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Monthly Archives: July 2016
“The Corner and the Window”
“The Corner and the Window” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Paul Militaru Photography
Tomato Harvest – July 14, 2016
These are all from the two tomato plants that are in the “nook” planter we have beside the porch and behind the house. We converted this brick planter from a regular one to a square foot planter a couple of years ago by taking out all the soil and replacing it with Mel’s Mix.
These plants have gotten twice as big as the ones in the main garden.
I’m beginning to think we’ll just plant two tomato plants next year – both in this planter – three weeks or so apart, putting all the big, heavy-duty plant ladders in the one planter – one behind each plant, one on each end of the planter and one in front of each plant, and maybe the last one between the two.
This year we had a storm that pulled the plants in this planter down, bending them almost double. We picked them up, propping them up as well as we could without breaking a lot of branches, but the damage was done. Next year we’ll do a better job of preparing for storms and giving the sweet plants as much support as we can.
Meanwhile, we’re feeling wonderful about our wonderful supply of tomatoes!
Filed under Gardening, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
Lewis Metal Yard Critters – Take 2
“Flying Pig”
You’ll see our flying pig as you come up the driveway. He twists and turns as the wind blows. He’s made of a 25 gallon propane tank, pipe, and sheet metal, plus googly eyes. Several years ago we decided that pigs were – indeed – flying!
“Janitor Penguin”
Our hard-working janitor penguin is made from a 25 gallon propane tank, some kind of disk vehicle part for the head, part of an oil can for a hat, pipe, weird farm implement scraps, old fireplace tools, a pair of my husband’s shop gloves, googly eyes, and a bow tie we got on the net. He stands to one side of our garage door.
Filed under Lewis yard art
I Love Tree Houses – Take 2
Ecuador-hongkiat.com
floating-boredpanda.com-Canada
rom mirrors-Sweden-boredpanda.com
Honeymoon Tree House-Kruger Natl Park-South Africa-theknot.com
Thanks to Evie Zimmerman, trendingly.com
Filed under Tree Houses
“You are My Lady”
“You are my Lady” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Paul Militaru Photography
When a Table is a Work of Art – Take 4
Hilla Shamia
Touchstone Galleries
Matthew Robinson
Imgur.com
Thanks to Emily Davis, trendingly.com
Filed under When a Table is a Work of Art
Hunkering Down
“Storms Come and Go” – Eric Thomas -etinspires.com
We’re about to start a group of storms carrying high, gusty, damaging winds, rain, and probably hair balls. This morning my husband got out before breakfast to finish mowing the lawn. I’ve just come in from
- gathering ripe tomatoes
- weed whacking around our garden and shop, and
- weed whacking the front yard
It was almost non-stop thunder when I finally called it quits. I really would have liked to weed whack in the back, too, but I decided to come in. It’s really DARK outside now and the trees are blowing around as I type. I got all the animals in and closed the garage door, and will hope for the best. We really need the rain, but it would be nicer if it were a gentle, soaking rain….
Land of Nod – Take 2
Babble
Babble
Thanks to Evie Zimmerman, trendingly.com
Filed under Uncategorized
3-D Drawings – Take 2
Joao Carvaho from Brazil is 16. His grasp of 3-D drawing is wonderful.
Thanks to Emily Davis, trendingly.com
Filed under drawings
Getting the Lard Off Progress Report 7/13/2016
echoes007 via emily davis, trendingly.com
I’m finally seeing some progress in ending the Plateau from Hell. I did a lot of reading and found that plateaus are a given when you’re trying to lose weight. In a low-carb lifestyle, oddly enough, to get off a plateau they suggest that you eat more fat, drink more water, exercise more.
I’ve made some changes and am seeing a difference on the scales. I’ve lost 44 lbs and 21 inches now.
Eleven months ago I was absolutely sedentary. My doctor was tactfully saying over and over again that I try to lose some weight. My blood test numbers, drawn quarterly for my thyroid, were high in everything. I heard myself telling my doctor we were trying to eat in a more healthy fashion and trying to lose weight. On the way home from that appointment in August of 2015, I finally decided I would either really try to lose the lard or would quit lying to my doctor.
I started a low-carb diet, trying to stay at 40 carbs per day or less, and 1200 calories or less. I signed up with MyFitnessPal.com to keep track of what I was eating and my exercises each day. I searched the net and discovered Dana Carpender’s low carb cookbooks. I bought one for slow cooker recipes and another for 15 minute meals. I did not get rid of all the stuff I shouldn’t eat because my husband didn’t especially want to lose weight and didn’t want to give anything up. I decided I would try a recipe and see what happened. The recipes were so good that my husband decided to eat what I was eating (and then anything else he wanted. He was sure that this would be yet another effort on my part that would be short-lived.
I dug out an old DVD that I call, “Walking with Annoying Leslie”, and use it almost every day. I’m also doing upper and lower body strength exercises with weights. So far, I’ve progressed from one set of eight of each of the exercises with 3 lb weights to THREE sets of eight with 5 lb weights. I also use my elliptical trainer when it’s not too hot or too cold in our garage. Finally, I grit my teeth and use our Wii Fit Plus. I now talk back to the lady who asks me, “Do you find you fall down a lot?” or “This seems to be a challenge for you.” I can hear my husband chuckle in the other room when I do. :0) I carry a pedometer just to remind myself to move more. The very best I’ve done in a day thus far is a little over 6,000 steps.
My husband tells me now and then that he’s impressed with my determination. He admires the fact that I’ve changed my lifestyle, lost weight, and regularly exercise now. He was impressed when my last blood test results were so good that I don’t have to take cholesterol lowering drugs anymore and my doc said my numbers were “disgustingly normal” – “better than his,” while grinning from ear to ear at me.
The fact that I’m 69 and was completely sedentary has been – and continues to be – a challenge. The fact that the weight loss and exercise has lessened the pain in my joints, allowing me to do what I’d like to do more and more, is a real motivation. It’s also really nice that my friends are saying nice things about how I look. I’ve come down three sizes in jeans so far. I can wear some things that used to be too tight, and have actually had to give away things that are too large.
Since I’ve tried – and failed – to get any taller, one goal is to shed another 30 lbs or so of lard. I would like to be able to walk all over a park, or use the walking trail in our town without worrying about finding a bench. I would like to lengthen the amount of time I can work in the yard without being shot for the rest of the day. I want to do as much as I can to get and stay as healthy as possible for the rest of my life.
My mantra is,
taolife.com
Filed under getting the lard off
My Day
products.geappliances.com
This is what our fridge looks like, except ours is black.
We bought it about 7 years ago, and have been really happy with it.
Lately, though, the gasket in the freezer at the bottom has become brittle on the sides, allowing air to get in and causing ice to form. We found a repairman who is ordering another gasket for us as soon as it arrives. Today, though, it was all iced up and desperately needed attention.
We got our styrofoam coolers down from the attic, spreading them out all over the kitchen. I emptied the freezer, tossing out things that were old or we don’t eat anymore. Then we defrosted the freezer that usually doesn’t have to be defrosted, using a hair dryer, a fan, and keeping the drawers open.
We just finished cleaning it all up a few minutes ago. I’m going to start returning things to the freezer in a bit.
While we were waiting, I cleaned out the rest of the fridge, finding FOUR jars of cherries. My husband tried to look blameless, but didn’t pull it off. :0) I know have the regular part of the fridge cleaned and rearranged.
It’s too bad that it takes something like the freezer filling up with ice in order for us to do a thorough cleaning. I think almost anything takes priority…
Filed under Acting Like a Grownup, I'm a slob
“Hollow Bird’s House”
“Hollow Bird’s House” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Paul Militaru Photography
Cats and Dogs – Take 1
Aelinsaar
Brak KILIC
DITK
Gaston Enria
Thanks to Emily Davis, trendingly.com
Filed under Amazing Animals
Button Art – Take 2
etsy.com-BellePapiers
LadyBug-PaintedWithButtons-etsy.com
Lindy Krickbaum-www.pinterest.com
Filed under Button Art, Creativity
I Love Treehouses – Take 1
back yard tree house-Greenwich Village NY-mnn.com
bird house-Japan-boredpanda.com
birds nest-Sweden-boredpanda.com
cathedral-Tennessee-popularmechanics.com
Thanks to Evie Zimmerman, trendingly.com
Filed under Tree Houses
Tomato Harvest July 11, 2016
I’ve been carefully slicing one tomato and sharing the slices between us as part of our dinners. We’ve been enjoying every bite.
I really think that a home-grown tomato is a completely different vegetable than what is called a tomato at the store. I use the ones from the store in the winter to add color to salads, but they just have no taste!
Today I was really lucky, having all these ripe and ready to pick. There’s also a little bitty bell pepper I’ll use in our salad. We’ll be able to splurge for several days now, having a small plate full of tomatoes each with our dinners!
It’s been really hot and extremely muggy lately, so we haven’t made any progress on installing the 3rd box in the raised garden project. I think we’ll have a couple of days of less humidity this week, so maybe we can catch up with lawn mowing, weed whacking, and get some progress made on the conversion-of-the-garden project.
I hope you have found a good way to keep cool!
Filed under Gardening, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
Funny Signs – Take 1
funny-sign-s.blogspot.com
photobucket.com
photos.ellen.warnerbros.com
photos.ellen.warnerbros.com
Filed under Funny Signs - Humor
New Outlook
I remarked to my husband while we were out shopping this morning that I thought we should get new dishes every 50 years. Happily, he agreed!
He chose our first set of crockery, so I chose this today. We got 8 place settings of dinner plate, lunch plate, square bowl, and coffee mug. I just love ’em! (For some reason, the dishes catch the light just right to make it LOOK like there are white specks on the plates. There aren’t.) The turquoise/gold/brown combination is nicely eye-popping, and I like the square plates and bowls. They actually look handmade, so I love that, as well.
Our purchase required that we get rid of the old dishes, so we’ve been packing them up the rest of the day. We have 4 place settings of the new dishes in the dishwasher and the other 4 settings on the counter now, waiting to go into the dishwasher. While we were packing things up to be donated to the Veterans Thrift Store in Fort Smith, I went through my cabinets and found lots of things I don’t use anymore and we packed those up, as well.
We’ll donate 5 large boxes of kitchenware, dishware, mugs, etc. tomorrow.
Here’s to our next 50 years!
Filed under Bright Ideas
Things You Rarely Get to See – Take 6
Thanks to an email from Marsha Koenig
What the Heat Index Means
With the actual temperature at 92 degrees F, and the humidity at 74%, that means it FEELS as if it’s 116 degrees F outside. I took the dogs out, and my husband walked out to the shop and back, and we decided that’s enough for today, except for grocery shopping.
Filed under weather
“A Curious Blackbird”
“A Curious Blackbird” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Paul Militaru Photography
Lewis Mailbox Decorations – Take 1
As you can see in this picture, our mailbox is to the right side of the bottom of our driveway. (You can see the greeter robot and one-and-a-half owls in the background).
We have a lot of fun making these metal decorations for our mailbox. :0) Over the years we’ve changed from relatively simple designs to more complex ones, some of which have 3-dimensional effects. (My husband is trying to figure out how we can add movement to these without having motors or batteries.)
We create them from 4×8 metal sheets. We have a CNC setup with a huge table. We lay the sheet metal on the table. We use a computer to create the design. (usually we choose a design we like from the net. My husband uses computer programs to create the G-Code that the computer uses to translate into directions for a plasma torch to cut. We happily watch as the torch follows the computer directions, cutting out our design. (Sometimes this is pretty grim – with endless things not working correctly. We’ve learned to do a trial run on the cutout – without the torch running – to be more sure we won’t be wasting expensive metal.)
There are lots of steps involved in each decoration, but mainly the cut out design is welded to the attachment bars. We use an overhead projector to transfer the important parts of the design to the metal we’ve cut out. I then paint the piece on both sides. We spray the piece with polyurethane to protect it from the weather as much as possible.
Each design is approximately 2-1/2 feet high with varying widths. We include an attachment bar the design is welded to, and then we have a bar with holes in it. We attach each design to the mailbox with nuts and bolts. We change the decoration approximately twice per month.
My husband hung a square metal tube suspended from the ceiling in the shop to hold our finished decorations. He makes a hanger for each design based on how long it is so that we can easily walk under the group of decorations. This shows an old picture of the holder. It’s almost completely full now, and most of these decorations have been replaced with more complicated ones.
The decoration at the beginning of this post is Snoopy and Woodstock, each carrying a U.S. Flag to celebrate Independence Day.
We’ll change to another decoration on the 15th.
Filed under Lewis Mailbox Decorations
Lewis Metal Yard Critters – Take 1
We have a gate we can close across the bottom of our driveway. It has two long metal pipes – one on either side of the driveway. We made these owls, whose dimensions are approximately 2-1/2 feet high by about 1-1/2 feet wide. They’re mainly painted thick, heavy metal. The eyes have two sizes of car reflectors, so they light up at night when light hits them.
In front of the owls, closer to the bottom of our 650 foot STEEP driveway is our greeter robot.
His torso is a large exhaust pipe from a huge farm implement. His arms and legs are various sized pipes welded together. His head is scrap metal. His eyes are car reflectors. His mouth is a piece of scrap metal welded to the head and painted. The hand that holds our address sign is a shovel. His upper hand doffs his hat. He has a yellow antenna type thing sprouting from the top of his head. His feet are huge, heavy blocks of metal. He’s over 6 feet tall. He weighs a LOT, so we wrestled him into the truck in 4 pieces and assembled him where he stands at the side of the driveway. He has a heavy chain around his neck attached to the pole behind him to keep him from falling over.
Also at the bottom of the driveway is our mailbox, for which we’ve made lots of decorations.
Filed under Lewis yard art
The Detector is Up and Working!
Optex Infrared Detector
For the past 30 years or so, we’ve had a complicated system of lines and sensors running down our driveway to alert us if someone was coming up the driveway. The system worked well for years, thanks to careful maintenance and troubleshooting by my husband. For quite awhile now, though, it’s been wonky and unreliable.
We got a new sensor and laboriously installed it and connected it to the rest of the system, sitting beside our driveway in the hot. That didn’t solve the problem, and my husband started talking about trying to put a new electrical line in. This would mean hiring a trench digging guy with equipment to dig a trench 650 feet or more down the side of the driveway, put in the new line with some kind of protection, fill the trench up again, attach all the sensors, etc. and HOPE the problem was solved THEN.
I suggested that we try to look at the problem in a different way. I thought that MAYBE if we put some kind of motion sensor or the like on the garage end of the house, anyone pulling up to the house would set it off. THEN, if we could attach that to a noise thingie in the house, it would let us know we had a visitor.
A few days ago an Optex Infrared Sensor was delivered. We spent the evening installing it, leaving the wiring for another time. The next day my husband ran the wiring we needed. We got the noisemaker to work, finally, but there was a loud hum on the line ALL THE TIME. My husband has spent all day for two days trying to build a hum suppressor and get the whole system to work.
He just came into the office, sighing as he plopped down in his chair with an orange. I expected him to gripe about equipment, the vagaries of the universe, or such, and he said quietly, “I think it works.”
I jumped up and went outside just past the driveway pad and “VOILA!” the detector saw me and made the noise which sounded on all the speakers in the house and in the driveway!!!!! AND there is NO hum on the line!
Rather than declare a victory lap and do something fun for awhile, as I’m typing he’s making a list of other things that need work so that we can prioritize them….
Filed under security
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