A picture and a thousand words
Susan's project and family blog
A cold, late spring plus my procrastination means that the tomatoes and basil are finally in 2/3 of the way through June. Crazy late.
That’s one early girl, one cherry tomato, and two basil starts. We’ll see?? I’m only vaguely optimistic for them. I’ll try to put in beans and summer squash once we’re back for our trip, and I want to try some kitchen herbs (thyme, basil, oregano, cilantro X2 for Kevin, maybe dill).
The mountains were out like mad today, and I was cut off on the way home by a teeny little car with 5 kids in it and all the windows open and all I could think is “the interns are back!” Zooming around like mad people in their rental cars, heading home to their subsidized apartments with friends in tow. It makes me smile. Hope they like it here as much as I do.
And, as you can see from the buds, there are more to come!
We have almost 20 other guys leafing out, but this is the only one that has even put buds up so far – we’ll see!
My Grandparents sent us a first anniversary gift – a lovely, handpainted fruitbowl, decorated with hyacinths.
The bottom is lovely, too.
I was thinking that it looked so familiar when we unwrapped it – it turns out that the artist is a friend of my grandparents, and my mom has had a similar fruit bowl from her since forever. It came with instructions (we both found it surprisingly touching that they’re typewritten – not something we see much).
The bowl arrive the day before our first CSA bag arrived, and we quickly tried it out on the apriums (tiny apricot/plum hybrids). They looked gorgeous against the blue bowl and kept well. This will clearly be a new favourite kitchen standby.
Our friends Shawn and Sanna left their puppy, William with us when they went (to Shawn’s) home in Alabama for Christmas. They brought us back a great BBQ sauce, which we’ve been saving for grilling season. The weather is inching towards consistent, so we had a rib roast. They brought potato salad and delicious, marinated farmers market asparagus, and Larry brought wonderful wine.
Right before they arrived, I found a whole new 10′ tract of mint in the garden, so I pulled it up by the roots and we made mojitos.
The BBQ duo and their dog:
Don’t the ribs look amazing? William was in his element – munching sticks and pinecones, and acting like a happy dog in a yard with lots of birds and squirrels. The party went late, and I didn’t manage to get a shot until the shade had taken over (around 7 pm! Love June!)
The evening concluded with amazing strawberry rhubarb pie, again from Shawn and Sanna. 🙂 What a great, low-speed, delicious afternoon. 🙂
Our neighbour, Paul, asked us today if we would mind trimming back the lilac the lilac next to the driveway, since he was having a hard time reaching his gate and mowing. They’re good neighbours, and I appreciated that they waited until after the blooms were done, so I went out about an hour later with the clips and pruned it back and up. The entire thing looks a lot more even now, which is nice, and I think that it will get more sun which should help with the last of the very persistent moss.
Once I was outside, I weeded the front gardens, pruned back a few bushes that had gotten gangly, and then decided to finally just do something about the maple. Two branches later, I can present before and after shots:
View from the street, before:
… and view from the street, after:
View from the house, before:
… and view from the house, after:
The ground actually gets sunlight now! I think that going up another branch in the middle would entirely be a bad thing, but at least now I can walk under it without stooping, and maybe we can scatter some grass seed and have a chance of it growing. 🙂
By that point I’d filled one yard waste bin and decided to move to the back. I pulled weeds from the rock wall (you wouldn’t believe the number of ivy starts that grow here in a week), pruned the Japanese maple, trimmed the lilac at the side of the house up a bit, and then decided to cut down a tree. We have a pine tree right outside our bedroom window that is just below the maximum size before you need a permit. The poor thing is surrounded by five enormous trees, and tried to compensate by growing as an “L” – it only has one branch, but that was as big as the trunk.
So, I cut it down, snipped and sawed it up, and had just about filled the second yard waste bin when Kevin got home from golf. He did a good job being impressed at all my progress. 🙂 I mentioned that we should probably think about cutting some of the branches on the larger pines at the side of the house – there are a bunch that hang over the roof and side yard, blocking light but not providing any privacy. I’d sort of meant it as a project for another day, but he was enthusiastic starting (and I know better than to stop a project like that when it has momentum!), so he spent another hour cutting down branches – he ended up taking down about 12 big ones from the roof, and then I took down another two from the ground. Even at 8:00 pm, there was an impressive amount of extra light. I can’t wait to see how it looks tomorrow morning from the bedroom.
Here’s Kevin sweeping up pine needles, and our new sky view! (Plus good perspective just how big those trees are – he’s only about 10′ away from that trunk!)
And here’s about a third of the tree carnage. It looked like a major hurricane had hit.
I spent about another hour clipping and sawing the branches into three big piles. There are also branches that fell in the front yard that I didn’t get to before we lost the light. Delicious hamburgers on the grill for dinner, and we are both going to sleep VERY well tonight!
We’ve had stacked trim just sitting in our garage for a few months now. I needed to rip 12 of the boards down to width, and the guys at the lumber yard were quite clear that the only way to do it was a table saw. We both researched, but the things are expensive, you have to store them, and there are safety concerns… Brian suggested way back in March that I look around at local places and see if someone would do the cuts for us for cheap. Sounded like a plan, but it took me a while to find a place. Meanwhile, there’ve been stacks of MDF blocking all the space in our garage.
Something finally clicked this week, and I found Hardwoods Supply online: six minutes from our house, open on Saturdays, and willing to make 21 10′ cuts for me.
I loaded the wood into the car, drove over, unloaded, they cut it up, reloaded, drove back and got everything restacked in the garage by the end of the dryer cycle (40 min). Nice. A very, very good use of $30. (And the guys were great. The one ringing me out was tickled at how mortified I was when I signed my maiden name on the credit card bill — I haven’t done that in months.)
So far I’ve managed to cut 12 pieces to their proper size. I have about 35 pieces to go (25 are straight cuts, the rest mitered), but all of a sudden I’d had enough fun for one afternoon, so the rest of the cuts and the painting will have to wait till tomorrow. Still, it’s a great start.
It has been raining, cold and dismal here for the last week, but we’re finally at the time of year where everything is so green and the flowers are so bright that it’s not so bad. Here’s the view of the front yard from my computer/sewing machine>
With all the flowers are starting to fall — I’ll miss their color. They were so saturated and brilliant while they lasted.
We’ve been having fishtank light issues for about a week. The fans on our lights (the same things that are in a computer case) have been noisy for the last year or so, but one of them has apparently become completely unbalanced and starting last Sunday now makes a loud revving noise approximately every five seconds. I figured out which fan was causing the problem and took the light apart to try to remove it. Electricity isn’t exactly my forte, though, so Kevin took over once everything was in pieces and I’d given up.
Kevin ordered new fans, put the light back together, and the day after they arrived, the actinic lights blew. We have four compact florescent bulbs in the upper tank – two are white (with yellow/pink tints) and two are blue (technically called actinic). Kevin took apart the lights again, played with wires, switched the bulbs, checked the switches and sockets, and it appears that part of our ballast blew – expensive and crummy. The light is three and a half years old, so it shouldn’t be dying but it’s also well past its warranty. Adding to the worry is the fact that we’re looking at upgrading our tank in the fall, so this really isn’t a good time to be looking at multi-hundred dollar temporary light fixtures.
Just when we were starting to get fairly distressed, we realized that Amanda and Brian not only gave us back our old fishtank when they moved away, but Brian threw in his two compact florescent fixtures. They’re perfect (even the right pin configuration!), and now we’re back in business.
A wild success! Thanks, guys. What a save!
I finally got over my discouragement, ripped out the offending seams, starched all of the pieces, and am re-attacking attaching the trim for the daybed quilt-top.
I’m four seams in, and some of them weren’t properly aligned so I clearly have another date with the seam ripper in my future. At least I’m finally back on the wagon. It is fun to work on it again.