How's Robb?

.... For those following along at home, this is what our bathroom looked like when we first bought the house.  The tub was not really a functional shower.  There was just a hand-held shower attachment, but no way to hang a shower curtain, and no way of showering while standing up. There was also a really disreputable green plastic "mop shield" along the wooden baseboard.  The sink was cracked, and there weren't many towel racks.  The walls were made of plaster that simulated tile. And all the walls had peeling, damaged paint. It was a wreck, and we loved it.  A year ago our bathroom looked like this.  Not horrible, but not great either.  We had been ignoring it for quite a while, knowing that the process of restoring the room would make a huge mess. Robb and I painstakingly scraped the paint off the 1925 plaster "tile," taking great care not to damage the surface of the plaster.  This was tedious, dirty work.  Few things are less fun th

... Regular blog readers may have noticed that Robb and I both appreciate the way maps can convey information.  The current trend for "infographics" hits a real sweet spot with us. This week, the New York Times published a fascinating map, examining the Thanksgiving foods.  They teamed with Google to see what regionally distinct recipes were being researched around the country.  ( Click here for the full article -- it's fascinating. ) So what do you think, blog readers? Does this map make sense?  There was a another recent New York Times article ,  looking at regional Thanksgiving recipes that stirred up a bit of controversy.  I'm not clear what the hub-bub was about, but you can click here to compare.  Interestingly, both articles produced sauerkraut as the regionally unique food for my home state of Maryland. But I wasn't apparently from the right part of Maryland (and didn't have Marylanders as parents) to have ever had sauerkraut with turkey.

... After spending more time than I care to think about restoring the plaster wall "tiles" we're almost ready to prime our bathroom.  I've begged Robb to help me with the sanding, because I'm so sick of it all. Oddly, both the projects we're painting at work involve some kind of fake tiles.  I'm on vacation today.  And what am I doing? Working on fake tiles. Every time I think I've fixed all of the "tile" I find something else that needs work.  I guess that's just business as usual with an old house. I'm taking the time to do this properly, but it is driving me a bit insane.  A painter who was less of a perfectionist freak would have had this project finished ages ago.  Sigh...

... While other parts of the country were shivering, Northern California finally got a bit of meaningful rain.  I took the opportunity to transplant three baby pomegranate trees to better locations.  (There's no point moving plants around in dry, dry soil.) I also picked up two car-loads of compost from my semi-secret municipal source.  Typically, they have mountains of wood chips, but at the moment they have beautiful well-seasoned compost, free for the taking.  Since we got this house, I've been digging organic material into the soil, again and again.  Un-ammended soil around here has the texture of concrete -- it's a dense silt with no drainage at all.  One of the holes that I dug for the pomegranate tree was in soil I hadn't worked much.  Even after two days of rain, the dirt was bone-dry once I dug down four inches. This is probably the point at which I have to admit to myself that I've run out of room in the back garden, as far as fruit trees are con

... Robb has been slowly but steadily working on our house.  He's painted many of the exterior doors, replaced the screens in the screen doors, and has been reglazing our windows.  His current project involves undoing some of the work that was done by the contractors who worked on our house when we first got the place.  When we first moved in, the front porch needed work.  The contractors replaced all the boards on the landing, and also replaced many of the stair treads.  Five years on, all of these boards -- every single one -- have "cupped."  They are no longer flat, and because of that water accumulates on them when it rains.  In addition, none of the contractor's nail holes were caulked. Robb is working to fix all this. He sanded the landing boards, and we'll be re-priming and repainting the porch and stairs. On Saturday, his plan was to carefully remove the worst stair tread, and flip it over.  Sounded simple, right? It turns out that the

.... Right after Christmas last year Robb and I embarked on the Sisyphean task of repainting our bathroom.  We had previously painted the ceiling and walls above the wainscoting with a buttery yellow color. We set about stripping the paint from the woodwork and the 1920s plaster wall "tiles."  This was a tricky, and rather disgusting task.  We had decades of paint to remove, but we had to be careful not to destroy the layer of plaster that was at the bottom of it all. I spent hours with my head wedged behind the toilet.  It was grim work, and the process of removal made the whole room look like a Dive Bar. Once the loose paint was removed, I masked off individual tiles and delicately re-surfaced them with a custom made "schmoo" mixture. We primed the repaired plaster "tiles" as well as the woodwork that we stripped. And then it happened:  I oh-so-carefully removed my ridiculously expensive fancy painters' masking t

.... Another Wonky Panorama. Aren't the teenaged chickens huge? This weekend was all about tidying and organizing.  I tackled a project that has long been nagging at me:  organizing our bookshelves.  At the moment, we have significantly more books than we can fit into our home, so something had to change.  I've currently got two stacks of books in the kitchen to give away.  Whats impressive is that we had a huge Book Purge prior to buying our house, and another one when we left Connecticut to move to California. I'm also flirting a Wardrobe Purge.  I have too many clothes that I never wear.  I need to pull every garment out of storage, try everything on, and then ruthlessly edit what I own.  At the moment, there are too many aspirational clothes, clothes of good intention.  if I'm never going to wear something, why is it cluttering up my house? The truth is that I have a bit of a problem throwing things away.  I need to get over my weird guilt, and just set

...  Our persimmon tree is ripening. And I recently noticed this.  Hmmmmmmm..... This particular fruit is about three feet off the ground.  Our hens are utterly fruit-obsessed.  Visitors to our house may have seen Isabella leaping for grapes.  She's completely insane when it comes to grapes.  We cut them into tiny pieces, and she launches herself into the air to get them.  She seems spring-loaded, as she jumps for grapes. Her wings flap uselessly at her side.  Robb and I find this hilariously funny, which is Reason Number 4,927 why it's good we never had children. We can't refrain from laughing at her indignity. As for the hen-pecked persimmon, can't you imagine something like this?  Only with chickens? Dignity? What's that?

... From time to time, I like to offer some inspiration on the blog.  Long-time readers will have figured out that I'm fascinated with how things are made. The prototyping process, the team effort, the attention to detail, the exquisite skill built up over years of hard work, the hours and hours of work. This mesmerizing video has it all.  Grab a cup of coffee, and drink in the beauty.

... Our Top Hen, Anne Elliott is moulting.  It's a pitiful spectacle. Her two remaining tail feathers are particularly sad. She looks like Chicken Dinner.

... I make no secret of the fact that I love Oakland.  Despite its gritty reputation, Oakland a wonderful place to live. This past weekend, I took part in an Oakland-based treasure hunt . Participants ran all over downtown Oakland, and used their knowledge of local architecture and history to solve a series of puzzles. These urban scavenger hunts force participants to really look at a city.  And there's loads to see in Oakland. There all manner of lovely old buildings, which look splendid in the sunshine.  (Oakland is mostly immune to the Bay Area's famous foggy weather.) There are a staggering number of spectacular terra cotta facades in downtown Oakland.  I went on a walking tour of this part of Oakland with the Tile Heritage Society, a few years ago.  I must have been really busy at the time, because I never edited those photos to share on the blog. Swirls and squirrels in a theater foyer.  I believe the medallions are made of terra cotta.  

.... There's chaos in the hen house. The Mean Girls have not been allowing goofy Lydia and the New Girls to sleep on the main perch.  Instead of sleeping on the second perch, Lydia and the New Girls have been sleeping in the nest boxes. That sounds cute and cozy, if you don't know that chickens crap all night long.  The nest boxes, from which we would gather eggs -- if every single hen weren't moulting -- were covered with chicken poop.  This had to stop. Robb and I discussed various options to keep the birds from fouling their nests at night, and finally arrived at the idea of sticking a salvaged baby-gate in front of the nest boxes before Chicken Bedtime. There was much fussing in the hen house tonight.  In the end, all the chickens roosted in the main perch.  All except Lydia who glumly bedded down in the wood shavings.  Lydia is one strange hen. *************** I wrote this and then scheduled it to publish on Tuesday morning. When I got home from work

.... This weekend, we picked our first persimmons.  We made them into fruit-and-nut muffins that we shared with our next-door neighbor. We're also getting a lot of kale, arugula and mustard greens from the garden.  The latter two self-sowed, which is fun. We finally got some rain, which meant that digging in the garden was somewhat easier.  Despite all my efforts at soil amendment, our dirt has the texture of concrete.  It can be miserable to work in the summer (our dry season).  When the soil is damp, it become much more manageable.  When we first bought the house, I went a little crazy buying things on the Farm and Garden section of Craigslist.  One of my biggest mistakes was the putative lapin cherry tree that turned out to be inedible rootstock.  The fruit was horrible. And I stupidly planted the tree in the middle of my vegetable garden.  Thanks to the ridiculously high walls between our garden and our neighbors' we don't get a lot of sunlight. 

.... Because the soil around my house has the consistency of hardened concrete, I'm constantly digging in buckets and buckets of organic material. Sometimes, this is compost. A lot of the time, the "organic material" is the free mulch that I get from the municipal piles near where I work.  Since Robb and I bought our house, I have dug hundreds of gallons of woodchips into our soil.  (I'm measuring in gallons, because I use five gallon paint buckets to haul the woodchips.) All that decomposing wood results in a lot of interesting fungus in the garden.  Even though California is in the middle of a massive drought, our garden gets a pretty good overnight dew-fall.  Mushrooms have been sprouting up all over. The photo at the top of this page is of a teeny-tiny bird's nest fungus.  I've written about them before, both the one's I've found in Oakland , and the ones in France .  I have mixed success photographing really tiny objects.  This was the