Painting the wall orange.

When we had our painting party in October, I purposely left this wall blank. It is the dining room wall and it needed to be orange. I didn't want to complicate the painting by adding in another color. So on Monday, I painted it orange. I'm pretty excited at how it turned out.

Getting started.
Finished. It was great paint, and I only had to put one coat on.
When I get a chance, I'll put up the zip code map of Portland on the orange wall. It should look great there. In the meantime, I'm really happy how the brightness of the orange offsets the soft yellow of the rest of the room.
Just for fun, here is a picture of the house five hours after we moved into it. Some things have changed since then.
I'm busy planning for Shelf Building Extravaganza! Stay tuned.

Back in August, we had a work day.

This was a very productive workday. First we moved the lettuce beds from the side of the house to the side of the back yard.

Before. Notice the squash plants on the left which will produce the lovely squash highlighted in this entry. Anyway. The lettuce beds on the side of the house didn't really work because they get too little sun. So we moved them over on the right side of the yard....
As you can see here. You can't really see in this photo, but the apple trees got relocated to the ends of the raised beds. I think they will get more sun there and be happier. I've been having problems with cats and squirrels digging in the beds, so I put yogurt container lids all over trying to discourage them from digging. It didn't really work. I'm going to get floating row covers before I plant next year to see if that solves the problem.
Back in May we started seed for Spearmint, Peppermint and Pennyroyal. At the time we were inundated with ants and read that planting mint around you house will repel the ants. Of the 60 seeds we started (20 of each) we ended up with 4 peppermint plants and about 16 pennyroyal plants. We planted them around the house. They should make a nice ground cover between the grass and the house. Already they are winning by surviving in our cement soil.
And yes, I know mint spreads. It is not near the garden so have no fear.
We also worked on Matt's bike. We changed the knobby tires out for road ones and put on the bike rack. We also put in some tubes filled with slime to help him avoid flats. His bike is all set to go!

Long overdue harvest photos.

Tomatoes liked my garden this year. Here is the pile of Roma tomatoes I harvested from my garden plot. There are beefsteaks on the bottom of the pile just peeking out. Peppers also liked my garden. There are two yellow peppers sitting on the counter.

The beefsteaks took forever to ripen, but they were huge when they did. Almost all of them cracked on the bottom which I am blaming on myself. I got bored of watering them and just let them be and I think that didn't help. The one I am holding was particularly huge and did not crack. I gave it to my brother for his birthday which is September 26th if that gives you any idea how long it took for them to ripen. There is also a tiny red pepper sitting on the counter.
My squash took over a lot of the garden as well as some of the yard. It produced these five specimens.
For awhile when people asked what kind of squash this was I would tell them "Winter" having forgot the kind of squash it was. I have to work on that record keeping aspect of gardening. However, I walked through the farmers market yesterday and found that it was "Long Island Cheese" which is a great keeper squash. When I get to making some stuff with my squash I'll let you know how it turns out.

We like games.

We like a lot of kind of games, but the so-called European Board Games are particularly popular at The Orange Door lately. That's our newest one, BattleLore made by the same company that makes Shadows over Camelot, which is my current favorite. We also have RoboRally and Matt bought Ticket to Ride for his dad a few years ago.

Matt was home sick last week and kept begging me to play with him after I got home from work. I finally had time on Thursday and played my first game of BattleLore. I went down to defeat, which was to be expected because you have to play this a few times before you get the strategy down.

Our upstairs neighbor told Matt about the number of Meet Up events where you can play board games. He's at one now, playing. I may never see him on a Sunday ever again.

8 Random Things

Back in October, Shawn and Sara posted 8 Random Things on their blog and encouraged other people to list 8 Random Things of their own. We made a list of our random things which I put on my desk to put on the blog. It was then covered by other important papers and just unearthed today. Better late than never.

1. We are a car-free household.

2. We are big Veronica Mars fans, but have only seen the show on DVD.

3. We are both in the helping professions.

4. We are big readers, though we rarely read the same types of books

5. We have been known to bike long distances with friends, but not each other.

6. We like Shadows Over Camelot, a fabulous board game. Patricia thinks the name is cheesy and replaces the word "Shadows" with other ominous sounding words: "Dark Skies," "Hurricanes," "Dick Cheney," "Flat Tax"

7. We each have a vice that the other can't stand. His vice: Video games. Mine: People Magazine.

8. We each agree that the other is funny but say that "I am the funny one in the relationship" (Though Patricia said this phrase first, so clearly she is the funny one in the relationship.)

A long time ago, we used to be friends....

People in the know will recognize the title above as the theme song to Veronica Mars. We have completed watching the series. I got home on Friday after work and we put in episode 13 and kept going until we watched the last one. Then we watched the DVD commentaries until Matt cried "Uncle" at, ahem, four a.m.

There was no official finale, as the show was not renewed at the end of the season, so it was sad to watch Veronica walk off into the rain, but having watched the pitch for Season 4 --which jumps several years into the future as Veronica starts working for the F.B.I.--Matt and I agreed that we wouldn't probably have liked a Season 4 in that form. One of the things we both love about the show are the interactions with all the other cast members.

We'll be buying Season 1 so we have a complete set. You should too. It's a great show.

We've been homeowners six months and 5 days!

October 27, aside from being the day after my birthday and our wonderful painting party, was also our six month anniversary in our house. (Pause here while Patricia thinks, walks over to the calendar and consults her own blog) Oh wait, we moved on the 20th. I guess we are a bit further past our six month anniversary than I thought. Anyway, the point of this post is to summarize what we have finished in the last six months. Here we go. (And yes, I'm am loving the "bullet point" button in Blogger recently.)

• Black shelf unassembled, painted and reassembled
• Shelving on pantry wall installed
• Dig garden bed
• Fix shower curtain
• Paint Pantry
• Get a hammock
• Paint the kitchen
  
• Paint the great room
• Knife Holder installed
• Plant Evergreen Huckleberry
• Plant Apple Trees
• Install Towel Racks
• Put up hooks in office
• started a bat box (I'm sure we will finish it this winter)
• Planted a garden
• got new furniture
• planted mint and pennyroyal (post still to come)
• moved the lettuce beds (post still to come)

That is 18 projects which averages out to three per month. Which is much more than I feel like we have done. There are "only" 25 things left on the list. Good job us!