Oh yes, that...

Johnny Yen's comment on my last post reminds me: I think I might have failed to mention the butterfly lady is pregnant :)

Juniorette is expected to show up around the end of July, which is mostly why we've been on the major home-improvement kick...

So, yay!

Up to stuff

As usual, I lack photographic evidence to back up these assertions, but we've now got:
A new ceiling fan in the living room (thank you, Dad/Steve!!! Not a one-person install).
An assembled crib in Juniorette's room.
A massive amount of extraneous crapola donated/recycled/set at curbside with a "free" sign.
A revamped bathroom upstairs (new paint, new lighting, new hardware).
New flooring in the living room & kiddo's room (old news, but I did it!)
A cleaned up and organized garage.
I think that's about it. Next up is a platform for the pooches to lie on by the back door that will have a compartment for dog towels and a nice cushion on the top. That'll also mean clearing out the beater old couch that now lives in that room. You can see the couch here:

That "room" is part of the kitchen, pretty much, but separated by a partial wall and a counter. The other side of that room, behind the camera operator, is the washer and dryer area. That door behind the couch leads to an uninsulated storage closet (paint, cardboard boxes, fascinating items like that).
Our plan is to have the platform on one side and Yuki's garage on the other, so the door can open and there will be a little more space.
Anyway, that's in the middle distance (i.e. not this weekend).

Almost done, photos to follow

The flooring project, which I squared the bulk of away Sunday afternoon and Monday, is nearing a close, though I'm still fooling with the woodwork that is the transition from the living room to the dining room, as well as from the laminate floor of the child's room to its carpeted closet.

Anyway, the re-org has left my aging computer untethered from the Internet, which puts a damper on blog posts, especially ones with photos.

So, trust me: It looks good, but it'll look better when you can see it!

Home improvement

This post will take a while to get to the point, depending on what you're looking for in it, so just stick with me.

So, I usually forget to take "before" and "during" photos, so it should be no surprise that the befores are missing. But here are a couple of during photos of the now-in-progress project to install new flooring in the living room and the soon-to-be-former office. Those last five words are foreshadowing, for all you literary types.
Oh yeah, the living room is getting overhauled, too. Trust me, you're glad you can't see too much detail on the carpets.
OK, here's the roundabout part:

Our office has had several names over the years.

When we lived in this city in the 1990s, we called the office "Monny's room" because that was who lived there before he moved out and the computer and all our extra crap moved in.

In our dinky apartment in New Hampshire, we still called the second bedroom "Monny's room," though we occasionally also called it the office, among other words. It was small.

Here, we've pretty much called the office "the office" from day one, but in late July or early August, Allah willing, it should have a new name. Like, maybe, "Aurelia's room" or "Ridley's room" or "Gabriel's room" or something like that.

Whatever it is called, it will not have carpet. I am not a fan of carpet. I think it might be fairer to say I despise carpet. Read into that if you like... Also, if you were looking for the big excitement, go back a paragraph.

Anyway, being as we have two leviathans hanging around - and I'm alarmingly klutzy sometimes - tile is out, as is cork, as is most kinds of wood. I'm not sold on bamboo, either, not for flooring anyway. Too many questions about the adhesives for my taste. So our friends at DuPont, who make low-emission and generally responsible flooring now have this stack, plus another behind it, ready to be installed. On Monday!
And because every big job demands the acquisition of a nice tool, the butterfly lady kindly bought me this handy dandy late birthday present.
Stay tuned. If the job goes as planned, the next "during" photos all will be a blur. But the "afters" should be good. They damn well better be, anyway.

Oh, and someone likes the same music I do:

New scarves

I've finally gotten some bamboo scarves woven, about two years after I planned (hey, biz was good without it, so I guess that's good). Here are a few of the new ones:
The bamboo is pretty, for sure, but where it really shines is in how it feels - super soft and slinky like silk - and drapes. Wow!

For fun at the end of the warp, I tried (in the righthand scarf) a fairly straightforward overshot pattern (that's just weaverese for cloth that has a simple fundamental structure overlaid with fancy patterns):
I say "fairly straightforward" because even though I'm good at this, I erred once, as you can probably see. Maybe the error in the pattern is actually a design plus. I'm sure it is for people who believe symmetry must be disrupted to avoid the appearance of evil spirits.

New back yard

Winter is approaching, and with it - maybe - some rain. For us and our Newfies, that means mud season in our abysmal back yard. But now there are Eight Paws of the Newfpocalypse, so we decided to install a lawn (and underground sprinklers).

Here's pretty much what the yard looked like before:
That darker patch in the middle used to be a planter bed, which was super successful last year but not so much so this year. Yuki's puppyhood took a toll. Anyway, I used a Ridgid digging fork for the demo (about $30, bought to replace a crappy Craftsman fork I finally got my money back on. The Craftsman was the second free replacement after the original conked out). Here's how much fun hand turning soil is:
It is good exercise, though, and the rental rototillers were heavy and our CRV lacks a trailer hitch. I think the whole demolition/grading (with a rake, mostly) took about six hours for 450 square feet. Hey, small yard. But small yard full of junkola. I found a bunch of former paving in part of the yard:
and smaller odds and ends, too. This place would have been a good archaeology lab, though it is too rich in artifacts to be realistic.
Anyway, here's a view of the prepped yard, and the big stack of sod (About $95, including sales tax and a $5 deposit on the pallet):
At this point, I hadn't laid in the sprinkler, but I squared that away in about an hour using flexible PVC, a couple of sprinkler heads (our side yard is too small to irrigate without watering the porch and/or driveway). The pipe, sprinkler heads, joints, timer and such cost about $130, so besides time, this project was pretty inexpensive. The labor was laborious, though:
You lay sod just like flooring, really:
And here's mostly finished:
I misunderestimated on the square footage, so I ran out just as I finished the yard. As in, I ran out of sod at the same time as I ran out of places I needed to put it. Now all we need to do is see if it takes, and holds up to the canines, and the winter, and...

Wishing for fall

But not very hard: I'm all for hot, dry weather.

I am, however, thinking seriously about installing an underground sprinkler system and a small lawn for our back yard. The dogs would enjoy the grass, I think, and it would help to keep the HUGE supply of weeds at bay back there. Plus, it would give me a fun project that wouldn't cost very much (the sprinkler part, anyway - I don't know what turf runs these days, and the dogs make seeding impossible).

I would bemoan this move as a surrender to the all-American ideal of a green stretch of grass were it not for the quite small dimensions of this lawn-to-be. One thing you can say for our house: There's not a lot of room wasted on a big yard.

Anyway, that's what's occupying the non-work, non-puppy, non-cook, non-swimmer parts of my brain just now.

New puppy = lazy Saturday

But not too lazy. Our new Newfoundland pupy, Yuki - or whatever we wind up calling her instead - passed the night more restfully than I expected... which means I got up with her at 2:30 to go out, come back in, go back out (after whizzing on the floor a couple of times), hang around outside (for some appropriately placed whiz), come back in, play, play, play and conk out at 3:30. But she did sleep the rest of the night, so that's pretty good, really.

She did need to have someone sleep down on the floor next to her crate so she could get over the scariness factor. She raised a hue and cry until I came down, opened the door and cuddled her for a while. Naturally, she got too darn hot and schlumped into her box to rearrange the towel and curl up for both of her long stretches of sleep. Yeah, big scary crate.

But we received her non-housebroken and non-crate trained, so you have to start somewhere.

Today, we went downtown (in the auto, not on foot), and she got some visiting time in at the bank, where they plied her with treats, as well as at work, where we dropped in for a spell. Pretty big day for puppy, who's now completely conked out on the kitchen floor. Still, she didn't walk far at all, but with large-breed puppies, you have to go easy for a *long* time (the rule of thumb is as many minutes walking each day as the puppy is weeks old - not even around the block here, unless you carry her). She's ridiculously cute.

How I spent my weekend

The front yard has been a disaster area since we moved in three and change years ago, and although I've made a few moves to improve it, it has been mostly weeds most of the time.

Assets include four Russian sage plants (planted by me), two trees that survived out of the lot of 10 from the Arbor Day people a few years ago (though one is pretty bent and needs staking), a rhododendron (one of the three great objects, don't you know), a pretty carnation-like plant that has tons of little pink flowers, three pussy willows and an assortment of hyacinth, grape hyacinth, tulips and now about a half-dozen lunaria (those really cool silver dollar plants that have the funky seed pods and look like this when blooming (thank you UNH Cooperative Extension for the photo!):

However, as is so true of most of life, assets have been outnumbered by liabilities, including:

• Crabgrass (I'm thinking it's so named for its weird shoots that usually run underground)
• Armyworms (curses!)

• Weird wild carrot/parsley type weeds that are nearly ineradicable and unusually numerous.
• Other weird wild carrot/parsley type weeds that are nearly ineradicable and unusually numerous.
• Assorted weedy grasses, which combined with the crabgrass apparently give the armyworms a great neighborhood to live in.
• A square concrete pad, about 4 feet on a side, which I was reminded today is (was :) about eight fucking inches thick (code for sidewalks is 3 or 4 inches), poured by the city in the distant past to accommodate a previous resident.
• Three oddly placed square concrete tiles, about 15 inches on a side, maybe for a walkway? (these are now an asset, of course)
• 400,000 river rocks varying in size from thumbnail to Palestinian grenade (heavy enough to dent a tank, in other words).
• Relentless sunshine and a busy street with the mountains on one end and damn near Oregon on the other, which is another way of saying about 400,000,000 weed seeds blowing into the yard a week.

Saturday, I trimmed the pussy willows (yes, I thought of that, too) and dug out the more stony side of the yard, retrieving so many stones I could make a snazzy dish for the outdoor faucet and the downspout from the gutters, as well as surrounding the water meter with a significant pond of stones.

I rearranged the concrete tile things so they are now three diamonds in a row, kind of Japanese walkway style. I dug up maybe 250 pounds of weeds, too. I got two blisters and a good night's sleep.

Today (Sunday), I dug out the other side of the yard, but not completely, because I did the same thing when we moved in so it wasn't critical. But I did zap most of the crabgrass and dug out several armyworms. I observed a wolf spider, several centipedes, some unidentifiable spiders, a ton of people at the neighbor's yard sale and some pretty clouds.

I also demolished the concrete slab using an electric jackhammer (I did sing Jackhammer John while I was at it (for two hours)) borrowed from my neighbor, whose kindly daughter and several other relatives helped me chuck into the back of a truck. I got the hang of the jackhammer when I had about 1 square foot left to demo. Today, I re-got the two blisters, plus another. But it was well worth it.

Anyway, the plan is to plant eight lavender plants (picked up in Oregon - no sales tax and friendlier businesses with lower prices than up here), stake the tree that needs it - and maybe move it - and infill with poppy and black-eyed Susan seeds.

In case you were wondering, and had the patience to get this far, black-eyed Susans are my favorite flower.

Busy, busy

Naturally, these things would be better with photos, but that will have to wait. The past week's been pretty busy:

Scones with almond paste (made by me: candy success No. 2)
Built and tested a teleprompter (for work)
Knitted more scarves (I've lost track. 8? 9?)
Splurged on fancy yarn for scarves (what else is new)
Daily Japanese lessons :)

Oh, and regular life, which can be busy anyway.

A couple more hats

These two are knitted out of mohair...

A new project

I've had a basket of knitting yarn sitting in the closet for about three years now, and until this week I hadn't touched it, partly because weaving's kept my hands full, and partly because I would have to learn how to knit to use it.

But earlier this week, I bought a knitting loom (about $7 on sale), something I'd heard of from my father, something that sounded like it would make knitting a whole lot easier.

The loom I bought is just a circle with pegs on it:It is quick and easy, though it makes a pretty loose knit. I've found this can be partly counteracted when the hat is washed/shrunk. If you don't mind having a smaller hat, you can get the knit to be tighter with hot water and a bit of dish soap (same thing you'd do for felting, incidentally).

Anyway, here are two of the four hats I've made this week.



My model kindly didn't ask for much in compensation. But he wasn't too keen on trying on the light blue mohair with the sparkles.

Outfitting the loom

So I bought a new (to me) loom a while back and finally scrounged up enough dough to buy some needed items to outfit it for production work. One difference 'twixt a hobbyist and a production weaver is the need to put on long warps (i.e. 50 yards instead of two, three, five), and the upshot of that is a need to put these rake-like items on the beam the warp is wound onto.
That I did, with a couple of trips to the hardware store, and one to the lumber yard (where a kindly worker cut a really superb piece of no-void plywood into 1.25-inch strips that I glued to make double-thickness and cut to suit my purposes).

Anyway, after that, and some previous repair work, I now have a loom that should take me through the rest of my career as a weaver. Unless, of course, someone decides I'm such a brilliant scarf maker that I change professions!

Unauthorized personnel

She is pretty sure this counts as being on the couch only when the blanket is on it, too.

New Hampshire lite/fight club

Well, we finally got a decent snow. I think the last time I saw snow like this here was in the mid-'90s. Katy is a hog in mud in this; Max is OK with it, but would really prefer to have his snow a la carte (aka without the Newfie who's usually included).

Here's their usual hostilities:

Snow? Check. Happy Newfy? Check.

Katy's pleased with the weather here the past couple of days. Although our city does get cold, it doesn't often get snow (that usually lands in the hills, not down in the valley). But every so often...
When we went out for the morning visit to the back yard, playing ensued, some of which I caught in immortal electrons:

10 books in a row

On one of my shelves:

The Sea of Trolls - Nancy Farmer
Mind of the Raven - Bernd Heinrich
Kanji & Kana - Hadamitzky & Spahn
A book entirely in Japanese, indecipherable at the moment
Kyo Noren - Takai Kiyoshi
Godless Morality - Richard Holloway
The Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels (oooh, *that* communist manifesto!)
The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara
The Next Million Years - Charles Galton Darwin
Forgotten Kingdom - Peter Goullart

Craftiness

I have a tendency to collect things. I'm pretty good about not being a huge pack rat, but not always:
I'm not really sure when I started saving corks, but I think it might have been 1994 or 1995. Needless to say, not every bottle of wine had/has a cork that can be saved, and not all of the corks I've saved are even from wine bottles. I have a few left over. Here's what I made:

The first one was kind of predictable and simple:

Here are a few of the others:

Dust devil

What better way to start off a Saturday than to clean out the garage?

Wait, don't answer that. I did make coffee first, though. And the whole cleanup was really only about an hour of furious sweeping and a small amount of tossing junk in the trash. No big deal.

I did find a very large spider - large for these parts, that is. When I was a boy, I nearly trod on a tarantula while running barefoot down a path. This was no biggie, about the size of a wolf spider but not as bulky. I let her out in the yard, which is probably arachnicide for that species and her cousins will come to get me later.

Our garage is too small for our car (an SUV-lite from Honda), so it is really an uninsulated shop without electricity (aka storage shed). But it does have a good roof. And way less dust than earlier today.

Electric countermeasures

Mama II posted a spiel about home energy conservation, and I was surprised to see she thought it necessary to spend big cash (i.e. thousands of dollars) to get Energy Star-rated appliances.

Since the butterfly lady and I moved into our home, we have had to buy a water heater, refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer. We could use a new stove/oven, too. The only things we haven't had to replace are the air conditioner (but that was brand new when we bought the house and was included as part of the negotiation for the closing) and the furnace, which is not particularly efficient.

Our washer, dryer and fridge are all Frigidaire Gallery - the washer is an ultra-efficient front-loader (about $600). The dryer is your basic $279 model, but my research indicated dryers matter not for conservation. It works fine, though the starter knob was flimsy and has snapped. The fridge is fantastic, especially energy-wise. The piece of junk the seller left us with leaked and was a huge energy hog; this one barely registers on the electricity meter when it cycles on. It does not have an icemaker (isn't that what the little trays are for??) and it is your standard freezer-on-top sort, about $750, I think.

The water heater is totally run of the mill. Had I been building from scratch, I probably would have bought one of those snazzy tankless, on-demand heaters, but we probably will have to sell this house (and move) eventually, so why get something people around here aren't familiar with?

The A/C is a Trane. We mostly use a laptop for doing computer stuff. We don't watch a ton of TV (on our now-old-school Sony Trinitron, the last non-LCD TV I think we'll own).

What can I say? Our electric bills rarely go over $45 or $50 (I think that happened once, $50-plus), even in the 100-degree heat of summer. Most often, the power costs us about $35 or $40 a month.

The gas bill is another story. I notice that in the summer, the gas bill (when the furnace pilot is off) is $4.24, which is the basic rate. Just having the pilot on (as I did for one month the first year we lived here during non-furnace season) costs about $7 a month.

The gas company yaks a lot about how you should use gas to run the dryer and water heater. Wouldn't it be charming to get a gas bill that had $14 a month ($21 in furnace months) just in god damn pilot light costs?

Anyway, the gas bill runs from the aforementioned $4.24 four months a year to about $175 in the dead of winter. On the plus side, a significant portion of our house (one-third: the now fully occupy-able basement) is taken up by my studio, which means a small tax break on utilities. I think our anti-American Dream tax structure more than makes up for the small savings, but that is a topic for another post.

If I were building from scratch, you can be damn sure we'd orient our house to take advantage of the sun, use a ground-source geothermal heat pump, and have clotheslines in the loft of our home. But that is a topic for another day, too.