Friday, May 25, 2007

"Dog-proofing Your Yard"

"Dog-proofing Your Yard" was a topic on one of the Portland morning news shows this morning. My husband wanted me to watch, but I already had a date to go walking with my friend Janae (who I only have 20 days to socialize with before she moves to Utah.) Our dogs have been VERY BAD for the part of our back yard where the grass should be:
Dogs in Yard(Yes, that's YARN in the picture)

However, dogs are VERY GOOD for flowers. I don't think I lost a single tulip bulb to squirrels this year. There won't be any deer eating my vegetation with Cozy and Callie around (I saw a doe a block from the house once, so it's not entirely impossible.) Neighbors are not helping themselves to my roses (Mo Jackson had a good story about that on her blog.) And my flowerpots are safe from crazy ladies planning to open their own garden centers with purloined pots and yard art (true story, I lost several of my best containers a couple of years ago to just such a lady, there was a story about her in our newspaper a few weeks after they went missing--I was indignant about that, let me tell you.)

So we have plans to level the yard and re-establish the lawn (which the dogs didn't dig up to begin with, but that's a long story involving a sewer line, a nine-foot deep trench, a giant hole-fort dug by neighborhood boys, a cornfield, an above-ground pool and a lot of bark chips.) And in the meantime, I'm enjoying my flowers:

Poppy


Julia Child Rose


Rio Samba Rose

Deadline

Today is the deadline for the Mother's Day project at Afghans for Afghans, and I've still got another foot to go on my baby blanket. Sigh. For anyone not familiar with Afghans for Afghans, it's an organization which collects handmade blankets, hats, sweaters, etc. to send to Afghanistan to warm people against the bitter cold. Warmth is the main goal, and densely worked wool in colors that won't show soiling are preferred. I didn't make this deadline, but I'm not allowing myself to start another project until it's finished, and they will most certainly be able to use it in the future.
Sherry 324
I really don't know WHAT got into me when I picked the colors. I at least have an excuse for the chevrons---all that single crochet is thick and heavy. But the hot pink and turquoise? I can only blame a limited selection of the affordable Paton's Classic Wool at Michaels, and a desire for bright, youthful colors---though in retrospect, a heather gray with a blue stripe would have been preferrable,maybe. It's been slow going, I can only get 3 or 4 rows done in an hour, and I'm really regretting that hot pink, but did I mention that it's WARM?

Monday, May 21, 2007

Kitchen Ceiling

When we moved into our house in 2001, the kitchen had a circa 1970's suspended ceiling. You know----the ceiling is dotted with flourescent light fixtures, then covered by a metal grid which suspends sheets of frosted plastic. It must have been pretty cool when it was new, with the whole room full of light radiating from the entire ceiling. But it ate up almost a foot of the height of the room, was yellowed and dated, and gave the room an unpleasant cave-like atmosphere. John's been working this project little by little for a while, and suddenly this weekend I realized I was rapidly losing my chance to take a "before" picture.
Ceiling in Progress
The big gray patch used to be a hole going into the ceiling. There are cracks in the old plaster-over-lath ceiling, screw holes and pencil marks from the suspended ceiling, and cracked and chipped paint. The ceiling was going to be a royal pain to return to any sort of paintable surface, so we decided to put up ceiling tiles. Here they are in their ungrouted and unpainted glory:
Ceiling Tiles
Only two more rows to go. My husband is immensely clever (and he does good work, too.)

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Beginning to Breathe Again

I am starting to recover from my Teacher Appreciation Week duties. Here's a picture of the centerpieces I did in the
"Staff Dining Room" (Teacher's Lounge.)
centerpiece teacher appreciation
I bought clay pots, cut a 2"x2"x4" piece of florists foam for the center, planted 3 Dusty Millers around the edges, and finished them off with big silk daisies. Three tables, total expenditure of $27, and I can re-use the pots and silk daisies and plant the Dusty Millers in with my irises.

Now that the teachers are all appreciated, and my PTO duties have returned to running the popcorn machine and manning the concession stand every Friday, I can return my attention to my family, my house, my dogs and other projects. The family is doing well. Both the kids will be going to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry next month for being finalists in the Battle of the Books, in which they had to read 10 assigned books and compete against other teams to answer "knowledge bowl" style questions about them. Audrey was chosen to be the mistress of ceremonies for the "Mustang Idol" talent competition that is taking place every day during the school lunch periods over the next few weeks as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. John is getting over the cold that all of the rest of us have all had and gotten over (the kids each missing 3 days of school,) so far he's handled it very well, none of that sick MAN whiny-ness that women complain about, and he hasn't missed a day of work or a soccer practice over it. I'm listening to an audiobook version of Tamar Geller's The Loved Dog in the car. I love my dogs, and for being 10 months old I think their manners are coming along nicely. Unfortunately the neighbors are apparently "all talking about them," and "everyone hates them," at least that's what I was told when they got out (again) on Tuesday. Aaaargh. I don't want to be "THAT neighbor," the one with "THOSE dogs." So I get to work harder on improving their manners faster (and John reinforced the fence, AGAIN.)

And I'm working frantically on this, even though I don't think I will make that May 25 deadline:
afghan for afghan progress
It's growing. It's showing progress. I'm working on it dilligently, but it may not make it specifically to the opening of the new clinic in the Wardak province, to be given to one of their new mothers as part of the Afghans for Afghans Mothers' Day Project.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

End in Sight

I dropped over 26 dozen cookies off at school today. I had declared it "Cookie Day" for Teacher Appreciation Week. No pictures--partly because I'm lousy about remembering to take pictures, and partly because I was pushing my deadline for the 10:55 first lunch so closely that the last batch was still warm and I parked illegally in a drop-off zone with my hazard lights on while I ran them in. Double batches of Peanut Butter Round-ups, Vanishing Oatmeal, and Chocolate Chip (with and with-out nuts,) and a pan of brownies, and a single batch of Toll House Cookies made with white chocolate chips and dried cranberries (I'm calling that experiment a success.)

Now I just need to provide lunch tomorrow and I'll be done with Teacher Appreciation Week for another year, and glad of it, too. I do sincerely appreciate my children's teachers, without whom I would have to homeschool, which wouldn't be entirely terrible, but we would be getting on eachother's nerves more often, and they would never learn math.

I had to share a passage from the book I have been reading in 11-12 minute spurts between putting cookies in and out of the oven. It's from "Shakespeare's Landlord" by Charlaine Harris, it's early in the book so I can't give you a lot of background, but the protagonist cleans houses, and is over at one of her client's apartments, helping her do a big Spring Clean:

"For three hours, we worked in the small apartment, cleaning things that had never been dirty and straightening things that had never been messy. Alvah likes her life streamlined---she would live well on a boat, I've always thought. Everything superfluous was thrown away ruthlessly; everything else was arranged logically and compactly. I admire this, having tendencies that way myself, though I'm not as extreme as Alvah. For one thing, I reflected as I wiped the cabinets in the bathroom, Alvah has such limited interests that cleaning is one of her few outlets for self-expression. Alvah does a little embroidery of an uninspired kind, but she doesn't read or sew and is not particularly interested in cooking or television. So she cleans. . . .Alvah is a warning to me."

I'm no Alvah. I wish I could regard cleaning as an outlet for self-expression. I would say I need to embrace my inner-Alvah-----but I just don't think she's in there.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Maying

I'm having trouble coming up with a title for this post. It may be the White Russian, but mostly I think it's that I'm overextended. It's Teacher Appreciation WEEK here, and I am our designated PTO Teacher Appreciator. Today I did a chocolate fountain for the two lunch periods in the the Staff Dining Room (aka Teachers' Lounge.) For the record, even though it goes against all your insticts, yes, you really do need to add all that vegetable oil it says to in the directions that came in the chocolate fountain to get it to flow properly (yuck.) That was the one and only hitch in the maiden voyage of the chocolate fountain. I provided strawberries, marshmallows, pretzels, Sara Lee pound cake, Rice Krispie Treats, graham crackers, bananas, Oreos, and those new Keebler cheesecake sandwich cookies. It went over very well, and my next participation in the observation of appreciating teachers isn't until Thursday, when I'm supposed to produce a bunch of homemade cookies, followed by a luncheon on Friday.

James is running track and he came in NOT-LAST in hurdles today (WHOO HOO!!) Let's not talk about the 800 meters. Audrey is playing soccer and back in school after a bout with general viral crud she generously shared with me. Meaning that I'm doing all that teacher appreciating under the influence of cold medicine (never White Russians during the day.)

My only current project is this:

Afghan for Afghan (Baby)

It's a baby blanket for Afghans for Afghans that I am crocheting furiously in hopes of getting it off before the current May 25 deadline. It's wool. It's not light colored. Its the last thing I ever make in colors I don't like. That hot pink and turquoise is just not floating my boat and it's making it a little bit of a chore.