Snow Day

Looks like minimal damage to the trees around my house. Nothing big and obvious down as far as I can see.

Streets are slushy but I walked around and found no ice.

A small tree (or large photinia shrub, actually) toppled this morning a couple of mins after I took the first picture; you can see the branches in the upper right corner of the the picture. It was scraggly, bent, and probably needed to go anyway.

Didn't land on anything and didn't appear to cause any damage at all. That's cool, because it could have fallen on the glass greenhouse in the background there. Yay, our team! I've got a small chainsaw and axe so I can probably remove most of it myself. We'll see.

composting, version 3

I spent some time this morning talking with local Richardson resident and master composter Rob.

I've been learning/experimenting with compost for a while but sometimes talking it out with a teacher really helps gel one's thinking.

Lessons I learned from Rob, and took to heart while watching him work his own compost piles:

1. A practical, simple approach to composting will suffice for most people.
2. Circular bins are great. They can blend into your backyard -- the mesh is almost invisible and the leaves and other materials are, by definition, a natural color. The bins can be unhooked quickly and relocated; this gives you plenty of room to "completely deconstruct" the pile and rebuild the parts that need more time (see below).
3. Sifting can help seperate out the "finished" parts of the compost from the unfinished. Rob has MacGyvered up a sifting mechanism that lets the finer, velvety compost fall through for use while retaining the coarser materials for reconstruction of the pile.
4. Multiple piles are useful and time is your friend. Multiple bins can help this process along, but Rob demonstrated that a working compost pile can stand on its own after it has taken shape. You can remove the circular bin to start a new pile.

So I came home and decided to make a few test bins. They wouldn't be as good as Rob's bins but these are another step in my own understanding of how compost works. The image above is one of the three 3' diameter bins I made that came out ok. I have one tucked away beside the house; it holds leaves I swept up from the curb. There's one stored behind the shed and one that's going to get used next as soon as the ugly duckling 4' bin gets full.

I wasn't trying to make a 4' bin; I was trying to make a 3' bin from 9.5' of material. But it was my first one and a series of mistakes meant I cut out 12' instead of 9.5'. Oh well. I didn't want to cut the material down and have an unusable scrap, plus I figured this would be a good way to experiment with size. It's holding together and isn't wobbly. The wire is 16ga and fairly heavy.

CarpetRipping, pt 2

Earlier in the year we ripped the carpet out of the front room (living room?). The Dear Wife and I finally had the "simultaneous days off" and "motivation" lines on our biorythyms line up so we did the hallway. The beige at the top is the carpet, the blue is the top of the carpet padding, and the brown-yellow is the underside of the carpet padding. Note the bits of padding that stuck to the floor when the padding was pulled up; those are where the floor is stained below.



This one went a lot faster as there was no furniture to move. You can see the stains where the stuck-on bits had to be scraped off. No mopping or washing done yet; only swept. Luckily there was no physical damage to the wood as was found in the front room.

hummingbirds

Found a hummingbird feeder at a garage sale for 50c. Cleaned it up, read up on making the nectar, and hung it up in the back yard. Saw the first bird (a brown female?) later that day. Just now a green one was at the feeder.

Here's a page on identification of hummingbirds in Texas.

Fence repair

At some point our wooden fence will need to replaced, probably with chainlink. For now we knocked out the rotted slats and replaced them with slats from Lowes.

It's not particularly pretty, but it's much sturdier and there is no danger of the dog busting out. Plus the COR aggressively issues code violations around here and I wanted to stay ahead of that.