Well, it's that time of year again. In the spirit of the season, I'll be taking a break from blogging to make merry with family and friends. Hooray for the old year (thank you, and goodbye), and here's a wish for the new: May peace and joy be upon our house, and yours, and may we be shelter and comfort in the year to come.
Merry Christmas! See you soon.
Posted in Electrical on December 22, 2009|
One of the things I love about renovations and general fixups is finding out what's possible. In an ideal world, we wanted to put our garage lights on a timer, to have them go on and off while we're away so it looks like somebody's around. I thought you could only get timers for freestanding lights that come with a plug (what do they call those…lamps?), but it turns out you can get them for wall switches too. The tiny programming buttons, which can only be programmed by tiny fingers, are under the display panel on the left, hiding behind the plastic. Will wonders never cease.
Posted in Garden on December 21, 2009| 1 Comment »
Well, we found the camera, so here are the gargoyles in all their glory. Now that I look at the photos again, they seem almost cute, but having them on the house with backlit red eyes was a different story.
I spotted another visitor at the suet feeder: the tiny red-breasted nuthatch. So far, we're making our suet out of leftover bacon grease, so I think it's only fair that from here on in, the feeder gets called The Greasy Spoon.
(Photo: Northwest Ohio Birds)
Posted in Food and Drink, Kitchen, Recipes on December 17, 2009|
Posted in Food and Drink, Kitchen on December 16, 2009|
When we first took a close look at the kitchen sink, we noticed that something that used to be to the right of the faucet wasn't there anymore. At first we thought it was supposed to be a soap dispenser, but when we opened the cupboard below, we saw a small tank hooked up to three filters. Surprise! We had a reverse osmosis system set up down there – but no drinking faucet for it up top. Aesthetic andy found one online, ordered it, and installed it last week. Now we can have cold filtered water any old time.
Four of these came to hang out in the big tree over the weekend. They didn’t eat anything, just spread out and sat hunched over, like thugs. The bullies of the playground. You don’t kick sand at these guys.
(Photo: European Starling, New Zealand Birds)
This is what some of our new kitchen knobs look like (the drawers in the kitchen are going to have something different to break things up a bit). The design is called a Cloisonné pattern. Cloisonné is an art technique that involves soldering metal to a surface in the outline of a design, and then filling in the spaces (cloisons in French) with enamel paste. Sounds fancy, but mostly they just help us open the cupboards.
Posted in Kitchen on December 11, 2009|
We switched out some of the knobs on our kitchen cupboards because andy said they reminded him of beady black eyes. I threw the the old knobs in a pile on the counter and left the kitchen. When I came back, they looked like this:
And when I came back the next time, they looked like this:
Posted in Holidays on December 10, 2009|
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