I bought some fall starts. This is because I didn't start my own starts back at the end of June/early July. 20 minutes to place 4 Kale starts. Then I stopped and spent 9 minutes making 8-inch and 9.5-inch spacers. 24 minutes to plant the 4 chard and 6 lettuce starts. 21 minutes to water the whole shebang.
I've covered the seeds I planted yesterday
And here's why. Upstairs Kitty loves to use it as a litter box. Here, she's thwarted.
Total today: 1 hour, 14 minutes.
I spent all day in the garden. It has been very hot of late, and today temperatures cooled. It was great to be outside and working.
Hey, what happens if you totally weed your garden and then you don't weed it for a few weeks in the summer? What if you just wanted to weed everything all at once? How long would that take? I can tell you that in my case, it takes 4 hours and 45 minutes. That includes everything: Herb bed at Leo's, front bed, parking strip, side yard, potato patch at Leo's, my yard, Emilia's yard. It was a marathon session, but I didn't hate it.
Here is Emilia's backyard. The double dug beds are looking pretty good, but the rest is a solid carpet of weeds.
These weeds were growing among the beans I planted. "I wonder what they grow into?" I mused to my friend. She told me and told me to pull them. After two weeks, they were much bigger and I did.
Post weeding.
Here's the side yard. With the pathways I use the "scrape"method where I just take my hoe and scrape off the top layer of weeds, ignoring the roots. It means they come back, but I just scrape again. Perhaps someday I'll get some ground cover down.
The rain garden hasn't been weeded all summer long. It was the one thing I didn't get to last time. The plants are happier now that they don't have so much competition.
Harvest! Not bad. Not bad at all.
What else did I do? 1 hour, 47 minutes planting. I put in a mustard cover crop (which I have intentions of also eating if it sprouts) on the side yard and emptied old packets of collard seeds into the the newly double dug beds in Emilia's yard. I started a bunch of lettuce, kale, and chard for fall harvest. It's like I think I don't have to go back to work on Monday.
I spent 13 minutes writing up what I had planted.
I spent 8 minutes putting things away.
Total time this week: 6 hours, 53 minutes All on one day. Eeek.
Music. I didn't want to deal with the ipod but I had the following songs stuck in my head all day:
"It's Time" Imagine Dragons:
"Somebody that I used to know" Gotye
There is no escaping this song this summer.
My first observation was that Willamette Shakespeare's production values are much higher than we usually see with outdoor (and indoor, for that matter) Shakespeare. I gasped when I saw the list of donors and amounts. They seem to be much better supported than the companies we usually support. I am a fan of the bare bones productions, so I have to admit I was a little standoffish from the get-go.
Then, there was an incredibly obnoxious woman selling raffle tickets who was very loud and insistent and spoke with a fake English accent. While I appreciate her enthusiasm and support, she was very annoying and produced the opposite effect in that I did not give any money or buy a raffle ticket because I didn't want her to continue broadcasting her loud voice over my attempts at conversation.
So we weren't off to the best start, as far as I was concerned, but once the actors took the stage the show was delightful. First off, we saw Ithica Tell in NWCTC's King John last fall and really liked her. In this production, she played a marvelous Beatrice. It was a role where she cavorted and verbally jousted and capered across the stage. She was quite fun to watch and I hope to see more of her. People I also enjoyed in this picture were Holly Wigmore's Hero and Clara Weishahn was a good Ursula, rocking the sexy librarian look. Also, Kristopher Mahoney-Watson who played Conrade as well as a Messenger had an amazing deep and lush voice. The program says "he is an avid metal fan and an amateur basketball player with delusions of one day making it in the NBA," but as far as I'm concerned, he could get a job reading the phone book with that voice.
Claudio was played by Chris Ringkamp and Jason Maniccia was a delighful Benedict. We've just seen him in two NWCTC's plays this year, Measure for Measure and Hamlet.
Here are our musicians for the evening: Ali Ippolito and Jason Okamoto. They provided lovely music to set the stage.
One fun thing about Portland right now is that with the amount of Shakespeare going on you get to see actors in many different roles in many different companies. On the left, you can see Clara-Liis Hillier as Dogberry. We recently saw her with OPSFest and in NWCTC's Much Ado About Nothing. She played a different role then.
So overall, it was a fantastic performance and we will be seeking out Willamette Shakespeare again. If that obnoxious lady isn't hectoring, I will also donate money.
Okay, so this might even be more awesome than sourdough bread. I can make Sourdough English Muffins! How cool is that? They aren't very hard.
Also, did you know English Muffins are cooked on the stove top? I actually knew that because I read a recipe sometime in the past, but it's also pretty awesome. Like making pancakes, except with a better end product.
I used a recipe from Wild Yeast which I found here.
Today's task involves putting in the soap dishes and touching up a few areas.
Before soap dish instillation.
I had a good helper.
Just a shout-out to the soap dish my parents bought me when I went off to Cottey. It came from Wal-Mart, because that was the only place to shop in Nevada, Missouri. I remember picking it out because I had to go with tan because the other colors were too hideous. As you can tell by the amount of broken plastic, this soap dish has been dropped several times, but it still does what it is intended to do. Most recently, the white part was sitting in the soap dish part of the shower caddy to better catch the slivers of soap which would always fall through the shower caddy's larger spaces. Am I getting rid of this soap dish? No way! It is back under the sink, holding a scrub brush.
Now Matt and I each have our own soap, which means for me, no more broken soap! There's also a soap dish for my razor and pumice stone. We're living in a shower caddy-free world!
The soap is just the right height for Matt. Me? I have to stretch a bit, but that's what being short is all about.
I used this brush to do the touch-ups. This paint so far has demonstrated it will chip easily (if you look closely, you can see where some scraped off during the soap dish instillation) so I have repackaged some paint into small canning jars so I can easily do touchups, if need be.
Here was the radio that was my faithful companion during this project. This was my first CD player, a passdown from the college boyfriend. It has been living in one of the sheds and I have been debating getting rid of it because I never use it. However, the one radio in the house is in the living room and I didn't want to blast music through the duration of my project, so this worked nicely.
I listened to 94.7 FM exclusively for the duration and I have the following observations:
If one can time one's project to mostly take place during the 90 minute music stretch at 10am, it's pretty awesome
If not, prepare to hear a lot of commercials because despite what they say, five songs is not a "long music stretch."
Why exactly does this guy have Trojans in his head?
I think that the entire demographic of 94.7 FM consists of men who don't know how to propose. There was an ad for jewelers who specialized in diamond engagement rings every commercial break.
Hey there, jewelers who specialize in diamond engagement rings! How about making a commercial or two that reflect the reality that many couples buy their engagement rings together. Or, perish the thought, that sometimes the woman buys the rings. And not just in lesbian relationships!
All those songs from the 80s teenager movies? You can bundle them together and think of them as one song and then stop playing that song for a very long time. I really like "If you leave" by OMD, but I really only need to hear it, say, every two years or so. Not every other day.
Same for Nirvana
Same for Pearl Jam.
So! Am I done with the bathroom? Not yet. I have to wrestle with the conundrum of if I want to purchase brand new towels that match the colors of the bathroom, or keep using my current towels which do not match because they are still good. It's "matchy-matchy me" vs. "frugal me." Future me can tell you that the "matchy matchy me" is going to win out. I'll have photos of the finished product soon.
Oh bathroom painting project, you go on and on. Mostly because I make an already hard project harder by adding complicating factors.
The shelves above the toilet are a contrasting color, meaning an attempt at careful painting until I decided I was just too annoyed to be careful anymore and taped up the whole thing.
A sign of a Patricia Collins Paint Project is the roller getting on some item and leaving a mark I do not notice until it is too late even though I am paying attention and being very careful. This is the crux of why I do not like to paint.
We are moving into a world where there is no shower caddy in our shower. Making this possible is this shelf.
Matt was home and it was a good thing, as I had never seen anchors like this before. They were completely flat on one side. How do I put them in the wall? The directions were no help, as they showed normal anchors. "Origami Boyfriend" came to my rescue and showed me that these anchors could be folded into normal looking anchors. Thank goodness for Origami Boyfriend.
Here's the shelf in place. It went in rather quickly, (15 minutes! the box said, and was not far off) and with little trouble. I did have to tighten a screw on the bottom of the brackets which was difficult due to the angle and the lip of the shower getting in the way. I ended up taking the screw head bit which did fit into the space and twisting it with my hand, breathing deeply while I dropped the bit multiple times.
The shelf now holds our shampoo and conditioners.
With my remaining amount of time today I ripped off the tape. This was a new, green frog tape I had not tried before and I was impressed. It did not let paint bleed in as the blue tape has and it did not really tear much of the paint it was covering off of the wall. I will have to do a little touching up, but not much.
And that's the end of work time today. But wait! There is more work to do.
