and was laying in the road.  

My son got on the tractor and moved the pine limbs, but farther up the road, more trees had fallen.  We soon learned by chatting with passing traffic that the other end of our road was blocked, as well.  It wasn't long until we began to hear chainsaws in the distance; the "good ol' boys" had arrived to clear the roadways.

Our cell phones do not work when the power goes out (we live in the black hole of the cellular universe).  We still have a land line, and saved an old princess telephone for times such as this.  We plugged it up, and it immediately started ringing with news that several places in the county had been hit by a tornado.

The south side of the town where I work is torn all to pieces.  Horrible damage to homes and businesses.  If there were any fatalities in the county, I haven't heard about them, but people in neighboring counties were not so lucky.  We heard that this tornado tore up things over 150 miles from here.

The Husband and I spent the day cleaning up sticks, glad to be doing it, glad to still have a house, glad to still be here.  He got out the chainsaw and sawed up the big stuff.  I ground up more than a wheelbarrow load of the little stuff with the limb grinder. 

I don't know what we're going to do about the big-assed tree.  Someone who has some major equipment and knows what they're doing is going to have to handle this one.  :-\