Dogs and Jen: Home Edition

I went out to work on hacking down the vicious thorn tree and kudzu growing over from Jungle Neighbor’s yard.

I made pretty good progress until I spotted this:

And these little guys were inside.

So, for now, the thorny stays until the babies hatch and leave the nest.

How do zucchinis like this happen to me? I pick them every day, I check on them several times, and then every now and then I end up with arm-sized squashes.

Anyway, I’ve been working on this all consuming project for work. I only fit in a couple hours of sleep trying to get it done, and then rewrote and rewrote again. When I finally finished it around 1 this afternoon, I was seized with the urge to make something real.  I also needed to get rid of all the fruits and veggies in my fridge that would go bad next week.

I spent seven hours in the kitchen and came out with this:

That’s 2 loaves of zucchini bread, 12 zucchini muffins, two little ramekins of the zucchini bread, 2 small blueberry muffin ramekins, 6 pints of lentil soup, 2 pints of spaghetti sauce, and 3 half pints of blueberry orange jam.

Look out, family - lots of this is coming to you!

Last summer, I went home to Chicago for a couple weeks and had my mail held. When I got back, I sorted it. The pile on the right is the useful content. The pile on the left is junk.

Look how sad K looks at all that waste!

I’ve tried websites that say they can get you off these mailing lists, and maybe they have helped a bit. Still, I get tons of catalogs and it really irritates me. Thus, this week I’ve started the Catalog Removal Project. Each day I’m calling every place that sends me catalogs and asking to be removed from their mailing list. It only takes a little time and, hopefully, will lead to a reduction.

Updates in 3 months when some of this should have taken effect.

Today is K’s 8th birthday! To celebrate, I picked up a doggie cake from Living Ruff (the previously mentioned dog boutique). It was like peanut butter graham with frosting, carob chips, and dried cherries. K and Pi were both very excited.

K got the first bite.

In other news, I still have tons of zucchini. I picked them all monday morning (before a trip to New York). This morning, only 2 days later, this one appeared:

(EDIT: I’m with you commenters on the zucchini bread - there are 4 loaves in the house right now! There are also several bags of frozen zucchini in the freezer. So. Much. Zucchini.)

MOM and DAD gave me a bike for Christmas. It’s pretty awesome.

I put this together myself in January, but last week finally took it to a bike shop to make sure it wouldn’t fall apart as I rode it. Since then, it’s been great to run my errands this way. My most frequent trips downtown are about a 5 mile round trip. I make more stops now than when I was driving, because it’s just a lot easier to lock it up than to navigate the traffic and find parking.

It’s also brought me closer to a few neighborhood establishments. CakeLove is one. Ah, CakeLove.  Life is so much better with cupcakes.

When my SIL and nieces were here a few weeks ago, we also discovered Living Ruff, a dog boutique which opened last fall.  They are great. There’s tons of snacks of all varieties, a bakery case of dog treats, and some very nice people.

The girls love the cookies they have in the bakery case. Their noses go right for my bag and try to sniff them out when I get home. Here are some purchases from last weekend: the dog flag and the bee.

For scale, the bone flag cookie is about 5 inches long.

So now, it appears that once or twice a week during my bike rides, I’ll be picking up treats for all three of us.

Granted, I do nothing to take care of this bush. I even considered pulling it out when I moved in. I have no particular love for rose bushes. That said, it did fine last year. It made flowers. It grew leaves.

This year, it’s almost dead. I still have done absolutely nothing to it. It had leaves and flowers in the spring. Now, almost all the leaves have fallen off. The few left don’t look too hot. The branches are kind of black and dead.

I’m not desperate to save it, but I know many of you actually take care of roses. Any idea what happened? My main concern is that it’s some disease. This bush is in my veggie garden, so I’ll yank it out if this is something that may spread to my plants.

I finally broke down and bought the SolarCone composter I posted about a few weeks ago. I produce very little trash in my house, and almost all of it is recyclable. I probably need to take the trash out every 6 weeks. Still, I do have veggies go wilty pretty often, and I have all kinds of stems and such. Most of that I’d freeze in my freezer drawer until trash day and then send it off to the dump. For most people, compostable material is a huge percentage of the trash they sent to landfills. My footprint may be a bit smaller, but I still don’t want to make that impact.

Thus, the composter is a great thing.

It arrived last night while I was downtown running errands (on my bike, another great life development that I will discuss later). After dinner, I set it up. Putting it together was pretty easy. There is a basket that goes underground, and two concentric cones that sit on top. They basically screwed together, and the cap screwed onto that. The end for assembly. However, the next step was to dig a hole big enough to bury the 24″ high basket and cover the lip of the top cones. That hole was about 30″ deep (so I could fill back in with some material that had good drainage under the cone) and about 3′ wide.

Digging holes is a lot of work. Here it is installed and buried into place.

Thankfully, it’s mostly unseen from the house and patio because it’s behind my magnolia bush.  After I finished digging and cleaning up, I brought out its first load of food - all those wilted greens and squishy veggies that I’d had in my freezer waiting for trash day. As of this morning, it was composting, I guess. Here’s the view inside the composter - a place you don’t want to put your head and sniff around. (this inside view intrigues me in a weird way; a compost-cam of the inside would be amusing)

The smell is fine with the cap closed, so this seems (so far) to have met all my requirements. More in a few weeks as I see how well it works.