I bought ten Qwiic adapters from Amazon. They’re the size of a quarter, and they cost six bucks apiece.
They shipped them to me in seven separate packages.
Remember last month’s birthday log disaster?
Charcoal lighter gel works way better than Bacardi.
Last year, we put a bird feeder on the deck, and we enjoyed the show all winter long.
The squirrels ate through the plastic, though, and we needed a new one. You’d think it would be easy to find a squirrel-proof, pole mounted bird feeder like our old one, but I Could Not find one. I was looking for a feeder that sits atop a pole, but every feeder I looked at was designed to dangle. I looked in four stores and Amazon, and I was really surprised.
Last year’s feeder was chewed up beyond repair. At least that’s what I told Mary. But under the circumstances, I took another look at it. Hmmm. What if I turned it upside down and covered over the chewed half? Then I could drill new feeding holes near the perches, and reinforce the parts the squirrels like to chew. It just might work.
Introducing the world’s first carbon fiber bird feeder.
The squirrels will gnaw their teeth to gnubs.
My potato patch was one of the bright spots in our drought stricken garden, and I harvested about 50 pounds of spuds, which we stacked on racks in the garage to dry. They sat there, near a window, for a couple of weeks.
Mary was going to make a big batch of scalloped potatoes with them, and I was washing them off, and under the dirt, they were green. It turns out that potatoes turn green when they’re exposed to light, and the green part is toxic. And so, in an abundance of caution (she made me do it), we threw out my entire potato harvest. Ouch.
I think of it as a valuable data point.
Now all that meat and no potatoes
Just ain’t right, like green tomatoes
Here I’m waiting, palpitatin’
With all that meat and no potatoes
– Louis Armstrong
I’m too old, I decided, to park outside in the snow in the winter.
I’ve got a perfectly good garage bay I could park in, but it’s full of garbage and motorcycles.
The garbage, I can just throw away. But the motorcycles need to go somewhere. If I’m going to park inside this winter, I decided, I’m going to need more room.
I did a lot of thinking about how carried away I want to get? At first, I wanted a garage addition, but I talked myself down to a shed on a gravel pad. I bought one off the lot, and they delivered it on a truck. Wham bam!
I ran electricity in a trench and, to mark the wire, I bought a big box of bulbs and planted them every foot. With red tulips and yellow daffodils, I wrote ‘Reid Mary’ along the trench in morse code.
Actually, it came out as ‘Reid Marn’, because I ran out of tulips in the middle of the ‘Y’
When we put in the basement patio last Spring, we only finished the apartment half, and we ‘saved money’ by leaving out the stone in the Shop half. But the finished half looks so good, it makes the shop half look bad. Ghetto, even. And guess which half I use every day?
The contractor told me this was going to happen, and he was right. He managed to fit me in, and they finished off the patio past the shop, like I should’a done in the first place.
It’s nice.
But it came out crooked, because …
Back in the day, when we were building the house and pouring the foundation, the concrete guy needed final drawings, and what I gave him had an arithmetic error. They built it like I drew it, and that whole wing of the house is a couple inches crooked.
Which is why the patio, which is straight on the apartment side, is crooked on the shop side.