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Tuesday, with Rain

May1

It’s raining, but it looks like it’s finally warming up the normal way (gradually and damply, not in 90-degree bursts). Warm season might finally be here!

This weekend, we got the onions in, and we finally decided on what we were doing on the raised beds. Now to figure out how we’re getting them home… I really need a truck. Peas are next, and then the rest of the garden in a week or two.

I spent way too long looking at furniture DIY redos in the time when I was too exhausted to sand the dresser anymore. I have reaffirmed that I hate hate hate the distressed look, but that’s about it.:-)

I’m looking forward to starting to pull the house apart and put it together. Hopefully, we can get a lot done this summer!

Link du Jour: Literary Association Ads – teeny books! Giant books! Books on the stairs!

I am not yet certain about decorating with books. I’m also not sure where our bookshelves are going to end up. Would love built-ins. Will see how that works out.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/330113.html. You can comment here or there.

Food Waste and recycled furniture – what I did on my weekend

Apr29

Today, I spent several hours or so sanding down my old dresser – and by old, I mean I’m pretty sure my Mom got it at a garage sale when I was 6 or so, so it’s been in our family for 30 years, more if I’m right about the garage sale.

This thing is stained – was stained – an orangy red color, and, well, it had been a child’s dresser. Possibly two or three children’s dresser. It is beat to shit. One of the legs is broken. I have been carrying it in move after move since I moved out of my parents’ house at 20. It’s well-used.

But it’s solid wood, it’s a good size for us, and the frame is still intact. So I picked up 4 new (taller) legs at the ReUse center (you should totally see if your area has something similar!) – also stained an ugly orangish red – and got to work with the palm sander.

I’ve gotten the drawer fronts (5), the top, half the front, and one side sanded down – it’s turned out to be a lovely poplar with a very green grain. My plan is to pain the carcass and drawer fronts (the same white as the bedroom walls), stain the top to match what we’re doing with the closet doors, stain the legs to match, and buy nifty knobs.

Truth be told, I’m doing all this for the knobs.
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Wow, that was a lot of text for “I’m sanding down a dresser,” sorry.

While looking for tips on refinishing furnishing, I found “The Frugal Girl” and, specifically, her Food Waste Friday segment, in which she blogs about, yes, food waste. I find it interesting, and I’m glad to see someone else thinks of it.

T. & I have learned to minimize food waste by using the freezer a lot and not buying veggies we don’t have a plan for – we buy a lot of canned food. How do you avoid throwing food out?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/328741.html. You can comment here or there.

Gardening… start! Or my weekend in the dirt

Apr17

This was a busy long weekend for me and T!

Thursday, Mother-Woman and Father-Man (alderfather) came down with the chainsaw and the rototiller and the truck (Yay parents with machinery!) We dug some garden space out of our yard – two long rows by the side of the garage, one 18″x25′ and the other 4’x25′, about 2′ apart. The narrow one is going to be squash and onions, while the wide one will be three 8×4 raised beds housing… almost everything else.

We also put in a long trench in the back against the hedgerow for asparagus (YAY! Asparagus! Finally!), which was… fun. Till, dig out the dirt, till in the trench, repeat. Lots of work, but rewarding! Then Mom & Dad & the truck took us to Tractor Supply Company so we could get our awesome cart!!

Friday, we drove to Syracuse where I got zapped with lasers, then spent an hour at Lowe’s on the way home. Peat, manure, sun hat (Yay sun hat)…

I really need to start taking pictures, don’t I?

Saturday we put in all the spear roots. Asparagus is a weird plant to grow, in that you get these little octopus roots, and bury them just-a-bit, then, as the plants come up, bury them more and more… and then you don’t get to eat the plants for three years! But after that, you have plants for years! article here

We dug the trench for the spears about 2x as long as it needed to be, so we planted carrot seeds in the front of the rest of it. When the field behind us plants corn, as we hope they will again, we’ll plant a row of corn there, too (Corn is wind-pollinated; the more corn, the better).

Then it started raining. The onions will have to wait until tomorrow.

The Giraffe Call is still going strong! We are just $5 from the first donation-incentive level!!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/324584.html. You can comment here or there.

Gardening!

Mar23

It’s really too early for gardening, even if it has been in the 80’s the last couple days here (Last frost date is sometime in April… (looks it up)… this says mid-May, this says early May.

But! Last winter we planted garlic, and it’s coming up brilliantly. We also planted crocuses, and they’ve bloomed, and day lilies, and they’re beginning to come up.

My favorite, though? (I’m silly) Last year, we freecycled (<3 Freecycle) some chives and planted them in a patch of semi-garden next to the house. They're up and ready to be hair-cut already! (I love chives because they're always up before everything else, even in miserably grey, snowy Marches).

Speaking of freecycle, some time ago, I freecycled some seeds. I still have a few left, having stored them in the freezer in an airtight bag in the meantime, so, to fill out the chives, I planted Something that calls itself Chinese Garlic Chives around and between our two chive tufts. All The Chives!

This weekend, we’ll hit the farmstands, finish planning our raised beds, and figure out where to plant the asparagus bed.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/305205.html. You can comment here or there.

Life in the Country, Tuesday edition (Actually Monday edition, just really late).

Mar21

From [personal profile] jjhunter‘s awesome How are You? (in Haiku) post from yesterday (which you should totally read):

My cat, very proud
And very loud, this morning,
presented a mouse.

3 or 4 a.m., to be specific, with the mouse so far up his mouth he was making a weird warbling noise. Good kitty. For a certain value of good.

This is the second mouse Drake has ever caught, and he responded in about the same fashion last time.

Now, I’m not known for being squeamish – except about dead things. So T had to get the mouse away from the cat/out of his mouth and dispose of it. We gave the kitty treats and told him he was a good cat.

Ah, life in an old farmhouse.

In other news, the crocuses and daffodils are up, my chives and garlic are happy, and there’s buds on the lilac. Yay Spring! (I grew up in Lake Effect, NY. Any day over 60 before the end of April is a blessing to be enjoyed to its fullest before it snows again!)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/303895.html. You can comment here or there.

State of the Lyn… sick, sick, sick

Mar16

(Sick – first thing that came to mind when I typed that – Yay, Paypal/Smashwords reversed their censorship, now I can go back to selling dubcon incest with people with animal bits!)

That aside!!! I have been sick since probably-Saturday definitely-Monday and am just worn. the heck. out. I have done almost no writing at all – just enough to start working on the next book of Addergoole, and something like 100 words of Porter. I’m drooping.

I have THINGS to blog about in terms of house; I’ll try to get up the energy later today. But Not Dead Yet, at least.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/300052.html. You can comment here or there.

Sick Day from Writing

Mar13

Declaring this week a sick week from writing. I’ll get done what I can, but no promises on anything.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/299800.html. You can comment here or there.

Need a Fire Icon, or burning things for fun

Feb28

So, I haven’t posted about the house in a while, my bad.

We’ve been not doing a whole lot as it’s winter enough to keep from, say, painting, which we have a lot of to do. We finished framing in the bedroom window, and now can’t find the cordless drill power cord (heh) to install the shade in the window. *rolls eyes* it’s been like that a lot lately.

BUT! We have a wood-burning stove installed and it’s AWESOME!

The house isn’t really set up well for wood heat – it’s probably why there’s a chimney at both ends – being a long rectangle, more or less:

[card][bedrm[bath][kitcn]{util]
[Living][dining][kitchen][util]
[llllll][ddddddd]

(yay houseplan. There’s stairs in the dining room)

And the wood stove is in the Living room, on an awesome granite-tile pad Spouse!Man built.
So the Living Room is TOASTY, the dining room is nice, and the kitchen is a bit chill during the day.

We burn the stove from ~11 to ~11, then let the boiler take care of the night time into early morning. but the cool part is (to me) what we’re burning: deadwood from the yard, grapevines from the yard, a little semi-green stuff we cut out of the yard (yes, we’ll have the chimney thoroughly swept come spring), and 1/3 of a very old barn we freecycled and had delivered to us.

Yes. We have 1/3 of a barn (more like 1/6 now) in our garage. And it burns beautifully.

I <3 freecycle so hardcore.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/285718.html. You can comment here or there.

Thinking about Weather

Feb6

I’ve been talking, recently, with people in different climate zones- specifically @dahob and [personal profile] anke most recently – about “winter” and its varying meanings.

I grew up in Rochester, on the northern coast of one of the Great Lakes – http://www.divinglore.com/Genesis/USA/great%20lakes%20map.jpg – Ontario, the easternmost. For comparison, my husband grew up in Buffalo, between Ontario and Erie.

The weather there is snowy, wet, with a long winter normally stretching from late October to early April (it was not uncommon to have snow on Hallowe’en, although it was normally gone by mid-April). According to this chart, Rochester gets less than one inch a year less than Buffalo, although, in my memories, it came more steadily, and with less majors dumps of the stuff.

Still, I remember playing as a child in drifts as tall as I was, and having similar drifts to shovel in blizzards when I lived there – ’98, I think, and sometime around ’04 or ’05. They call it lake affect – the cold weather from Canada grabs all the water off the lake and dumps it on us.

Down in Ithaca, this site confirms that we get less snow. It’s colder down here – no giant lake-heat-and-cold-sink going on – but the worst of the weather seems to bypass us; last year, when the entire Northeast US was being dumped on, we had one small storm.

What does winter look like where you are?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/261192.html. You can comment here or there.