Aimless Tangents

This was originally written on Wednesday.

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I began my work day today among the clouds.  Or so it felt.  I work on the sixth floor of an eighteen story building (not counting basement levels) downtown.  Because I’m very low on the totem pole I do not have a desk anywhere near a window, but the files stored on our floor have beautiful views of downtown.  I frequently look out onto the world to enjoy the view.

This morning the world was wrapped up tightly in a blanket of soft gray.  I could barely see the top deck of the parking garage or other buildings that are nearby.  The world felt small, insulated, quiet. 

And then my imagination kicked in.  What is lurking off out of view?  Yes, intellectually I know that there is a house on the corner and that shapeless lump is probably their trash can left out from yesterdays pick up schedule.  But what if it is something more?  What if, knowing that the humans with their poor eyesight cannot see clearly in such a dense fog, other more fantastical beasts come out to play in the just above freezing cloud that is hugging the ground this morning?

What if there are fairies like in Fantasia, lightly skimming along and bringing the frost with them?  What if woodland elves are dancing unseen close by, shrouded by the fog?  What would happen if I caught a glimpse of this hidden world?

Such thoughts brought a peaceful, wonder-filled smile to my face this morning even as I headed downtown to a world surrounded by concrete, glass, and metal.  I’m 31 now and find great comfort in being able to still imagine the magic that the world holds.

This is my latest time sink.  I’m so very addicted. 

What is Pinterest? 

Well…bear with me and I’ll answer that.  I’m a Bookmarker.  By that I mean if I find something interesting on the web I’ll bookmark the page.  My bookmarks are sorta categorized but I have a metric freaking ton of them that I never seem to go back through and look at.  Overwhelming and highly inefficient. 

Pinterest is basically an online based bookmarker.  Rather than bookmarking a page though I’ll pin an image.  Pinning the image puts it on my boards (read: categories) that are organized how I want them.  The pink links back to the original website/blog post/wherever I found the interesting thing. 

From Pinterest itself:  Think of Pinterest as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can create collections of things you love and "follow" collections created by people with great taste.

People use Pinterest to collect and share all sorts of things — wedding inspiration, favorite T-shirts, DJ equipment. You name it, people are pinning it.

But what makes it any better than just bookmarking things the old way?

Visual representation.  I’m pinning an image rather than a website’s title or url.  Great for me to easily surf through and rediscover the inspiration.

How do you pin?

From Pinterest itself again:  The easiest way to pin an item is to use the Pin It bookmark. This is a special button that lets you grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards. When you pin from a website, we automatically grab the source link so we can credit the original creator.

There is an iPhone app for Pinterest.  You can also upload images directly from your computer and pin them to your boards.  I just found the blog buttons for Pinterest and will be adding one shortly.

Right now Pinterest is invitation only.  You can go to the website and request an invite or you can drop me a line with your email address and let me know you want an invite, I’ve got plenty to go around.

You can also use the following address to see what images from your website have be pinned and are generating traffic for you.  Just change “nameofyoursitehere.com” to the actual .com name of your site.

http://pinterest.com/source/nameofyoursitehere.com

Come join me with my new addiction!

Last night I finally got the four piddly looking tomato plants in the ground and the marigolds between them.  My garden is fully planted.

Along the back fence I have eight zucchini plants, four tomato plants, and a marigold between each plant.

(I told you the tomato plants were piddly looking…)

In my “Needs to be raked, again” area I’ve got a container garden going.  Two strawberry plants, on rosemary, one thyme, two basil, two bell pepper plants, and a sage.

I need to get out there and rake/sweep and rearrange the pots for better growing conditions.  The herbs have taken off and gotten crazy big.  The pepper plants actually have blooms this year so I’m hopeful I’ll actually get peppers for once.  I’ve already done a small harvest of the basil and it was tasty.

The zucchini plants are small but already covered in blooms so I have no doubt that in a few weeks I’ll be up to my ears in zucchini.  Some of them will no doubt end up donated to the local food pantry.

Oklahoma suddenly got hot this week.  It means I don’t really want to spend my time out in the shop working on things like I should.  I’ve got a bench I need to refinish, a chair to paint, and a few other small projects to finish.

I’m kicking myself a bit over here.

I started with a corner bed left from the previous homeowners.  The wood was infested with ants and we have been wanting to pull it out for a year or two.  Finally pulled all the wood out a few weeks ago.  Decision was made to till up the dirt and use it to fill in along the back fence since it was sorta low and plant my garden there. 

Rains came and we had to ignore the bed for a while.  But while we were tearing the wood out i noticed some really weird looking roots and things.  But figured it was just left over stuff.  While we waited for things to dry out, the "grass" took over and it looked like this:

I started on it with a hoe last week and then got side tracked by redoing the porch roof, using the borrowed wood chipper to get rid of a pile of stuff, and recovering from one of the worst sun burns of my life.  Yesterday and today Hubs and I have been after it with our electric tiller.  We’ve made progress and I’ve decided that the husband was right, I do have more dirt than I know what to do with. 

This is how much I’ve got left, and most of the low spots have been filled at this point. 

Today, after tilling up that weird looking grass and spreading the dirt along the fence for my new garden area I decided to finally look up what the grass was.  Quackgrass.  First word of advice on the pages I looked at:  Don’t till it!!!!  Apparently it can come back from all the roots and rhizomes.  Oh, goody.

From here the plan is going to be to put down several layers of newspaper, then mulch on top of that.  I’ll cut holes in the newspaper to plant my garden through.  Whatever Quackgrass pokes through will get pulled by hand.  At this point it is far too late to go and dig through and try to remove each and every single piece of root and rhizome. 

But man, is it looking better already.

For now I’ve stopped about where the tiller is sitting.  The corner currently has some junk sitting in it from a pile of twigs/leaves that needs to be cleaned out. 

The big thing I was pushing for was getting enough room to plant the zucchini and tomato seedlings I have.  It is supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow and who knows how long it will take for the yard to be ready to work in again.

I finally got the window trim in the bedroom painted white.  Yes, it is taking forever.  Mostly because I am at the stage where the project is no longer fun with big impact and it is the tedious stuff left to do.  That always takes longer.  And painting trim is just not fun.  Toss in a bad gallon of paint and well, we are still living with minty green trim and doors along with Frog Tape in strategic places.  I’m making in-roads though, and have vowed to have the painting done by the end of the month.

With the window trim painted white I decided it was time to hang the new curtain hardware.  The existing hardware was bent and didn’t work very well for the drop cloth curtains I’ve made.  This is where you come in.  I’ve got two styles of curtain to work with.

Plain:

Folded over:

Here they are together, partially open.

Together, closed.

Tomorrow I’m hanging blinds and getting rid of the remaining old hardware (see the gold hook in the middle of the trim?  Yeah, those.)  The blinds are red mahogany wood blinds and they will block a lot of the light.  This is a very good thing since Oklahoma is already hitting the 80s and we aren’t even out of April yet.  This does not bode well for my electricity bill come July/August.

The Hubs likes one of the curtains, I like the other.  Unless I get a lot of people telling me “Ew, yuck don’t hang up those!” I’ll probably just end up doing them both the way I like.

I did this yesterday:

Cucumbers, bell pepper, squash, bush beans, basil, rosemary, thyme, dill, gourds, etc.  I’m hoping I get some decent plants otherwise I’ll have to run to Lowe’s and see what I can find there.

We finally replaced the crappy white paint I had previously attempted to use on the trim in the bedroom.  The process has begun in there; sadly it takes 3 coats so this is going to take a while.  Yay?

As if I needed another project…  My attention has recently turned to our wood floors.  They are in bad shape.  Original to the house which was built in 1921.  We’ve only ever damp mopped them and they are showing their age and the impact from the dog.

Over the past year I’ve been doing a lot of reading on what we could do to salvage these floors.  We had always hoped to refinish them.  Then we realized they were so old and so worn that refinishing would be pointless (“they” say not to refinish if you can see nails starting to show through, and we can).  Through my learning process I found out that due to the age of the floors they would likely have had a wax finish at the time and throughout the years until they were covered with carpet and then uncovered.

On a random Google tangent last week I stumbled upon an article that said to use these two products on your wax finished floors to help bring them back to life.

I did a test spot in an area that could easily be covered by a rug if it didn’t turn out.

Restor A Finish only:

Restor a Finish and Feed N Wax:

Still not the perfect-ness of a newly refinished floor but a HUGE improvement nonetheless.  I’ll be redoing the rooms one by one as budget, time, and my knees/back hold out.  Wish me luck!

Texture in the bedroom is my main goal right now.  To that end, I have had an idea for circle wall art for a long time.  Ever since I saw it done on another blog that I sadly cannot find again.  I’m not sure what they used for their circles but I decided on wooden embroidery hoops.  Whenever Hobby Lobby had a sale I stocked up.  I would also buy broken ones from the clearance section so long as the solid inner circle was intact.

Yesterday I gathered up all of my embroidery hoops of differing sizes and separated the inner and outer circles.  For this project I only used the inner circle.  Not sure yet what I’m going to do with the outer ones.  I applied two coats of acrylic paints in colors I already had that coordinated well with both the summer and winter bedding. 

Today I finished up the painting (I had left blank spots so I could handle the hoops with no problems while wet) and hung them.  I started with the largest and hung it somewhat in the middle.  From there I just randomly chose colors and sizes while trying to keep two identical circles away from one another. 

The hoops are hung by a clear thumbtack just pushed into the wall wherever I thought it would hang best.  (My thumb is now killing me.)

Ignore the crooked headboard, I still haven’t taken the time to hang it so it is just propped up against the wall at the moment.

Now I’m faced with a dilemma.  The wall that the bed is against is the longest wall in the bedroom.  The bed (and its art) is pretty much in the middle of the wall.  I’m trying to decide if I should just leave the remainder of the wall empty or try to find other, complementary art to hang on either side.

And yes, the frog tape is still up, we are having issues with the trim paint.  The is a door jamb at the very edge of the picture on the left.  I’ve got a large-ish area right there where I could put something on the wall and (thanks to the other door that isn’t always open) another medium-ish area on that end to put something.  Or leave blank.  I can’t decide.

Not enough…

• time
• money
• daylight
• drive
• passion
• effort
• peace
• compassion
• will
• space
• storage
• clean dishes
• clean laundry
• etc.

I could make a list a mile long of what I don’t have enough of.  Easy job to do as we seem conditioned, partially by society, to focus on what we don’t have.  But yesterday morning, afternoon, and evening right before I turned out the light to go to sleep my husband reminded me of something I do have enough of:  love. 

Yesterday was not a good day.  It was a panic attack, crying filled, fear fueled hell of a morning.  And my husband was brave enough to come home and give me what I needed.  He gave me a hug, let me cry on his shoulder a little bit, soothed me, made me laugh, and then helped me get out of my own head.

I tend to get so caught up in my own worries, in the rabid brain weasels that fight and bite and chew, that I can only focus on the bad.  It is a nasty cycle, one exacerbated by the unemployment and difficult job hunt.  When so much of my life is “Not Enough”, his love, his understanding, his adoration of me is always enough.

Even his unibrow is enough. 

Joining up with the Madhouse Wednesday crew this week since my regular schedule got derailed this week.

With the weather warming up and lots of people getting out to work in their yards, usually generating a lot of very nice green and brown waste, I thought it was timely to repost my no-cost pallet compost bin.  Enjoy!

I’ve wanted a compost bin for a while now. The willow tree in our back yard sheds leaves like you wouldn’t believe. And as I hate bagging leaves it seemed like a good idea to have a place to rake to so that they may decompose into something the plants will love. Thanks to the price of the tumbling compost bins, or even the free standing ones, or even the kits I started scrounging for more economical ideas. Preferably free ones.

A while back I conned a friend into going and picking up some free pallets for me in his truck, he was bribed with food. I had intended to use the pallets as building materials for things around the house. Then I found some pictures of pallet compost bins. After rummaging through my supplies I realized I had three pallets that would work. Their tops had relatively closely spaced slats; so that the compost wouldn’t pour out of the confines.

More importantly I had one that had ends like this (with an overhang):

And two like this (flush ends):

I started off by using my wonderful squeeze clamps to hold one of the flush ended pallets to the top of the overhanging pallet:

Close-up of the corner:

I put a few outdoor screws through the overhanging pallet into the side support of the flush ended pallet. With that I done I had this:

I repeated the process on the other side with the remaining flush ended pallet. Complete with the backyard neighbor’s dog barking at me non-stop.

And I ended up with this:

In the end I’m very pleased. I’ve managed to keep some pallets out of a landfill as well as get a practically free compost bin. Thanks to the rain in this area since I’ve completed the bin I haven’t had a chance to rake leaves and grass clippings into it. The weather is supposed to improve over this coming week so it will get filled relatively soon.

AKA, I finally finished the headboard that should have been done last week.  I’m thrilled with it!

Before:

After:

I have been wanting a headboard for a very long time.  However, the Hubs and I own a Versa and a Maxima.  Granted I can get a lot of stuff in my hatchback Versa but a Queen size headboard just won’t fit. 

So I started looking at plans to build one.  I found several I loved from Knock Off Wood.  I had a budget of less than $50 total for this thing, with cheaper being better.  All of the plans from Knock Off Wood were way more in parts than I was able to spend right now. 

I then decided to go dig in the pieces left behind by the previous home owners.  I found a piece of material that feels like the stuff pegboard is made out of.  I cut it down to size for our Queen bed.  Then I realized I was lucky enough that one of my Sisters In Law left an old ugly comforter in one of the storage buildings we have.  (Very lucky because foam and batting can be expensive.)

Using my electric staple gun I made a burrito.

The ends of the comforter were too long so I clipped them off with my nice, sharp shears.

The thing that took the longest was getting my fabric.  I was in Target last week and found a table cloth that was perfect; it had lots of texture and was a nice deep brown.  I bought the smallest rectangle and figured it would be big enough…it wasn’t.  Saturday I finally got the tablecloth exchanged for the biggest size, and then never got a chance to work on the headboard again until today.

I washed, dried, and ironed the tablecloth (after I made sure it fit!).  I then repeated the burrito making process but this time cut off the excess fabric to perhaps use it in another project later on.  The corners/ends also got folded over for a finished look rather than cut off.

I spent about $20 for the tablecloth and that was my only expense, everything else I had in my stash.  I’m very pleased with how everything turned out and like the look it gives the bedroom.  Now I just need to actually hang it on the wall with the D-hooks I’ve got!

One more look at the finished product: