Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Home

  • Not much to speak of

    Don’t have much to write about. Okay, that’s not totally true; I’ve got some things I want to write about, but they’ll run long and that’s not really what I feel like doing at nearly 11:30 at night. The topics? You’ll see why I’d run long:

    • Evolution
    • Ebooks
    • Reviews of some regular books I’m reading

    So instead, tonight, I’ll stick with the mundane things that tend to bore the hell out of people…

    We steam cleaned the carpet this last weekend. It’s amazing how much dirt and pet hair had accumulated in the ten months we’ve been living here. Amazing and gross. Makes me want to get rid of all the pets.

    This next weekend we need to dethatch the lawn and try to restore parts of it. I hate lawn maintenance. Makes me want to get rid of all the grass.

    The week before last, when I was sick, it turned out I had a bronchial sinus infection. I ended up getting antibiotics to get rid of it, which is something I almost never have to do.

    I’ve been teaching my five year old to play checkers. She’s got a good grasp of the rules, though needs to learn strategy and how to see the big picture. I’m pretty impressed by how quickly she picked it up, though. I have a feeling the strategy part will come to her pretty fast and then I’ll be frustrated at how I get beat every time :)

  • Water vs. Pop

    monkeyinabox: “Mind you, this was back in the days before bottled water was all the rage. Water came from the tap, unless you bought gourmet water, Perrier, or whatever rich people drank. Growing up in a place with good tap water, it makes that kind of stuff seems pretty stupid.”

    Great bit on being a “soda pop junkie.” I remember back in the days when I worked graveyard shift in Spokane doing (essentially) data processing, I’d take a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to work and often finish it before I left.

    And yeah, I never really got the bottled water thing, either. Growing up, we had a well, so our water was pretty pure and uncut.

    Well, except for this one time in the cistern… that’s a story that almost turned me off of water for good, but I think I’ll save it for another day.

  • Bulbs

    Part of owning a house means yardwork and landscaping, which I’m sure everybody by now knows I just love (*cough*). This weekend it was planting tulip bulbs in the ground, which should look pretty good come spring.

    Unless, of course, they don’t survive. Since we bought a new house, on recently developed land, a good majority of the soil we’re sitting on is gravel and rocks and fill—basically just junk dirt that the excavation company used to push out and level the lot. It’s basically the worst soil (if you can call it “soil”) I’ve ever seen for planting—I pulled more rocks and gravel out of the ground than dirt, it seemed, when digging holes for the bulbs. So who really knows if they’ll grow here.

    On the other hand, the lawn is (mostly) doing okay, as are some of the plants put in by the landscapers…

  • Perils of domesticity

    I don’t know what it is about this weekend, but here’s a few items illustrating the pitfalls of owning a home and raising a family:

    Saturday evening I noticed that the dryer had died. More specifically, that the drum belt had broken; the dryer would run, but the drum wouldn’t turn. So I spent most of this morning figuring out how to open the thing up, then buying a new belt and figuring out just how to fix it and put it all back together again. (You’d think a belt would be easy or intuitive to replace. If you’re like me, you’d be wrong.) Joy. It works, though.

    The event that led up to me discovering the dryer wasn’t working? My son, our youngest, was sick; he ate only a bite or two of dinner, then went to lie down on the couch. Which he then threw up on. But it wasn’t just the bite or two of dinner he threw up; it was lunch, too. So, I got to interrupt my dinner to clean up vomit from the couch. It was also on a throw pillow, which I cleaned, and was going to put in the dryer—and discovered the problem with the dryer.

    Same kid, twice over this past week, has set off his Tickle Me Elmo in the middle of the night (5:10-ish the first time, 2:10-ish the next time). Nothing’s quite as freaky as waking up in the dead of night out of a deep sleep hearing Elmo saying, “Elmo’s not ticklish there! Tickle Elmo again!”

  • Spending the weekend with noxious chemicals

    Since moving into the new house, it seems like there’s a never-ending list of things to do. This weekend it was staining the new fence. That took a big chunk of time.

    The way to go when doing something like staining a fence (or a deck) is to get a compression sprayer—a plastic tank that you pour the liquid into, seal airtight and pump air into. This creates pressure that forces the liquid out of the spray nozzle when triggered. Pretty handy, but here’s some things you might want to consider doing if you’re doing this (all of which I, of course, didn’t do):

    • Wear goggles. The sealant/stain spray has an amazing tendency to blow back into your eyes when it’s windy.
    • Wear a mask to avoid inhaling too many fumes.
    • Wear a hat, like a painter’s cap. Especially during those blowback situtations.

  • Sod

    Ever think about sod before? Yeah, me neither, until recently. Always seemed like such a boring topic—yah, grass, lawns, yawn. But I’ve been thinking a lot about sod lately, since we moved into our new house and had landscaping done. It turns out sod is quite a bit more interesting than I initially thought.

    Watching the sod get unrolled out and pieced together to form our new lawn, I realized that I had no idea where the stuff actually came from: were these neat rectangular rolls of grass turf just carved out of somebody’s pasture somewhere? Somebody’s yard? Who’s letting that happen? And wouldn’t you start to run out of the stuff pretty quickly if you’re poaching it? I mean, even though grass is a renewable resource, it still takes time to establish a yard strong enough to start cutting chunks out of.

    And then realizing the amount of sod that must be going into new lawns around here every day, I realized the inefficiency of this and went off in search of answers in my trusty Lawn Care for Dummies.

    Turns out sod comes from sod farms. No kidding. (Blindingly obvious in retrospect.) There’s actually people running vast farms that do nothing but grow grass for lawns. Not livestock, not grain or vegetables, but lawns. And the best known sod farm in this area? McPheeter’s Turf.

    Here’s a Bend Bulletin profile on McPheeter’s Turf.

    We work long hours, we just get really tired sometimes. We start at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and I’ll change water at 9:00 or 10:00 at night. But it’s so good to go to bed tired at night.

    I know farming is truly hard work and long hours, but still, that seems like a hell of a lot of time and work invested in just growing grass.

    Now, I just have to see a sod harvesting machine in action. What? You didn’t think they cut and rolled it by hand, did you?

  • Shed

    Costco Apex ShedSo I put together a Costco shed today, with help from my dad. Part of our grand plan to outfit the new house with all the bling bling, you know. It’s a nice shed, but it was a pain in the ass to get set up. Actually, the shed itself wasn’t that bad, it’s all plastic and rubbermaid-type material. The worst part was setting up a “foundation” for the thing on a slightly-sloped part of the yard that backs up to the fenceline. We found some sturdy pallets in the dumpster across the street that fit the bill, after levelling them off with cinder bricks, flat stone and two-by-four shims.

    Yeah, we did some dumpster diving. But it’s the big construction dumpster for the development we’re in, filled with lots of usable scrap wood and stuff! That makes it okay. :)

  • Stuff

    Still continuing to settle in to the new house. This weekend we cleared out the storage unit, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much stuff we’ve managed to accumulate over the years. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve got a packrat personality and it’s actually hard for me to get rid of stuff. But—wow. How does this happen? You’re puttering around in your daily life, happily oblivious, then one day you turn around and BAM!—where did all this stuff come from? And yes, you remember getting that, and yes, those have a story, and then you realize the true culprit:

    Time.

    Time: you lose track of it for even a moment, and it will sneak up on you. Your kids will grow a few more inches and start school, everyone you know is suddenly older, the music you spent formative years of your life listening to is on oldies radio stations, and stuff accumulates.

    And yeah, that packrat personality I mentioned, I have that. But not too badly though, not apeshit crazy like you see on TV or read about, where the old hermit guy has 30 years of newspapers tied up in his living room, or the wacko lady has 8,000 unopened boxes of toothpicks, or anything like that. No, I’ve got it just enough to annoy my wife. Could it ever get more serious? I doubt it.

    But you know… time will tell.

  • The Move Reloaded

    Well, we’re all moved in and (relatively) comfortable. Still not feeling like blogging much—after 3 days of moving and cleaning and unpacking, and the ongoing process of more unpacking and arranging and tweaking (things like hanging curtains, and towel racks), I’m just beat. So, some quick thoughts on the moving process:

    • Smartest thing we did: hiring movers. Totally worth it. If/when we move again, it’s the only way to go.
    • Taking a day off from work was also smart.
    • Going back to work feels like a vacation.

    Ugh. More later.

  • The Move

    So tomorrow we get funded and close on our new house, and take possession. Then comes the Move; we’ll start hauling a load or two over tomorrow evening, and then Saturday is the big day. Fortunately, this time we’ve hired movers to do all the heavy lifting.

    I don’t expect to be online much or at all after I leave work tomorrow, at least until Sunday sometime, maybe later. If all goes according to plan, Bend Broadband should have our cable service turned on Saturday (I think), but I seriously doubt I’ll be interested in going online after spending the day moving.

    Thus marks the end of one chapter of our lives, and the beginning of a new one. It’s not the first house we’ve bought, but it will be first brand new one we’ve lived in. Should be interesting!