Have Tools, Will Travel

We are off to the parents abode this weekend for excessive turkey and cranberries. We are going early to be able to build a set of outside steps for them. The old steps were decommissioned early this spring as they were deemed unsafe I guess, due to their rotten nature. They were replaced by and old kitchen step stool, because a small, steep, tippy step stool is much better for a pair of 85 year olds to walk on than rotting steps. We tried to build steps in August when we were home but were not allowed because there was a handyman coming to do it. Or something. But the handyman never arrived, or something, so now we are allowed to build proper steps.
Not getting much of an early start today as a result of the excessive eating and drinking last night with friends. Looks like it is shaping up to be an excessive Thanksgiving.
Well, thank the gods for that.

Back Door Bonanza

We are both exhausted after a marathon weekend project. One task on our to do list for quite some time was to replace the back door, which has been rotting out the floor beneath for at least as long as we have been living here.
We suspected that once we had a look at the floor, we would have a big job to replace anything rotten. We had no idea of what was below the floor, but evidence from outside suggested it was once a squirrels nest. In addition, we wanted to move the location of the door from the south wall of the porch to the east wall. The south wall is directly below the roof valley, and the ice builds up on the step making it really treacherous in winter. This was also why the door would leak when it rained.

We began Saturday morning, tearing up several layers of linoleum, chip board, 50's era tile and oil cloth to get to the real sub floor. Once we tore out the door we could see the rot extended back a foot or so from the door and also affected the sill. We decided to take out both layers of floor. The top was 1x4 tongue and groove, below that was a dogs breakfast of boards scavenged from what looked like the chicken coop.
Happily the joists were good, and the other sills were still good so we replaced the sill under the old door, and used plywood to cover the hole in the wall where the old door came out. That wall will eventually be the coat closet.
This morning we dug out the rubble under the construction. In the midst of this, we found an old green bottle, similar to a 70's era 7up bottle but without any writing on it, and a child's shoe. We levelled out the dirt and put vapour barrier over it to help seal out the damp. Then we insulated between the joists with styrofoam and fibreglass and laid plywood on top for the sub floor.
Next came the task of making a new hole for the new door. Once we opened up the east wall and exposed the studs we could see that the original door was probably there to begin with. The gable wall of the porch is constructed with a double top plate so we can use that as a header for the new door. When we insulated the porch walls a few years ago, we added studs in the right place for the door opening that we knew would eventually be there. After measuring to make sure we knew what size we wanted we went out to buy the door. By this time it was raining, so we put a plastic tent over the outside and continued to plug away. A skill saw and a reciprocating saw makes short work of several layers of sheathing and shingles.
Finally, we slotted the new door into place. It is a temporary measure so the squirrels don't come in tonight. The rough opening is a bit tight, and needs a slight adjustment before we fix it there permanently.
There is still a lot to do on this project. We need to add a bottom plate and studs in the old door opening, and replace the outside house wrap and shingles to make it weather proof. We need to finish laying the sub floor and build a set of steps up to the new door. Oh yeah, and the door needs a doorknob too.

Canning is the New Knitting

Last week, I heard on the radio that canning was the new knitting. The idea is that people can continue to eat locally during the winter if they preserve the harvest now. My mother would say everything old is new again.
Being a country girl, I've always been into canning because I was spoiled as a child with home made everything and the store bought versions were never as good. So years ago I started with jam and sweet fruit preserves. The other one loves pickles, so pickles were my next attempt. I used to spend weeks in the fall preserving everything I could get mt hands on that I could do in a hot water canner. My intentions were good but invariably we never ate all of it, and after a few years of dusting jars full of suspect stuff that eventually got thrown away, I gave up most of it and just stayed with the staples.
I'm not so fond of pickles and making them is a lot of work, so I don't do as many of those as he would like. The picture above is a small batch of green tomato chow, because we have a lot of green tomatoes and both the O.O and his father like them.
Salsa is one of those things that I can't stand if bought in a store. It just tastes like chemicals to me, but we eat a lot of Mexican food, and homemade salsa is a staple now. For a couple of years I've attempted to plant everything in the vegetable garden that one needs to make Salsa, but no matter how much I plan, the plants don't seem to co-operate. This year I got enough green peppers, about 2 weeks earlier than any tomatoes ripened. We got cold weather in early September which threatened frost, so I picked the bulk of my tomatoes while they were still green and packed them up in boxes to ripen later. None of my hot peppers grew at all. I couldn't find cilantro to plant at all this spring and my onions are just about ready to be picked now, although they are very small. So once again I went to the farm market and bought the ingredients I needed to make salsa and spent all day yesterday in the kitchen.
The other one, meanwhile finished off roofing the garden shed with the help of our neighbour Dan. This will keep the floor from rotting out again, and will also keep the new lawn mower dry in the winter.









Today he is working on replacing the sheathing on one end of the garage in a vain attempt to keep the critters out. Again, we are doing this a cheaply as possible because we want to tear the ugly garage down someday, so instead of using something proper, we are slapping up something call super roof, which seems to be half inch chip board, but not chip board.

Homely Renovations R Us

Now that Study Boy has emerged from writing the first draft of his research proposal, we spent some time doing house reno stuff yesterday. The never ending process of putting the actual house back together was temporarily suspended though because regular maintenance was required on the garage. It is disheartening to spend money and time on such an ugly building. We have future plans to tear the existing garage down and build a new one because it is:
1 ugly
2 in the view
3 falling down anyway
4 badly designed for our needs

But until we build a new one that corrects all these faults, we still need a place to store tools, motorcycles, kilns and building materials. Oh, and the car in winter. The roof has leaked for a while, and we tried to ignore it but it started leaking on things like the table saw and the chop saw and it really wasn't going to survive another winter. We thought that maybe we would just cover it in a tarp, but realistically, this building will be standing for at least another 3 years, but probably more like 5 or 6. Sigh.
So Study Boy morphed into Good Ol' Boy and visited the local hardware store to see if he could strike a deal on some cheap, roofing shingles. The staff at the local Timbermart know us by name, so when we appear and ask if they have any open or leftover bits and pieces they want to get rid of, they are usually pretty happy to sell it to us at a good price just to get rid of it.
Compared to the shingles we put on the house a couple of years ago, these are really thin and seem to lose a lot of asphalt while you are handling them. They are meant to be 15 year shingles, but they won't last 10. Fine for a building that (hopefully) will be gone in half that time.
With all the money he saved on shingles, Tool Boy bought a roofing gun on Ebay. When we shingled the house roof, we borrowed one from a neighbour who has since moved away, so we justified the expense by saying that we have friends that need roofing projects done this fall. What goes around, comes around.

Death and Literature

This is the Death of Rats. He (she?) is one of my favourite literary characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

On the disc, Death is a character that shows up wherever there is, well, death. Which, like in our world, is pretty much everywhere, all the time. He is the standard Anthropomorphic Personification of death, which is to say, he looks like a skeleton, wearing a black robe and carrying a scythe.

Since he is so busy, it stands to reason that he needs an assistant. So the Death of Rats takes care of ushering smaller souls into the afterlife. Not just rats, but mice, small mammals, insects, you get the idea. And like the bigger Death, he is a rat skeleton wearing a robe and carrying a scythe. Because standards are important.


This is Atticus, named for a literary character. When we named him after the protagonist in "To Kill Mockingbird" we didn't expect he would take the title so literally.
Like the Death of Rats, he has decided it is his job to help usher smaller souls into the afterlife. At first it was a few house mice, then field mice, then several squirrels, a vole, a chipmunk, a bat, countless crickets and spiders and just today, 2 birds.
I love my cat, but he is starting to scare me.

Because I Don't Have Enough to Do...

Yeah right. Honestly I've been looking forward to getting laid off in October for about a month now; I want to do more pottery, rearrange elements of the garden before winter, do some smallish home reno projects and start curling. That was my plan for the fall. But Robbie Burns knew about the best laid plans. Today I agreed to teach a course at the community college. Just 1, and only 4 hours a week. It starts tomorrow. Actually it started Monday. Last minute and under the gun, just how I like to work.
I don't have a course outline or a semester schedule. I probably won't have access to a computer account or email tomorrow, and I haven't done any paperwork about being paid yet either. I have taught the course before, so I've decided to wing it tomorrow. I figure I can probably muster a 2 hour introduction to Horticulture Structures and Environment off the top of my head.
When I say wing it, I mean I have typed up 3 pages of outline stuff I may talk about. Or maybe not.
I expect something of my fall plans will suffer, most likely the garden.
Oh yeah, and I'm still working. What was I thinking?

Catching Up

Seems like the end of summer is coming whether we want it to or not. Everybody has been commenting on the shorter evenings and later mornings.

This morning the temperature said 3 degrees Celsius when I was getting dressed to ride the bike to work. I had to dig out the wind breaker pants, and as always, I wondered just what 3 degrees with a 80km/h wind actually makes the wind chill. I think the non technical answer is Brrrr. But now I need wonder no more, because this is a website that can calculate that. The technical answer is -14.7 degrees, way colder than I thought!

Tonight there is a large frost warning for most of the province. So I was out tonight covering the tomatoes and basil with bedsheets just in case. One can never have too many bedsheets. These ones came from Frenchies (my favourite store) and they are used as drop sheets when we do messy work in the house, and have also taken the place of walls when visitors need privacy for stuff like showering and peeing. (Oh those crazy visitors!) Tonight bedsheets are frost protection.
Before I covered everything I picked what was ripe. I never seem to remember that I don't need that many tomato plants. This year I thought I did well to keep it to a mere 10, or 2 each of 5 varieties. But as you can see, even just two, is too many for the cherry types. I remember one year in Vancouver I resorted to making green chow with cherry tomatoes, I may need to do this again.

Last Monday I went to the city to see a play at the Fringe Fest. It was called Audacious Babe and Glow Girl and it was written and performed by a friend and student in Acadia's Theatre programme. I thought it was awesome. That is my completely unbiased opinion. The theatre review in today's Chronically Horrid wasn't as positive as my completely unbiased opinion, but happily they didn't post it on the website so you don't have to read that trash.




For those of you wondering what the O.O. is up to, he is still chained to the computer trying to get his research proposal ready to send to his advisers, and consequently is still not allowed to have any fun at all until he finishes his homework. On a positive side, Atticus has decided to help.

And Finally, a long while back I mentioned to a potter friend that I follow a number of Pottery Blogs as a poor substitute for the feedback and ideas you get from being part of a community studio. She asked that I list them on my blog, so here they are added to the left pane. Each of these also have more potter's blogs listed on their site so I can pretty much get lost in virtual clay all evening.