Making Stuff

Hideous Objects
Now that all the lucky recipients of this Christmas's arts-n-crafts projects have been given their dubious gifts, I can finally blog about them. They're picture frames (I later put a photo of Matt & me inside a giant, lightning-struck baldcypress trunk in each one).

I think I earlier characterized them as hideous objects. You can see why.

Ours, Ladonna's, Mom & Dad's

Aunt Pauline's, my brother & sister-in-law's

The responses were the most fun. I made a prototype for the K's (not a frame, but a star--not gonna try that again--too many edges), and when Kate opened it, she said "Oh! Did--you--make--this?" In the sort of strangled tone a non-smoker would use with a five-year-old who had just presented her with a particularly hideous hand-made ash tray.

Mom's response was along those same lines. Ladonna cleverly skirted the issue of the frame by commenting lavishly on the photo.

My brother, on the other hand, took one look at the object and said, "Oh my god the sofa!"

You'll remember the hideous old family sofa that we replaced earlier this year. Well, it had been a member of the family for so long (since before my birth), that I thought maybe some of my loved ones would like to have a keepsake. So I made little picture frame ornaments, using foamboard, hot glue, Swavarski crystals, and ribbons. I tried to dress them up as much as possible--that upholstery is really overwhelming--but to make them attractive was beyond my skills. Aunt Pauline's turned out best because it is the most thoroughly covered in ribbon. And Ladonna's wasn't too awful. The others, well, they have sentimental value. I hope.

Victory Garden
In other artsy-craftsy-homemakery news, I got a jump on a veggie garden for next spring. It's been a while since I've attempted such a thing, but in the current economic environment... Hell, it beats learning how to darn socks. Plus, I want access to those stripy eggplants and to our favorite Aji Limon chiles, which are so hard to find. I ended up ordering from The Pepper Gal, the only source that had poblanos, pasillas, chile pequin (for the wildlife, not for us--we're nowhere near that badass), and Aji Limon. In the past, I've preferred to buy seedlings from nurseries--it can be hard to match nursery-grown stoutness and vigor--but now that I have a greenhouse at my disposal, growing plants from seed seemed like the obvious choice--much cheaper, much more variety.

In addition to the Pepper Gal seeds, I also ordered from Harris and dark horse Swallowtail Gardens.

Here's what I should be receiving in the mail:

Ornamentals:

• Poppy, Oriental--Beauty Of Livermore
• Larkspur, Giant Imperial-Blue Spire (to go around the gazebo--I positively adore blue larkspur against a white fence)

Herbs:

• Basil, Lemon--Mrs. Burns (my favorite basil)
• Lemon Grass, East Indian

Veggies:

• Artichoke, Violetto (See artichoke advice from Natural Gardener)
• Lettuce, Loose-Leaf--Lollo Rossa
• Radishes, D'avignon (Do radishes grow in Texas? Especially ones with Frenchy names? We'll find out.)
• Tomatoes, Cherry--Super Sweet 100
• Tomatoes, Cherry--Yellow Pear
• Tomatoes, Heirloom--Black Plum
• Tomatoes, Heirloom--Brandywine, Pink (I know these heirloom tomatoes aren't going to grow here, yet I'm compelled to try)
• Watermelons, Charleston Grey (really, really pretty. see pic)
• Watermelons, Sugar Baby
• Eggplant Ophelia
• Eggplant Twinkle
• Eggplant Classic (Seriously? Three eggplant varieties? Damn those seed catalogs with their irresistable veggie porn!)
• Lettuce Harmony
• Okra Cajun Delight (which Matt doesn't eat, but we both feel that it's a necessary nod to our southern roots)
• Pepper Sweetheart
• Guajillo Peppers
• Aji Limon peppers
• Peru Yellow (Hopefully, a synonym for Aji Limon)
• Ancho Mulato (Poblano)
• Peter Hot (a very naughty pepper that Matt loves, yet refuses to eat. I don't suppose I can blame him--I expect I'd feel the same way if it were a girly-part pepper.)
• Chile Pequin pepper
• Holy Mole Pasilla pepper
• Aji Cristal pepper

For Fun:

• Gourd Baby Bottle
• Pumpkin Fairytale
• Pumpkin Lumina

So far, I've only received the pepper seeds. Today I planted a few seeds of the most practical varieties, hoping for an early harvest: Aji Limon, Ancho Mulato, and Guajillo.

Many New Things

New sofa! (and ottoman)

Well. Today certainly has been full of excitement.

The long-anticipated sofa (with ottoman) finally arrived. It's very big and very comfy (if you like your sofas firm, which we do). I'm having some slight regrets about the lovely cotton velveteen espresso-colored upholstery we chose. At the time, it seemed charmingly decadent, but it would also appear to be a fuzz magnet. And Po's striped hairs show up beautifully on that dark brown. I guess we'll have to keep some lint rollers handy and wield them often.

We'll test the sleeper this weekend. The old one had a pretty decent mattress, for a sofa bed. We'll see what this one's like after several hours.

Next on the list of new things, Matt's work had this spare gas grill that they wanted, somewhat inexplicably, to get rid of. Well, we give used appliances a happy home here at Chez M, so he loaded that sucker up and carted it off. It's much larger and less rickety than our other second-hand gas grill, so that's nice. If anyone wants the older old one, let me know--otherwise it'll be hitting the freecycle.

And finally, most dramatically, we acquired a new cat.

This was rather a big step for us, as I only became a somewhat reluctant cat owner last year, and, since, moreover, our catspace is not big and is currently full of Po, who is large, and contains multitudes.

However.

She'd been hanging around the yard begging handouts for some weeks, and she's such a sweet little kitty with a Little Tramp moustache and the most plaintive meow ever. And, furthermore, there's some sort of cat disease going around Manchaca (deep south Austin, for you out-of-towners. Pronounced "man-chaack"--the last "a" is silent, for some reason.) We couldn't continue feeding her and petting her if there was a risk of passing something on to Po. But at the same time, we didn't want to abandon her to whatever-the-germ-is. She's very affectionate--if skittish--and so very skinny. We named her Isadora, which seemed like a good name for a wee skinny little cat with dainty paws. But she almost immediately became "Izzy."

We snagged her Sunday night and put her in the garage till we could take her to the vet, but our garage (French for "decrepit old shack") turned out to be anything but hermetic, and Izzy--who loathes confinement, we have discovered--escaped. To our surprise, she came around again last night (we grilled--Izzy positively cannot resist the smell of a cookout) and was gullible enough to come within snatching distance. We nabbed her again, this time putting her in a great big crate (the kind you put Rottweilers in). She mewed piteously, and we had to keep reminding ourselves that it was for her own good in the long run.

Today we took her in to the vet. They confirmed that she wasn't microchipped and hadn't been fixed, so between those facts and the absence of a collar and her general skinniness, we assume she's a bona fide stray. The vet gave her a clean bill of health (apparently, her ears are "gorgeous" from a veterinary perspective) except that the feline leukemia virus test came back indeterminate. We're to come back in months for further testing. Fortunately, Po's had his shots and boosters, so he should be okay. The vet also recommended feeding them separately and keeping them physically separated until they've had time to get used to each other.

Izzy: the new kitty on the new sofa

She's now curled up (shedding white hairs) on the new sofa, apparently happy as a clam. She's been assigned temporary sleeping quarters in the master bath while she and Po acclimate to one another. Tonight we'll discover whether or not she has an intuitive understanding of the litter box. She does seem to have grokked on to the come command, though she's not always terribly motivated to actually respond to it. (We've been training Po over the months--he's a wayward kitty, and it relieves my feelings to see him obey me in at least some things. He does come and sit beautifully. He does stay and go when he's not feeling naughty. And he does jump, down, and stand, but these are newer acquisitions to his vocabulary, and he's a little hesitant about them.)

Le sofa est mort... Vive le sofa!

We evicted the old sofa today (and added some scratches to our bamboo floor, sadly. It opted not to go gently into that good night).

It was an 8-foot-long sleeper, and it weighed a ton. Two moves ago, as our moving guys struggled to maneuver the thing up a set of apartment stairs, my well-used old sofa--the cradle of my infancy (and my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, come to think of it) was disrespectfully referred to as a "motherfucker." We managed to heave the old thing out the front door without a single curse, but that's probably because all our breath was being used to grunt.

The Final Egress of the Sofa

We somehow wrangled the beast into Matt's trailer. He'll be taking it to his folks' property at Dale. Two's going down, but ain't but one's coming back.

I believe it will be a gory scene of dismemberment and immolation.

We're gonna take a little ride...

The new hotness is supposed to arrive this Tuesday. Farewell old sofa.

So-FA!

Dutifully blowing our rebate check like the patriots we are
We looked at some more sofas today, and I think this may be the one: a brown velour sofa with contrasting funky pillows. Mostly safely bourgeois, a tiny smidge bohemian.

One wants to be settled and have attractive things that are a good long-term investment, but one doesn't want to be boring. I mean, I was a ghetto-dwelling grad student for a long time. I had some clothes stolen from one apartment laundromat when thieves absconded with the washing machine they were sitting in, fer cryin out loud. I don't want to forget my roots. I don't want to be too gentrified. But I like pretty things. So. Brown velour + funky pillows.

The colors below aren't quite right (The photo of the pillow swatch came out oddly African, but it's actually kind of piquantly 1960s-ish), but you get the idea--the sofa's nice and rectangular. We like a rectangular sofa.

Very rough mock-up of possible new sofa. Shape is right; color is not completely wrong

It'll have a queen-sized sleeper, too, so we can have multiple guests at once or snuggle up for late-night movie watching. And it's good and firm and has a clean sort of an outline. The velour feels just a little decadent, too, which is fun. Our sofa says, "yeah, baby" and waggles its eyebrow rakishly.

Closeup of pillow fabric. In real life, it has more colors in it. Zesty and lubricious!

We're waiting on some swatches from the manufacturers before we make up our minds for sure, but I think this one is going to be it. And it's going to be 25% off! If we order when the sale is on, we'll be celebrating the arrival of the new sofa and the departure of the old by the end of September. Rest in peace, 33-year-old hideous yellow-and-orange-and-brown weave. You've served my family long and honorably.

R.I.P.

New upstairs vanity
In other acquisitions, last weekend Lowes put a vanity I've been eyeballing for some time on sale--about 40% off--so I went ahead and nabbed it. Since it's abnormally thin, it's an unusually good fit for our wee snippet of a guest bathroom, which contained no cabinet of any kind. And it's all part of my long-term plans for making everything in the guest room match. Oddly, it will be the only set of rooms in the house that does.

A. New shelf matching new vanity
B. Picture to be replaced by mirror that matches shelf
C. New vanity--now we have a place (other than the floor) to store toilet paper!
D. Fixture, mirror, and towel bar set to ultimately be replaced with shiny new prettiness to match the vanity.

The sink is a separate piece and is held on by gravity--not, in my opinion, a particularly adequate adhesive. So I smeared a big fat bead of liquid nails on the top of the cabinet and set the sink on that. I feel a little anxious about this--was there some reason for the top to be a separate piece? Something to do with--I don't know--expansion and contraction under humid conditions or something? But the deed is done. If the vanity experiences some sort of catastrophic breakdown as a result, I'll be sure to let you know. That's what happens when you don't follow the instruction manual to the letter.

Elsewhere...
No movement on the swing or trellis. It's too damn hot. Anxiously awaiting autumn, the true season of renewal here in Central Texas.

Irrigation Plan

...Or, Fun with Visio
Matt's been sweating and swinking (good word, no? It's archaic for toiling & drudging) on an irrigation system for us for the past month or so. The most important, of course, are our new trees (Magnolia and baldcypress), the hedge of jasmine, and the re-transplanted pear, so those got attention first. But whenever Matt has time and spare money to pick up a valve, some emitters, t-connectors, barbs, or converters, he's been adding on. The system has become sufficiently complex that I decided to map it for my own benefit and that of whoever buys the house next.

Plus, I wanted to play with Visio before my company closes and I have to give their laptop back to them. (And, by the bye, why the hell didn't I do this sooner? Visio is far and away the easiest tool for mocking up blueprints and landscape plans I've ever tried--way better than that cheap crap from Broderbund or my pointlessly arcane and convoluted efforts in Photoshop. This is easy.)

So here's what we've got (click on the picture to see a larger [legible] version). The solid black lines are our main lines. The thinner black lines are thinner tubes. Dashed lines are buried.

Aqua is for places where we plan to put irrigation. The aqua bits don't connect to anything because we haven't quite figured out how it's all going to tie together. The quartered circles represent valves. The two aqua spigots (called "bibs" in official Visio-speak) are existing spigots that do not actually work and never have during our entire tenure here. I hope we'll get them operational someday.

Neat, huh?

Irrigation plan--click to enlarge

We don't have any automated timers yet. I'm not much inclined to buy one, since (as you know), I'm not a fan of regular supplemental water. It's all very well to have a system that (A) nurtures baby trees along or (B) gets the garden through a severe drought, but I'm not interested in trying to create a rain forest here. On the other hand, as Matt will probably want to point out when he reads this, I do have a tendency to turn on hoses and sprinklers and forget about them till the following morning. Some water conservationist I am. So the jury's out on a timing system at the moment.

That mention of work reminds me--some of you may not know that Fusion is shutting down this August. This is rather a downer, but I found a well-paying long-term contract position with the Texas Education Agency (doing tech writing with a soupçon of business analysis and project management), so all is well. Or mostly well--my cube at the State is the most ghastly hole you ever saw--barely 3' square with a giant pillar taking up about a quarter of the space, no natural light in the entire cube farm and the ugliest florescent lights--all sickly and yellowy--and of course everything is beige everywhere. Worst of all, they move people around so much that no one bothers to decorate their cubes so the beigeness reigns supreme. And it's about 81 degrees in there--apparently, we're singlehandedly compensating for the rest of America's inability to reduce greenhouse emissions. But everyone seems very nice and very smart and I think it will be a good opportunity to add some skills to the old resume.

The other happy thing about the job is that it will enable Matt & I to go ahead with our plans to buy a replacement sofa, plans we had to abort when we first heard that Fusion was going to close. We went to Ethan Allen yesterday and spent a small geologic epoch contemplating fabrics and pondering firmnesses. (Matt was very patient about this, by the way. Although he did put the kibosh on some of my more... exciting selections.) We had really liked the Crate and Barrel experience earlier this summer--good firmness levels on the sofas (we like a firm sofa--probably because we're accustomed to a 33-year-old sofa will very little stuffing left), reasonable prices, good service, but I have lingering concerns about the fabric options. So there is more shopping to do before we come to any decisions. This is momentous, you know. Our first real sofa. Our first big furniture investment. Not some fly-by-night, temporary solution, like our $25 Ikea coffeetable, our hand-me-down kitchen table, or our silver-painted yard-sale dresser. This is for real. WE. HAVE. ARRIVED. Adulthood, give us a nice, big hug.