A couple Saturdays back, Teresa rented a lift and Ernie cut down some limbs. I went over to play with the lift a little bit.
Ernie
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But perhaps the best part of the tree trimming, is the fact that I got to realize a life long dream of having a woodpile.
After that stuff dries out, I’m going to have some serious fires!
It rained on Wednesday.
I would have gotten some flower pictures, but I didn’t want to get muddy since I was due in Beaverdale in a half hour.
I thought I would share a few pictures of the action that is going on in my backyard. I still don’t really know what some/most of this stuff is going to turn out to be, so if you know, don’t be afraid to shout out the answer.
The best guess somebody has given me is some kind of herb, but it is probably a weed.
One of my gardening experts told me that this was a magnolia tree. It definitely is not a magnolia tree. I’m still holding out hope for cherry tree, but it is probably a crab apple tree.
When I sent this picture to Shannon, she told me that it was concerning. Apparently it is bad for rhubarb to re-seed itself in the spring. Luckily I sprung into action (after being told what to do) and the rhubarb emergency was avoided, for now. Although I have some rhubarb that is so large that I worry that it is a super species of rhubarb that will one day grow out of my control and try to take over the world. The only other option is that this rhubarb is going end up in a very heavenly pie.
Some flower.
The super rhubarb. Don’t look at it too closely. Its hypnotic powers will bend you to its will.
Some more flowers that I can’t identify.
Same flowers, still no identification.
The mystery tree blooms.
Last Friday was a busy night for me. I spent the beginning of the evening at a Super Secret Session of FNSC. I can’t really tell you what happened there, because it is a secret.
After our session concluded in a secret manner I made my way over to Terra’s house to celebrate the birth of Geri D.
Her party consisted of much merriment and my complete and total domination of a game called “Apples to Apples”. Maybe that was the name of the game. Either way, the name is secondary to my thorough domination.
When I got home around 1 am I noticed that my garage door was wide open. It is not uncommon for me to leave my garage door open, so I must have done it. But at the time I wondered who had been in my garage. It was a silly thought, considering my nephew Johnathan is the only other soul that knows the security code to get into my garage.
I pulled my car into the garage and got out of my car.
There was a fluttering above my head.
I was excited. I thought I might have a bat in my garage. I like bats. In fact, I wanted to buy a bathouse or two to put up in the yard.
I looked around the garage and finally found the culprit. It was a female cardinal. She was perched on top of my garage door opener.
I was tired, but I made a game effort to shoo her out of the garage, but she wasn’t interested in leaving the garage. So I decided to leave the garage door open for the night.
Sleep came fast on that night and that was a good thing. I had an 8:45 am appointment at Beyer Hall with Baier, Russell and Andree. I was giving them free basketball lessons. They had expressed some interest in knowing how the game is properly played. As their friend, it was my duty to provide such a service.
I overslept on Saturday morning. I barely managed to find basketball clothes and shoes. I put them on and headed out the door.
When I got to the garage I looked around for the bird. I didn’t see her at first, but when I turned around to get into the car I saw her. She was lying dead on top of the old washing machine that I’m storing in the garage.
Since I was already late I decided to deal with the dead bird later.
Basketball went as expected. Admittedly there was a surprise at the beginning. A team of Andree/Russell did shock the team of Baier and I in the first game, but I finished the rest of the day undefeated.
When I got home later in the day, I discovered that I don’t actually own a shovel. So I waited until Sunday to bury the bird.
I dug a hole and threw the bird in it. Then I put an Easter Lily over the top of it.
Now it rained all day Sunday. I was digging a hole and burying a bird in the middle of the night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Jay thought that this must have looked like the beginning of a cheesy horror movie to an outside observer.
All I know is that the bird is buried and the lily is still kicking.
If you need to bury a dead bird, I recommend the middle of a thunderstorm. The ground is nice and wet and the ambiance can’t be beat.
On Saturday, Jason and I got the garage opener put on the garage door. This makes parking in the garage a lot easier. This was a good thing, because when I looked out my back door on Sunday after I got home from church I saw the following:
Thanks to that garage, I didn’t have to clean off my car. I just backed the car out of the garage and onto the street and I was off to Ames.
Once in Ames, I picked up Nader so that we could check out Adventureland.
Maybe you can’t tell from that picture, but he was complaining about the weather. Despite my best efforts over the years, I fear that I have failed to man that guy up.
Adventureland turned out to be a fair movie. It does have an incredible 80s soundtrack and a great performance by Kristen Stewart, but I found the movie to have more ambitions than it could deliver on.
After the movie I took Nader to Super Wal-Mart to buy groceries. I found something very disturbing in the frozen food aisle.
Excuse the crude cell phone picture, but that is the best I could do under the circumstances.
My favorite captain from Deadliest Catch is hawking his own brand of frozen fish products?!?! Captain Sig has become Captain Sellout. Oh the humanity!
Last Wednesday I saw the first signs of spring popping up in my yard.
Although I have no clue what to do with this rhubarb, I have a line of people that are interested in it already.
The room that has proven to be the most work by far has been the kitchen. The walls took 6-7 coats of paint.
I originally was considering a color called Raspberry Couli, but I had a lengthy conversation one day with Sara about red paint. She painted her television room Cranberry Punch and after I examined it rather closely, I knew that this was the shade of red for me.
But the walls were just a small part of the challenge. The biggest part of the challenge was the kitchen cabinets.
Luckily, Becky had a great idea that made lots of work, but made the cabinets look a million times better. She noticed that the ugly trim work on the front of the cabinets was only held on with tiny nails.
After knocking off the trim work, the cabinets had to be sanded down and given 3 coats of primer and another 3 coats of paint.
Plus I put on new handles and hinges.
New hardware. A silver metal finish to match the new appliances.
New spring loaded hinges, so that we didn’t have to put all of the magnets back on.
As you can tell, there still are a couple of doors that need to go back on.
The good news is that the kitchen is almost done. A little more paint and hanging up a couple more doors and it will be a finished masterpiece.
I actually struggled quite extensively with picking out colors for the living/dining room. I wanted to do the accent wall thing and I didn’t want to match any of the colors in any of the other rooms. Red, blue, gray, yellow and green were all taken. I was heading towards brown.
But another complication was buying an area rug. Shannon went shopping for the area rug with me. After I picked one out she noted that I could take the colors for the wall out of the rug. So I picked up even more brown paint sample cards.
That night I was getting a haircut from Monica. I took the paint cards with me to get her advice because she is usually my color coordination guru.
After looking at the cards, she really liked Cocoa Brown and Bamboo together.
I had to agree that they looked good together and I had finally picked out all of the paint colors for my house.
I also added a ceiling fan to the living room. I thought long and hard about this decision as well. Finally I settled on this beast due to its 60 inch blades.
It also had a remote, but as it turns out, with a 3 way switch, this type of remote doesn’t really work. So I actually have to stand up off my couch and turn the fan on or off. It feels like I’m living in the middle ages.
The last new addition to the living room area was the new switch covers.
Although I like the look of these covers, if you slip the slightest bit on installing these things, you take a chunk out of them with the screwdriver.
The guest bedroom. I view it as my library, but most people view as the cowboy room.
When I got around to picking the color for this room, I had already picked blue for my bedroom, red for the kitchen, gray for the office and green for the bathroom. I didn’t want to take away from the thunder of those rooms, so I wanted a different color.
A couple years back Monica gave me a sweet painting for my birthday.
I wanted to take a color out of this painting for the rest of the room. On one of the days that we went light fixture shopping, I showed this painting to Shannon. She suggested taking one of the brown tones out of it.
From these ideas, I ended up with yellow. I’m not sure how I got there, but I ended up with a color called October Leaves.
The first new light fixture I purchased for the house.
Some people have remarked that the yellow is so bright that it would be difficult to sleep in that room. I guess I’ve never really considered that to be my problem.
There are no pictures from moving day, but I would like to thank the people that gave some effort to make moving day work out.
The Friday before moving day had spectacular weather. The Saturday of moving day was not scheduled to have spectacular weather. I returned to work on that Friday to get caught up on a few projects that I had fallen behind on.
To take advantage of the nice weather, Jason and Carla moved some stuff during the day. Then at night, Jen and Derrick and Sara came over and we moved stuff that I wouldn’t be able to handle the projected rain on Saturday.
So after FNSC, Jay and Willy and Derrick and Jen and Sara and I moved a few things.
But thanks also needs to be given the people that showed up on moving day:
Jason Stensland
Jesse Howard
Steve Roberts
Roger Sebring
Toby Sebring
Jason Baier
Andree Jauhari
Russell Kennerly
Shannon Bardole
Becky Perkovich
Jen Gorshe
Sara Junck
Derrick Gorshe
Dan Dill
DJ Dill
William McAlpine
Jay Janson
Plus a special thanks to Scott Degeneffe who personally delivered my brand new stove.
After a good chunk of work was done, Monica and Jeff showed up. Jen, Derrick, Sara, Shannon, Monica, Jeff and I went to Jimmy’s for supper.
When we returned, Derrick and Jen stuck around. Derrick and I hooked up the new TV and Blu-Ray player. We watched The Warriors. Jen had never seen The Warriors before, but I have no doubt that she now probably considers it to be one of the greatest movies ever made. At least I don’t see another way of thinking about that movie.