How's Robb?

... That's what Robb said to me tonight, as he showed off the work he'd gotten done on our bathroom. I swear, I love that man so hard.

... On Saturday, Robb and I drove out to Davis to meet up with Alison and Allan . We poked around a few local farm stands ( locally grown lacto-fermented olives! Astonishingly inexpensive pecans!) We drove around the nature loop at the Yolo Bypass , and saw a staggering number of birds.  (Not many photos alas, because I was the driver.)  Alison and Allen are ideal birding pals. They're unbelievably knowledgeable, creative and terrifically fun to hang out with.  After gawking at the birds, and having lunch, we drove the back roads to a local sheep farm, Meridian Jacobs .  The sheep were charming and curious. I've met Robin, who owns meridian Jacobs a few times at fiber events.  She and Alison are good friends.  Robin generously gave us a tour of the barn.   (Photography was a bit difficult, because the sheep are active and squirmy, and because the barn was quite dark.) Jacobs are a rare "primitive" breed of sheep, who naturally grow multi

... We are hard at work, scraping off the peeling paint in our bathroom.  Robb observed that our "improvements" make the place look like the restroom in a dive bar.  For those wondering, etiquette demands that the correct response to a remark like that is to high-five the speaker, spin a pirouette, and burst into synchronized laughter.  We are utterly correct, at our house.

... Here's a drawing Robb made of our bathroom.  Drawings like this are helpful when considering alternate layouts for plumbing fixtures.  In our case, they show us that we don't have a lot of options, other than what's already here.  No other options that is, unless we want to rip out walls, which is something we're not interested in doing. Those panoramic photos all lie. They make this microscopic bathroom look enormous.

... This is how things looked on the morning of Boxing Day.  Robb had scraped the paint off our medicine cabinet months ago.  How things looked at the end of the day. I spent the afternoon scraping paint off of the woodwork.  I avoided anything that might be damaged by a heat gun. I also dropped our super-fancy and rather expensive heat tool out the bathroom window.  Good thing I hadn't gotten around the weeding the beds along that side of the house. The heat-tool landed on my messy plants, and is apparently unscathed.  I'm an idiot.  I set up a nice little hotplate to rest the tool on when it wasn't in use.  But I failed to secure it to anything, and out the window it went. We really got lucky with the weather, and were able to have our windows open today.  Heat-stripping paint stinks up the entire house unless you have extremely good ventilation. 

... Now that Christmas is over, Robb and I are trying to get a big chunk of work done on our bathroom which is currently the worst room in our house.  The photo above is how it looked when we moved in. Before we even moved in, Robb adapted the tub so that it functioned as a proper shower. Last winter, we painted the walls and ceiling above the "tile" trim.  Other than that, we've done our best to ignore this room. Like most houses of this era, the bathroom is microscopic. It's very difficult to take any photographs in this room, because the space is so tight. You can see the buttery color we picked for our walls.  We bought paint formulated for the fluctuations in temperature and humidity typical of a bathroom.  In just over a year, this paint has started to fail.  It is shrinking and cracking, and I'm pretty demoralized about the whole situation.  Robb has been picking away at the paint for a while.  I meant to get some work done, prio

... Robb and I hope that your Xmas was cozy, and that Santa brought a smile to your face.

... The garden is all about the persimmon tree, these days.  The local songbirds are all stopping by for a nibble.  This fine fellow paused long enough to pose for photos on our neighbor's gigantic bird-of-paradise plant.  He's an aptly-named Yellow-Rumped Warbler. I'm terrible at distinguishing the differences between various types of warblers, but he's a common and obvious species, so I'm willing to risk that identification.  It seems we have both a female and a male Nuttall's Woodpecker visiting our tree .  The male is very camera-shy.  Even this lousy photograph shows a glimpse of his beautiful red head. Most of the time, the birds all share the fruit.  Occasionally there's some squabbling.   "Get away from my persimmon, or I will bite you on the butt!" If you want to take a look into other folks' gardens, mosey on over to Daphne's excellent blog , for the weekly round-up.  It's always fascina

... Can you spot Linguine?

... I was chatting over the fence with my next door neighbor (we've both been sick for the past week) when this fine lady flew into our persimmon tree.  I was enchanted to have a little woodpecker in our back garden.   Right now, our persimmon tree is attracting a lot of wildlife.  We are happy to share fruit with the local birds.  Urban songbirds have a tough time of it.   Knowing next to nothing about the diet of woodpeckers, I was somewhat surprised to see this one happily eating fruit.  I know that woodpeckers eat insects and some consume sap. But persimmons? Who knew? I spent several hours in my vegetable garden, trying to tidy the place up, and had my camera with me the entire time.  It wasn't until Robb and I were eating lunch in the back yard that I got a clear shot of our local woodpecker.  Based on her size, we assumed she was a Downy Woodpecker -- one of America's most common types.  Petite and cheerful, they can be found all over the country

... It's winter. The days are short, and the chickens have stopped laying eggs.  This is perfectly normal. Most animals' reproductive cycles are tied to the seasons.  Babies are born when there's the most food to be had.  There's really no point in trying to have a little family, if you're all going to starve to death in the middle of winter. Even our domesticated chickens follow this cycle. Our chickies are all on winter vacation.  They've quit laying. Their combs aren't brightly colored.  They've stopped acting like Robb and I are Potential Roosters, with whom they might enjoy a bit of Chicken Nookie.  It's really weird, but chickens will assume a "breeding pose" for just about anyone.  They get this "oh gawd, just get it over with" look on their faces, and assume a squatting position directly in our path.  Roosters must love this.  Robb and I, on the other hand, find it all rather unsettling. During the winter, our

... Since we bought our little house, Robb and I have been frequenting local estate sales.  Estate sales are fascinating, and always a bit sad.  You can "read" a great deal about the people whose possessions are being sold off at these events.  Travels, interests, aging -- it's all evident in the unwanted contents of a now-unpopulated home. On Saturday, Robb and I stopped by an estate sale in Alameda.  The owners had clearly been adventurous gardeners, but as they had aged, they seemed to have ability to care for their plants.  Many beautiful specimens had split their pots, and grew roots between patio paving stones, burrowing into the earth.  Among the heaps of neglected plants were a massive pile of cymbidium orchids , being offered at a shockingly low price.  I bought the lot, filling Robb's station wagon to bursting. We live in a climate where many orchids can over-winter outside (I did bring the entire orchid jungle inside last week, due to a lon

... We've been busy-busy-busy at work, which always seems to be the case right around Christmas.  We're building a show set in an 1830s New Orleans home.  The set itself will be two stories tall, so there are a lot of surfaces to paint.  This first photo is taken from a viewing window, one floor above my studio.  We are working on a huge amount of custom-built "plantation shutters" and French doors.  The green things on sawhorses are the frames for the shutters.  The doors leaning on the wall on the right side of the photo are seven feet tall, which should give some sense of the scale of this project. Here's a view from a few days later.  The doors are finished, work on the shutters continues, and we're also creating all the parts that will become a two level porch. We are cranking out projects at a furious pace, partly to get the painted components to the carpenters for assembly, and partly so that we can take a break for the

...   Robb seems to have sprained his ankle, some time during our kitchen-painting project. Since he can't really feel his feet and legs, it's hard to notice when he's injured himself.  And since his limbs don't always behave the same way, from day to day, it's also a challenge to decide of there's actually something wrong with them.   What Robb noticed was that one of his ankles was rather swollen.  Not the pain, because there wasn't any.  A similar thing happened when he broke one of his toes .  He was alerted by the bruising, because he didn't feel any pain at all. I don't think Robb has sprained an ankle previously. He's trying to keep the leg elevated, and to keep off of it as much as possible. Knowing Robb, he'll probably build some crazy contraptions, to make his life easier.  And he'll train the cats to brew and carry his coffee.

... Things have been relatively quiet in the garden.  The persimmons continue to amaze.  The other day, our elderly neighbor came by and gave us a massive bag of mandarin oranges from the tree in his front yard.  We reciprocated with an equally large bag of persimmons.  We've been baking them into galettes, recipe -- hopefully -- to follow. Otherwise, there's not much happening in the garden.  I did a lot of tidying up, in advance of the Pie Party.  The chickens are still not laying.  I don't imagine that we'll see eggs from them until spring.  Snails or slugs or something ate my baby kale all the way to the ground.  So irritating!  The baby snao peas are limping along. My friend George helped me out with my orchids, telling me which ones needed to go inside for the winter, and which outdoor plants wanted to be wetter or dryer.  In years past, I've done a bit of research and hoped for the best. One of our beehives, the Mera colony, finally died out.

... I read a lot of old home blogs and quite a few vintage sewing blogs.  Both kinds of blogs like to tally up the costs of their projects.  And I'll say it now:  I think people lie shamelessly about how much they spent on their projects.  I think people hide costs, and massage their numbers so that it looks like they spent almost nothing. I think this sets up totally unrealistic expectations about what projects actually cost. I think it's a kind of false modesty or bragging, and it makes me crazy. So, for my own records, as much as anything else, here's what Robb and I spent on our recent kitchen restoration. First, we spent about a month of our time.  I spent two weeks of vacation, scraping and painting cabinets and woodwork.  And then when I went back to work, Robb kept going, and my work was mostly limited to the weekends. We spent money in four major areas, removing the old paint, re-painting, adding the new lighting, and replacing damaged hardware.