Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a million peaches. It was more like 10. But STILL!!
One of my three dwarf peach trees ripens in July. It had about a dozen peaches on it. They were little, but all yellowish golden red and within a few days of being picked. Every time I’d go outside I would check them to see if they had softened up at all so I could pick them. I checked them last night and they were doing ok. Still hard, but with a new tiny bit of give.
This morning, I reached in to check them and they were ALL GONE!!! Only one tiny peach had been missed by the theives who crept into my yard and picked all my peaches. I am very upset about this. I was so looking forward to those peaches! I have tree nets, but I didn’t think I’d need them for this. Man was I wrong.
The other two trees ripen in August. Once those peaches start showing signs of coloring, the nets will go on.
I have been a dedicated fan of Pitchmen since it began this season. I had always thought Billy Mays’s commercials were entertaining, but really came to like the guy watching the show. He seemed to be a sincere, funny, and generous guy. He had one twitter post earlier this month that said “Just went to our favorite pizza place. She burnt the pizza so she DOUBLED the offer!” Another said “Hi, Billy Mays here for Twitter. Are you tired of not knowing what I’m doing? Then follow me on Twitter. It’s free! No s&h charges either!” Totally the personality he displayed on the show, and really funny. Plus - he has introduced us to all kinds of home improvement products!
So, it was very sad news to hear that he died this morning. Poor Billy and his family. I usually don’t care about celebrity issues, but I was quite upset about this. My favorite comment I saw about it did make me smile: “Heaven will shine a little bit brighter today…now that is has the power of OxiClean!”
So back at the end of May Orkin came. In addition to the sermon, they killed all the inside ants and treated the outisde. I will say here that the PR person from Orkin who saw my blog acted swiftly to correct the celibacy-lecturing tech and made sure he wouldn’t come back.
However, the ants did come back. I found their nests all behind the downspout. Orkin couldn’t come immediately, so I killed them myself. There are still lots of ants particularly along the edge of the garden and the patio. I want to give them some tarro or something to kill them, but Orkin says no.
Thus I scheduled an Orkin person to come out 2 weeks ago and treat these ants and to kill the nests I may have missed. No one ever showed for that appointment so I made another one for them to come last week. Again, no one came. Finally, they called me and said “how about we just come on June 22nd like we’d planned all along?” If I’d wanted to wait a month, I wouldn’t have called to schedule visits two other times, but fine. Yet, come this morning, my ants had not been treated. I called this morning and they said they would send someone today. No one came.
So I just got off the phone with the main Orkin customer service line and the schedulewho assured me that, while it was never in the system for someone to come today, she would absolutely be here tomorrow morning. We’ll see. This is all becoming a little bit too familiar to my cabinet doors…
…which I still don’t have! When Contractor Sal came by a couple weeks ago to fix the kitchen trap, he said he’d check on them soon - once Cabinet Guy got back from his latest vacation.
I really want to compost my kitchen scraps. I leave as many in the yard as possible (carrot tops, pea shells, etc.), but I still end up throwing out food that goes bad in the fridge.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article at Slate about composting. I don’t want to deal with a pile that I have to turn over. I don’t want something that will smell bad (to me or to my unsuspecting neighbors). I don’t want to add “brown” material because I don’t have any of that - I mulch everything up.
The Slate article reviewed several systems, and this seems like one I might go with: the Solar Cone Green Cone.
Has anyone used a system like this or others? Any advice on what to do and still meet my criteria above?
I have put off buying a china cabinet for about 5 years. Finally, I broke down and went on a search. I originally thought I’d go for the kind of traditional buffet and hutch deal - a bottom part with solid doors, a top part with glass doors. However, I found this bookcase type cabinet with sliding glass doors at Pottery Barn and I think it’s perfect.
I still have some work to do filling it up. I’ve got a wine rack coming next week that will fill in the bottom left. I do actually have china from when I was married. We liked it then, but it’s lost it’s appeal to me.
There are some patterns that I like, but china is very very VERY low on my list of things to spend money on. So, for now, the china is staying in the boxes in the attic and I will have to find a different way to fill the remaining space. Maybe more cookbooks are the answer
I don’t know if you can tell from this picture, but the POs did some crazy butchering on these doors. Apparently they were not the right size so they hand cut some of the doors off down the middle.
Notice the wavy gap.
This work is truly Cabinet Guy caliber.
To fix this, I got a couple pieces of half round and attached them to the edges of this door. It made me realize I need some clamps. For now, the vice grips worked ok. A coat of paint, and this looked quite a bit better.
This was a good project for a day that brought threatening weather.
It’s nice to be back and doing some work on the house this week.
Over a month after the new windows were installed, I finally got around to painting them today. I didn’t take any before pictures because I thought I had tons of them from the siding installation. It turns out I didn’t take any of the windows in place. However, as you can see here, the insides were unfinished pine:
I saved like $300 -$400 getting them unfinished, but I did have a few moments of regret as I spent my day painting them. They turned out well, though, and the new handles also look good.
This officially brings to a close the siding and windows project. Horay!
As a side note, Orkin’s coming back this week. I found a bunch more ants outside nesting behind my downspout. I drenched the nests in the Ortho killer (I know, Orkin people, I’m supposed to let your stuff work, but it wasn’t working), but I’m sure there are more little nests around. Hopefully this application of Orkin medicine will take better than the first. The good news is that someone from Orkin read my earlier blog post about the religious exterminator, was properly appauled, and got me taken off his route (plus he got a little lesson on talking about religion at people’s houses).
There’s a nice closet in the basement that is impossible to open. The only way to get in there is to stick your fingers in the gap left by wavy trimming of the doors by the POs.
(pardon the mess on the floor - I’d just moved the treadmill to make room for my visitors and there was some fur under there).
When I ordered the box of 10 handles for the windows, I was surprised to receive 10 PAIRS of handles. They were cheap, but I have a lot of them. Thus, I decided to put some of those extras to use on this set of doors. I had to put on 4 handles - one pair in the middle folding part to open, and one pair on the end to close. They look nice and make it so much easier to get in there.
My fabulous SIL Michelle and my 2 nieces are coming for a visit next week. This has created the perfect excuse for me to get things in order around here. There is still much lingering mess from the busy semester, and it’s nice to have a motivating deadline to get it all cleaned up.
That said, there is a LOT to do this week (I know you’d come whatever the state of the house, Michelle, but I’d be embarrassed if you saw it like this). I got up at 8:30 this morning, my usual time, ready to start on a big list of things.
Flashback to yesterday where I saw an ant in the pantry. I got the great idea to move one of the ant traps that Orkin left into the pantry just in case. Well, those are ant baits. They attract ants. Thus, they attracted ants to my pantry where I found a bunch of them when I put away the box of Cheerios from breakfast. I called Orkin who told me that I had a scheduled visit on the 22nd and I was absolutely not allowed to kill the ants in the pantry because it would mess with their system. The woman on the line did not seem to understand why I was completely not ok with just letting the ants camp out in there for a couple weeks. So I killed them. Windex kills them and it turns out so does GreenWorks. However, there were ants between the spice jars and on the tines of the wire shelves so, to get them all, I had to pull out and wash every little jar of spices and all the other stuff in there.
In the midst of this long stupid project, I had lunch (yes it took that long). When I was cleaning up, I realized that I’d forgotten to dispose of the pods from the peas I picked last night for dinner. I put them into the garbage disposal and ground them up until the drain clogged. I tried a few things to unclog it, thinking maybe it was just the disposal, but no. It was clogged all the way down. Luckily, I have a big red pipe wrench and have watched enough TV to know how to get into the trap under the sink. I was feeling all proud of myself until I realized that MY kitchen sink trap does not come apart. All the pieces were glued together.
I took many many steps figuring out how to get the black pipe from the disposal disconnected from the main pipes. After that, I tried snaking with the snake and with other stuff. I tried shop-vacing it (which seemed to work until I got everything reassembled). After about 5 disassemblies and reassemblies and a dozen calls to various members of my family, Brother Tom suggested I put it together, put some water in the sink and use the plunger on it. That worked! (One million points to Tom are hereby awarded).
About 5 minutes after I finished, Contractor Sal returned my call where I left a message about this poor trap situation. He came over and put in a proper one that unscrews. Now I am prepared with many skills and facilities in case this happens again.
In any case, it left a GIANT mess. Here’s about half of it.
So, by 3:30pm today, I ended up with a nicely organized pantry, everything back in working order, and very very little progress on my list of stuff to do. Just one of those days…
The girls like boxes, but we did eventually open them up:
And here we go- three dwarf peach trees. They even came with peaches on them!
K enjoyed sampling the unripe peaches that fell off in transit.
I planted one of these in the hole from the roots I removed earlier in the week. I’m struggling to find a good place for the others that gets enough sun. The raspberry bushes are taking up some prime real estate, but they aren’t doing all that great. For now, the peach trees are staying on the patio where they can live indefinititely. Depending on how the raspberries come back next spring, I’ll see if these two make it into the ground.
