Casa Decrepit
Maraschino Cherries
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Authors: ayse
We'd finally gotten enough of making ourselves sick eating cherries last week, and it was time to harvest the last of the cherries and call it over. So on Sunday I climbed up the cherry tree and harvested what was left to make maraschino cherries.
There were a lot of slightly-pecked or chewed cherries, but these were the good cherries...
Big Moves Afoot
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- Published on Monday, 18 June 2012
Authors: ayse
The time is here: the new chickens are being mixed in with the old tonight. We've had them outside with the big chickens and all has been well until the last few days, when Dolly figured out how to fly over the fence and harass them (and also get at the compost pile they have been hanging out on). This has involved chickens on the...
Untangling
- Details
- Published on Sunday, 17 June 2012
Authors: ayse
After a long day out in the hot sun yesterday, Noel decided to do some inside work today, so he undertook the de-jackassing of the wiring in the basement. You will recall that our idiotic first contractor made a mess of our nice wiring during the foundation replacement, and part of closing out the foundation permit is fixing the hash...
Side Work
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- Published on Sunday, 17 June 2012
Authors: ayse
It's been super hot here. Hotter than it usually is, for days in a row. I've especially noticed it because I've been working outside (working working, not working on the house working) for the last two weeks. So not a lot got done apart from some intense complaining about the weather.
Today it was even hotter -- 92F -- and Noel did...
Garden Report: June 11
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- Published on Monday, 11 June 2012
Authors: ayse
Today a nice guy from Sonic (not the fast food place) came out and hooked up our new high-bandwidth connection. We'd been hosting our server in a colo (colocation facility; basically a place that has a lot of bandwidth and reliable power where you can pay to keep your server), but they had lots of connection failures then suddenly and...
Major Upheaval in Hive A
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- Published on Sunday, 10 June 2012
Authors: ayse
I went into the hives last week to see how they were doing, and Hive A had built cross-comb between two frames. Sometimes you can fix that, but in this case the comb was a wavy mess between the frames, locking them together, so I knew I needed to go in and remove it so the bees could rebuild it right. At the same time, that hive...
Cut Away Everything That Isn't a Deck
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- Published on Wednesday, 06 June 2012
Authors: ayse
For his second large beam end, Noel chose the one by the stairs, because that would easily be the hardest beam to cut.
He started by sharpening the saw.
This is more than just a metaphor; the saw he was using was quite dull and that's no way to cut a beam. He used a small metal triangle file and worked on the saw for quite a while. It...
Reconfiguring the Irrigation
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- Published on Sunday, 03 June 2012
Authors: ayse
When we hired the gardeners and they put mulch everywhere, I knew I had to change around at least some of the irrigation. Sprayers work fine with open ground, but they do poorly with mulch, at least in terms of letting the mulch suppress weeds.
I bought a massive pile of high-flow drip tubing. I'd like to spread the water we're getting...
Sawing Logs
- Details
- Published on Saturday, 02 June 2012
Authors: ayse
The time has come to cut off the extended ends of the big beams under the deck. We'd had a few discussions about how to do it, and what sort of shape we wanted them in, and finally settled on a simple angled cut done by handsaw.
Noel used a pretty simple method to make sure each cut is the same. He took a couple pieces of scrap wood...
Garden Report: May 31
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 31 May 2012
Authors: ayse
So, big happenings in the garden.
The chicks are chicks no more, so we've been getting them used to the other chickens (and vice versa) while also giving them daily outside time. We fenced off half the chicken run for their exclusive use, so hopefully by this weekend we should be able to introduce them to life with the big girls. These...
