Magnolia sieboldii - image by Sten Porse at wikimedia commons

Stupid zone 6 plants I can’t have.

I’m thinking I will plant some other magnolias this spring anyway. Probably Magnolia virginiana, and try my luck with one of the hardier grandifloras. Oh, and Magnolia x brooklynensis ‘Woodsman’ is pretty fancy looking too. Ah, I dream.

The Fresh Dirt blog had another post on using toilet paper rolls and newspaper for seed starting. I started writing a monster comment on my experiences with them over there, but decided it made better sense to clutter up my own page.

I used both these methods my first year of seed starting, and still use toilet tubes for plants I want to get started with a long taproot (like tomatoes), but they really aren’t a good all-purpose solution.

For doing large quantities of seedlings, tubes have some significant drawbacks. For one, it is hard to fill the tubes – the potting mix gets in the holes between them and they fall over and spill out the bottom.

Spilling actually isn’t a problem once they’re started since the damp dirt sticks together, and eventually the roots hold it all in anyway, but boy is it a pain with the dry mix. You can’t move the tubes once they’re filled, so you knock them over doing the ones next to them, and you can’t clean all that wasted potting soil out from between them. The more loose soil around the bottoms of the tubes, the more the roots will grow together and the more the bottoms of the tubes will disintegrate (more on that later).

Toilet roll pots are also hard to handle once the plants start to get bigger. The bottom starts to decay pretty quickly, plus a top heavy plant and an already tall and narrow pot leads to trouble. They start to tilt and eventually fall over, and picking them back up causes the paper to rip and they fall apart. A lot of this can be overcome by putting them in a high-sided container where there isn’t room for them to fall over, or by taping them together in groups. However, if you want to transplant some of them before the others? Good luck. (also, the roots will grow into neighboring pots, but that’s never been a big deal for me – I just rip them apart. They seem to deal). Inevitably by the time things are going out in the garden all my toilet roll pots are propped against the edges of the flats and leaning over forlornly.

So, yeah, I do still use toilet paper rolls for things with long or particularly fragile roots, (they have really nice dimensions apart from the tipping over thing – it’s hard to find anything else that’s as good a shape for tomatoes. Really people, why are commercial pots always so short?). However I do most of my ’serious’ seed starting in re-used black plastic nursery pots, as they are more durable. I did actually purchase some plastic flats, both for the convenient bottom trays and clear covers and because I don’t buy a lot of potted plants, so I didn’t have enough for all the seed-starting I wanted to do. I imagine someone who buys annuals regularly already has plenty on hand.

So, in summary, I would recommend toilet tubes for someone doing a few special plants, but not necessarily for a whole veggie garden’s worth. If you do use them, it helps to put them in a container with high, straight sides to help with the toppling.

Newspaper pots I didn’t think were worth the effort at all – they take time to make in any quantity, and are even more incredibly fragile than the toilet tubes once wet.

I should point out that I did do a few things differently from the video they showed, though I don’t think they change my opinion. For one, I never made bottoms for the toilet rolls. I also never made them square. I can see how the square-ness would help with filling them some, but there would still be holes in between. Obviously the bottom helps with filling, but it also makes the pot shorter, and one of the big advantages of this type of pot is the size & shape. Finally, In making paper pots with bottoms, I found sometimes the soil would get caught on the folded-in paper and not fill all the way to the bottom (particularly a problem with tall, narrow pots like these). This caused problems because then the pots didn’t wick water correctly, resulting in untimely seedling death. Finally, it appears that the bottom is making the pot even *more* tippy. Not something these pots need.

A project I’ve been working procrastinating on lately is stripping the bedroom door. Because the paint is peeling and nasty, and probably full of lead.

For a while, all was going well. I mean, apart from the terrible backache from the too-short saw horses.The biggest trick is to set up a putty knife somewhere so you can clean you scraper off one-handed. Otherwise, you keep fuddling about trying to hold the heat gun and the putty knife with one hand while you clean the scraper with the other, or wiping the scraper on less effective things, like the edge of the door, or your pants. Since doors, conveniently, have doorknob holes, it is quite convenient to stick the handle of the putty knife there, and with a little practice you can de-gunk your scraper with nearly a flick of the wrist.

The other trick is covering the chemical stripper with plastic wrap, so it soaks in longer and better without drying first. I had two patches going. I would pour on some stripper (the semi-gel kind), put the plastic on top, and mush it around through the plastic until it was pretty thin. Then I would switch to the other patch, which I’d done the same thing to before, pull the plastic off and set it aside. The top part of the stripper is still pretty fresh, so I push that onto a new part of the door, pour on a little more and cover it again. Then I really scrape off the loosened paint and used stripper.

Cleaning the knife is an issue again here. You will quickly run through a lot of paper towels if you choose that method. Likewise, while the stripper does not dissolve the plastic wrap, it does dissolve solo cups. Just fair warning here. An empty tin can worked well.

Lots of work, but the results are encouraging. These pictures are after one pass with the heat gun, and one with the chemical stripper. I started doing a second round of chemical, but it seemed like I might as well just sand at that point, I was getting to bare wood assuming in places the scraper made good contact, but a squeegee it is not.

There appeared to be, from the bottom, a fairly thick layer of dark translucent varnish (or shellac, or whatever, I didn’t test it) a layer of gunmetal gray paint they covered everything in, and three layers of white paint.

I don’t know if walnut was my favorite wood before we moved here, but it certainly is now.

But wait, did you see that at the top? That didn’t look like walnut, lets look closer…

No, definetly not. In fact, it even feels softer. Like…poplar?

Why would anyone make a giant door out of an expensive, hard wood like walnut, and make the top two panels out of poplar?! Particularly when they were planning on staining it instead of painting over it? Even if they were going to paint over it,  why wouldn’t you make the whole darn thing poplar? Was walnut just what they happened to have around? Seriously?

Unlike many things in this house, I am pretty sure the door hasn’t been tinkered with in latter years. It’s all fitted together with tennons and wooden pegs, which I do not imagine would be easy to take apart and back together again without showing.

I’ve also since inspected one of the unpainted original doors laying about (yes, there are plural) and when you look close under the dirt, it seems like it has lighter top panels too. They stained them darker to make the match better, but I’m pretty sure it’s different wood.

So… again, why?

Oh well, guess I need to start on the other side if I want to be able to close my bedroom door.

Ayse posted over at casa decrepit recently about looking into the dropped ceilings and finding a great plaster medallion.

Too bad our ceilings are just a tight sandwich of crumbly plaster, wallpaper and asbestos tiles, and not a real ‘drop’. There’s absolutely no chance of cool original artifacts hiding up in them.

Well, the bathroom ceiling is actually dropped. But that’s probably full of mold like hers too. I’m not going to go look any time soon.

I do think I can one up her on the wiring though. Ours actually went out the bedroom wall (like, outside) to the front porch light, then in again to the outlet in the office. Yeah, that’s disconnected now…

But anyway, we were talking about things above. And while I’m sure there will be no pleasant surprises in the ceilings, there might be in the eaves.

Sidebar:

Technically, I’m not sure if they’re called eaves. They’re quite easy to describe with a napkin sketch, but rather hard to do verbally.  Since I’m fresh out of sketcking napkins on this blog, I’ll do my best.

Out house is two stories, and the roof comes down to the top of the first floor. So from the end, it looks like a triangular second story sitting on top of a square first story. However, the second story doesn’t have angled walls following the roof lines. Instead, they just made it smaller until the entire square of the room fit inside the triangle of the roof. So you have the square second story, and a triangle attic on top of it, but then you have a triangle of empty space between the wall and the roof on each side too. I’m calling those the eaves.

End Sidebar

Some of those eaves have been made into finished closets. One of them has access to the unfinished area, where strange things like an extra door (mmmm doors), and the township meeting minutes from the 20s (gripping excerpt: cow killed by dogs. Paid witness 1 cent a mile to testify) are stored. These things make me think there *might* be neat stuff in the other eaves too.

We’d always planned to add access to the empty eaves and turn them into closets. (All! That! Space! We will be the one and only 19th century house with more than adequate closets), but winter moved that priority up a bit.

Because, y’see, one of the first things we did when we moved in was dump a bunch of insulation into the attic,  because there wasn’t any, and insulation is good for heating bills, and attic insulation is the biggest bang for your buck and all that. But, it didn’t do nearly as much as we expected. Because, as we stupidly realised a year later, we were only insulating that top triangle, (which happens to be on top of the second story to begin with) not the side triangles, which are on top of the empty balloon framed walls. This causes exciting effects like a breeze of cold air that comes in  around the foundation, flies straight through the walls where it picks up all the warm from the rooms, then rushes out the open attic.

Yeah, we’ll be fixing that soon.

Cross your fingers we find cool stuff!

Summer is over. The relative blog silence is due to the fact that we did absolutely nada since we moved in. Nothing. At. All.

It was nice. After nine months of turning down all sorts of fun things because we had to work on the house, and staying up almost every night, we stopped, and started saying ‘yes’ to practically invitation that we got. And watching a lot of mindless television. It was a good break.

But it had to stop some time. Because, well the short list is we had no insulation in the crawl space and it was getting darn cold, and we had no door on our bedroom nor rod in our closet because we never got around to putting up trim in that room. Also, the bathroom door didn’t close, which wasn’t a huge pain for us, but a little awkward for guests. We will, for these purposes, completely ignore the exposed duct work going through the office, the lack of any outdoor outlets (for, say christmas lights) the kitchen doors without working hardware, and the kitchen sink that drips into the cabinet below, because, well, duh, that has a pan under it, so it’s not a problem. We will also ignore the entire second story. Thanks.

So we finally did something about it. Well, mostly M. To start with, he put covers on the crawlspace vents. While said vents are quite a necessity in the summer for mold prevention, in the winter, they mean there is literally nothing but an inch of pine between your feet and the winter winds. And even less between the duct work and said winds. I do not believe it was doing good things for our heating.

He also planed the edge of the bathroom door, and set up the bedroom door in the garage for stripping. Said stripping is only, oh, 1/10 done, but it’s a start, and I think we’re getting back in that swing again. Which is a good thing.

Also, we got our first christmas tree.

Election time is coming up. (I promise, this will not be a political post, at least not in a partisan or candidate-specific manner) This is the first time since I came of voting age that I am planning on voting on local issues. I voted on the national and state items in the past of course, but I’d never felt like I was part of a local community, so it seemed strange and inappropriate for me to be deciding who their officials were.

So I nosed around a bit about what local offices and issues there were. Of the various Judges, sheriffs, and whatnots up for election in my semi-rural bit of the world, guess how many I am able to vote on? Exactly one. The rest are running unopposed.

Which I suppose is fine – if there are only five democrats in the whole county, it makes no sense for them to elect one into authority, and if they’d never get elected, they probably shouldn’t waste the money running.

But the non-choices coming up weren’t really (all) running unopposed – some of them did have opponents and a campaign – in the primary.

So in order to vote on local officials, I need to register as a republican. (Ohio has closed primaries).

Something about this turns my stomach. It isn’t pure political fevor. I’m largely non-partisan, as the issues that I tend to care about don’t follow party lines very well. If anything, I would have to say that I even agree with the republican view more often than the democratic. (with a few very sore counter-examples).

Nor does it have terribly important practical implications. We will probably get more junk mail. I can’t think of anything else.

But… the idea of having to declare myself something I am not in order to have the right to vote.

I’m sorry if this is old news to many. It was new to me, and I am still not done stewing it in my head. I thought it might be worthwhile to share with others who have never encountered such homogeneous political climes.

Well, the Omnivore’s hundred meme is getting a good bit of play, and as I think it’s a good list to keep track of, here goes. Bold I’ve eaten, Italic I really really mean to as soon as I get a chance. I won’t bother listing ‘never eats’ since I can’t imagine a thing I would refuse out of hand if the situation came up. I am surprised sushi isn’t on here, as that was such a threshold for me – once I’d intentionally eaten raw seafood and come to appreciate it, all the barriers came down.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison - fresh from a hunter was much better than in a fancy restaurant
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare - not as good as beef Carpaccio
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush – you know, probably, but I can’t place when
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns – Aren’t these just pot stickers?
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche – ? I think so at least
28. Oysters – on the half-shell even
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas – maybe. I’ve certainly seen one. I must have popped one into my mouth to try at some point.
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea -  I think this counts. I don’t remember exactly the type of jam or order of application ;)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more - and I bought the bottle too :) yum.
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel – barbequed unagi, if that’s valid.
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear – ? but as dried fruit candy, so that may not count
52. Umeboshi – ? on sushi, so again, may not count
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal – man, that’s pathetic I don’t have that. But I always got a quarter pounder, or whatever their other sandwich was.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain - again, this memory isn’t clear, but I think so.
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette – ? iffy. I’ve eaten pork intestines prepared szechuan style. But I think chitterlings may specifically imply southern
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini – Caviar without blini…
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef – ? another possible disqualification – it was ground into hamburger I think defeats the point.
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers – most taste like lettuce. Nasturtiums taste nasty.
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Which brings the total to 45, including seven of varying degrees of questionableness. I’ve got some work for me.

She did, didn’t she?

Well, part of it is probably the same reason she had a little needlepoint hat for the toilet paper – because it was the 70s/60s/50s/decade of your choice and that was cool back then. But I now have a new theory.

1) Your grandmother probably had well water. Well water is *cold*. This will be important latter.

2) Your grandmother probably did not have air conditioning. She probably had windowshades, and fans, and other things to make this bearable (honest to gosh, we didn’t think it would be possible, but it completely was) but windowshades and fans don’t do a darn thing about humidity. Again, I promise this will be relevant soon.

3) Your grandmother probably had one toilet, and seven people in the house. That toilet was seeing a lot of action.

Ok, that last one is at least related, but still, what does this have the least bit to do with toilet fashions? Imagine, for a moment, a nice glass of ice tea sitting out on a humid summer day. Refreshing, Yes. But also dripping all over the table with condensation. now realize that a toilet being constantly refilled with nice cold well water sitting in an unairconditioned house has a lot of similarities to that cold glass of tea.

Primarily, that it will drip all over the floor and make it look like you have a very serious plumbing problem. Ok, most people probably don’t suspect septic disaster while observing ice tea, but you get the drift.

For two people, this isn’t too much of a problem – the water must warm up enough between flushes to not cause problems, but if we have guests, we get puddles on the floor. And when guests are over is exactly when you don’t want to give the impression of a malfunctioning bathroom.

However, since it’s not the 50s anymore, the shag rug aesthetic isn’t really our cup of tea (there we go again with the tea…) In fact, we threw out the shag rug that was attached to the toilet when we bought the house, because, among other things, it was so thick the seat wouldn’t stay up. Obviously, one solution is air conditioning, but that seems a bit overkill.

Anyone have ideas less expensive than cooling systems, but less fugly than shag rugs?

We moved last Monday. We slept *in our own house* *without any spurious relatives* Wednesday night. It is good. It is also continuing to be comfortably cool without air conditioning. (not that our sub-80 days have been testing it…) Nothing is put away yet. Particularly, we noticed some of the kitchen shelves we warped and needed replaced, so nothing can go away in the kitchen. Also, there is no trim in the bedroom, and thus no rod in the closet, so nothing can go in there either lest it ‘get in the way’ when we have to put the trim back on. So it’s still in boxes scattered across the bedroom floor, not getting in the way at all. Note how I am not being cranky or anxious or upset about these things at all. I am letting M handle them as he finds time and considers them important. (between dinner with his work friends, frisbee with his work friends….). I feel very virtuous.

And now, for something completely different – we’ve been discussing purchasing a chest freezer some time now. One purpose of such would be to store things like beef, purchased half a cow at a time. In general, chest freezers are nice things for keeping lots of frozen food and minimizing grocery runs, but it wasn’t exactly urgent. Then, two days after we moved, our neighbor knocks on our door.  They’re moving, and have a couple things they don’t want to take with them. One of which is: a chest freezer! For free. We tied it too the dolly and rolled it down the road home.

I’m currently sitting on the back porch waiting for an air conditioner and dishwasher to fall from the sky as well.

Back in my intro to engineering drawing course (required for everyone getting a degree from the engineering college, including us computer types), the T.A.s would constantly rail on us ‘your scale is not a straightedge!’. We were supposed to be learning to draw straight lines freehand, but the scale was so handy and right there!

Yesterday, I wished I’d had a TA like that standing over me all winter when I was scraping all the things downstairs with a putty knife.

To begin at the beginning: The wood floors are done, and M declared we would move this week. I thought that was a little tight, and in any case, he couldn’t get help then, so it’s next week, but still, SOON. In order to do this ‘moving’ we need to clean all the construction miscellany out of the living areas. We’ve got the tools out of the kitchen and the laundry, leaving only the garage, which is filled with larger things like drywall, scrap lumber, and insulation. the plan is to move those things upstairs, so we can use them fixing those rooms.

However, the bedroom they need to go in is a mess. It’s full of nasty degraded carpet padding which managed to adhere itself to the floor in large chunks. We had a small spot of this in the downstairs bedroom, and it took us ages to get off. It also turns your clothes red with dust, and re-congeals to your shoes. (yes we mask-up when working with it).

Before, we were getting it up with putty knives, or sometimes pry-bars, because that’s what we had, and they looked a bit like scrapers. Today, we were used the scrapers we’d bought for stripping the trim.

Night and day. I won’t say it made stripping nasty carpet padding off a 10 x 17 foot room fun, or easy, but we did get it done, which is more than we’d have been able to say using the putty knives.

So, tomorrow we carry things upstairs, and SOON! we move.