Odds and Ends

No recent updates on my niece and the consequences of the accident.  News could come tomorrow or in months.

I basically solved my confusion about the EU GDPR notice requiring even foreigners to post about cookie use.  I found a brief one elsewhere and stole it.  It seems to say enough.  Feel free to steal it yourself from here (right under the header).  I think that, after a month, I will move it to the bottom of the blog, and later, somewhere barely findable.  Eventually, it will become nearly meaningless like "This site complies with all international laws applicable in the United States Courts to the best of our understanding. 

I do NOT like that Blogger has eliminated forwarding of comments to email account.  There was no reason given.  If it saved them money, they should say so.  If they polled the community and got a positive response to the idea, they should say so. 

The change is a real inconvenience to me.  I mean, no complaint to Blogger if they had a good reason, but none was given.

I'm also annoyed about the end to Open ID commenters.  I have enough of them who are frustrated and they are long-time commenters who don't want to establish Google accounts.  Its not up to ME if they should or should not.

The rain as been amazing this Spring.  Starting in early May, it has rained about 16-20" total.  I didn't keep track (at the start, who knew it would be a lot?).  But I have a good rain gauge and a general idea of how many times I have seen 1/4" to 3".

And the hardest thing is that it has been rather steady.  3" was a LOT at once.  But most times it is 1/2" every day or so.  The problem is that it keeps the soil soaked.  You plant seeds in soaked soil and they just rot.

Joke:  "I planted rice in early May and they have all drowned".

Seriously, I have lost a month of planting.  I planted 4 square feet of Spinach and got only 4 seedlings.  There should have been 4 dozen.  And I can't plant my deck pots when they are all mud.  Squishing around the wet soil creates little tubs that dry out and form hard layers later that flower roots don't penetrate well.

I have molehills EVERYWHERE!  The soft soil is like Heaven to them.  They are even in the front lawn and I've never had them there before; it is usually too hard for them to dig through.  And the voles use the mole tunnels to get at plant roots.  I'm going to have to spray carol oil over the yard.  That doesn't bother the earthworms the moles feed on, but apparently, it gives them  an awful taste to the moles, so they go elsewhere.  and if there are no mole tunnels, the voles are forced aboveground where nearly everything wants to eat them. 

Their are mole poisons, but I can't use them.  A poisoned mole can mean a poisoned predator (like my cats).  And I've never found a mole trap that had any meaningful affect.  You spike or whatever an few adult moles and it makes little difference.  There are always a few fertile adults left and that means more mole babies.  You have to make the adult moles actually LEAVE!

I've started unclutterring the house.  Well, you have to unclutter before you can clean, and I've let that go for too long.  And no matter what you want to do, something else seems to have to be done first.  So I looked around for "first things". 

I tend to save interesting home maintenance, gardening articles and recipes out of the newspaper and stack them on a corner of the dining table.  I went through the stack and threw most of them away.  I'm not really ever going to make those fancy chocolate truffles or hazelnut cookies, I'm not going to make those "tandoori/honey/duck burritos", and I really don't need a 13th way to BBQ a chicken...

And really, if I ever need to refinish a water-spot on a table top or re-grout a tile, I'll just look it up on the internet. It is time to stop saving information when it it so easily available online!

What I DO need to do is collect all the random stuff off the living room bookcases.  There are aquarium supplies sitting there.  So I need to enclose the existing aquarium stand with wall panel wood and make doors so the stuff has a place to be altogether and out of sight. 

And move some kitchen appliances I seldom use out of the cat-stuff closet to above the cabinets, making room for the 2 shelves of cat toys so THEY are out of sight (but surely not forgotten). 

And then move some stacked books INTO the bookcases, etc...  Figuring out the FIRST thing to do is very important, or else I just end up shifting the clutter around...

And then there is the Cat Room.  Which doubles as a storage room.  My Xmas decorations are still out loose.  I could spend a whole day just in there!  I would like to store them up in the attic, but I had some energy-saving contractor in there a few years ago insulating the place 12' deep (and have never noticed any reduction in my electric bill).  So it is time to put down some plywood flooring (like I used to have there).  And I still have the plywood I originally installed and then removed for the increased insulation in my basement.  But that has to be done before I can move the seldom-used Xmas decorations up there.

There is always something that has to be dome first...

Been Busy, Part 3

Getting rid of old pressure-treated lumber and boxes...

When I busted up the 25 year old garden beds last Fall, I collected them in a corner of the yard.  And there they sat.  Meanwhile, thinking I might move, I was collecting boxes that were of same shape.

This past week, I decided the old lumber had to go, and I wasn't going to move.  It was time to bring stuff to the landfill and the recycling center...

I did the old lumber debris first.  I was surprised at how much I had.  480 pounds of the stuff according to the landfill scale.  1/4 ton almost...  It took some work.  First, I had to haul all the 480# from the far backyard to the front yard.  Then into the hauling trailer.

Then drive it all 10 miles to the landfill.  Then drag it all out of trailer into the landfill disposal area (with dinosaur-sized bulldozers screaming around me barely 2 meters away).  And it cost $16 just to get rid of it.

And THEN I had a basement nearly full of identical boxes in 2 sixes.  One group of 4 dozen wine boxes and a group of 10 chewy.com boxes.  I was going to store them all in my attic, but decided "why".  So I packed those all into the back of the Highlander SUV.

They never would have fit by themselves into the car.  So I got inventive.  The chewy.com boxes could hold 3-4 wine boxes.  But there were still wine boxes left over.

I am spatially creative.  I looked at the leftover wineboxes and thought for like 2 minutes.  It hit me that a little reshaping of the wineboxes might fit them into the existingly-packed ones.

I crushed the narrow sides like paper grocery bags fold, and darn if they didn't fit right down into the other boxes!  Two boxes in the space of one and 2-3 pairs of boxes inside the larger ones

I filled up the back of the SUV and drove to the recycling center.  Free riddance of reusable materials!  There were even guys there so bored that hey emptied my car for me...

Getting rid of 480 lbs (1,056 kilos) of old lumber debris at a reasonable cost and 58 boxes for free is a good day!

An Interesting Week

I don't do well in the shortest darkest days of the year, but with the lengthening days, I have gotten more active.  It's nice to start accomplishing things again.

1.  I got The Salvation Army out here to pick up stuff I never used or no longer needed.  Mainly, I had a dining room table and chairs that I bought at their local showcase store 8 years ago.  It had some dings and scrapes, and I intended to completely refinish it as a Winter project.  Realizing I would never get around to doing that, I wanted to give it back.  I was also cleaning out closets and accumulated 8 boxes of miscellaneous household goods in good condition, a telescope (I have a newer better one now), an unopened flat screen wall mount (I decided to use a TV table instead), a nearly unused upright vacuum cleaner (I have wood floors now), etc.

It was all picked up last Wensday (I have decided to change the spelling; "Wednesday" is just medieval).  The new open space in my basement workshop is appreciated.

2.  I decided my cooking habits were in a rut.  20 years ago, I used to make pizzas from scratch.  I relearned how.  The first was bad.  The 2nd and 3rd were very good.  A pizza stone helps.  So does a bread machine with a pizza dough setting.  And leaving the dough sit overnight in a covered bowl helps.  I made my own sauce from crushed canned tomatoes too.  I do that for my spaghetti sauce anyway, just let it get a bit thicker.  Sliced commercial pepperoni, hot italian sausage, green bell peppers, mushrooms, and onions.

And I made chicken cordon blue, my own breaded chicken nuggets, ground hamburger from top sirloin (I have a manual grinder), pancakes from scratch, and egg rolls.

My efforts to make decent hamburger buns continue to fail, though.

3.  Rearranged and vacuumed the entire basement wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling.  The guys who filled the walls with insulation last September left such a mess (even though they did a lot of cleaning).  But I moved EVERYTHING and vacuumed.  I vacuumed some spots that may have never been vacuumed in 28 years.  When's the last time you pulled out the washer and dryer and cleaned behind there?  LOL!

4.  Reorganized all the stuff from the attic that I had to move down into the cats' room and stored them for returning to the attic when I replace the flooring up there.  The cats are thrilled to have more space for toys, exploring, and scratchers.

5.  Took almost everything out of the computer room, threw away lots of old stuff, and returned little.  And there is more to get rid of.  Why should I keep the boxes and disks from the apps from Windows 98?

6.  Emptied out 3 closets and most of the stuff went to a new pile of stuff to go to charity.  It is amazing how much unneeded "stuff" ends up on closet floors.  "Out of sight, out of mind".  For example, 30 years ago, I became the manager of an office softball team.  I had bases, gloves and balls in a box.  I'm keeping the ball and gloves, but the bases can go.  One thing charities can't say is that I have boring stuff to give.

7.  I had boxes of newspaper articles clipped out for "information".  Computer articles, gardening articles, cooking articles.  That stuff is all on the internet now.  So those are going into the recycling bin.

8.  One box was half full on fanfold perforated-edge computer paper!  That goes back to the days of dot-matrix printers.  But I'm not recycling THAT.  I now have a lifetime supply of note-taking paper!  Some old stuff is worth keeping.

9.  The weather today was GREAT.  It reached 67F!  I went outside to do some gardening work.  Mostly, I needed to dig level spots for the 6th of 6 framed garden beds.  Unfortunately, the ground was still frozen 2' down, so I did some work, but not as much as I hoped.  Still I did some work and the next warm day I can get another 2' deep.  That will be enough to build that 6th bed before Spring arrives.

10.  Haircut time!  Ever 2 months.  And I love the feel of heated shaving cream around my ears and neck when the barber does that razor cut!

11.  Visited the bank.  Got 6x higher interest rates on my savings with some creative transfers.   3% interest is better than .5%

I may have had a more productive week sometime, but I can't recall when exactly.  LOL!

Unclutterring

With the insulation contractor requiring me to move stuff away from all the basement walls, I had to realize how badly clutterred the entire basement had become.  It happens so gradually!

So another project is to get rid of stuff I haven't used in 10 years. 

First, that used dining table set I bought from Salvation Army when I retired,  planning to refinish it.  I'm never going to that!  I'm giving it back to them.  And as long as I was planning THAT. I decided to find everything else I could part with.  Stacking chairs I bought 20 years ago when I thought I would be throwing deck parties, wine bottle holders and kitchen stuff I never used, etc.  I'm sure there is more if I look around.

But mostly, that table and those chairs take up a lot of space in the basement and I have enough stuff down there that belongs there as it is.

There is stuff in the boxes that were in the attic that I had to haul down.  Most were Christmas decorations, and I haven't decorated a Christmas tree in 10 years.  I don't need them.  Most of those  can go.  I think I will keep the most unusual or the ornaments and little LED outside lights, I might use them again.

Some stuff from the attic I WILL keep.  I discovered several boxes of HO train stuff from my teen years that I thought were long gone.  I think I will set them up on the living room floor to see what I have.

But unclutterring is the rule of the day.