Spring Has Nearly Sprung

Although not officially until March 20 (the day after my birthday), it certainly feels as if it is Spring. According to my handy map (below), today is the last possible day for a frost in this area. The weather report predicted that it will reach nearly 70 degrees today (hallelujah!) I think it is safe to begin the summer garden preparations.

Yesterday I received my much-anticipated order of eight (that's right) varieties of heirloom tomatoes from the Seed Savers Exchange. I realize that no one really needs to have eight different kinds of tomatoes in their garden, especially if for a two person household, but no one should have to live with only red tomatoes, either. So I decided to buy at least one of each color, although I forgot to get an orange tomato. Maybe next year...


To commemorate my fur-children I bought a "Ruby" tomato and a "Potato Leaf" tomato. If you look carefully at the Hillbilly Potato tomato package, it actually says "Potato Loaf". I'm sure that's a mistake but it sure is funny, considering my boy-dog's personality.

For the last three weeks, Dave has been out of town on a business trip (but home on the weekends). Since I get bored at home all alone in the evenings I've been finding ways to keep myself entertained. One night I made myself a mini greenhouse out of plastic fabric, like your grandmother used to cover her floral couch, and two stackable shelving units, and huge zippers. I saw something like this at the local garden center and thought it was very cool. Except for the price! That one sells for $80 and it isn't as tall as mine is. In total, I think I spent like $40 on mine and spent about 4 hours making it. I love cheap and productive entertainment!

So I've sown some herbs (oregano, enough basil for all of Italy, thyme, dill, spearmint, and parsley), various lettuces (sweet, spicy, salad bowl), onions, leeks, and scallions. I planted onions back in the fall but very few made an effort at germinating. I thought I'd try one more time before it gets too hot for them. My lettuces have already sprouted!

As soon as I figure out how to use the soil blocker my dad loaned me I'll get my tomatoes sown, too. I'm also seriously considering splurging on an order of seed potatoes from Seed Savers. You can apparently plant them in a tire and just keep piling the soil/compost around them along with additional tires all season, until you eventually have a potato tower full of potatoes. I really need to try that.

Another Rainy Weekend

Another room down! That's right, Dave and I (almost) finished the flooring project in the guest room this weekend. And it only took one weekend...rather than 5 like the dining room.

This past Thursday night I pulled up the carpet and removed the tiles in the guest room. Because that room is only about half the size of the dining room, it only took me about 2 hours to do (that's not including a break at 6:30 to watch Friends). Then on Friday morning I chiseled out all the termite holes (21 I think) and filled them with cement putty. I wanted to make sure they'd be dry by Saturday morning so we could start laying laminate right away. I also removed all the baseboard and the door casing. Because our dining room trim wasn't yet painted (and so the furniture wasn't positioned) I couldn't remove the tiles from the guest room closet since it was still full of all my china and other dining room paraphernalia.

Ugly tile:
You know how nothing ever goes as planned? For instance, I prepared the guest room so that we could start laying laminate FIRST THING on Saturday. Well, first we decided to sleep in (or rather it just happened that way) and then we decided to visit the brand new Costco that just opened in Woodland. We are deliriously happy about this because it is SO close to our house. We could practically (er, impractically since we couldn't carry anything) ride our bikes there! It turns out that grand openings of stores that give out free food samples on rainy days are PACKED. I swear, all of Woodland and Davis where crammed into that store. I even saw my Biogeochemistry professor and his kids.

We went as quickly as possible through the store, making sure to sample as many of the treats as we could. The only thing I really wanted to buy was a 50 pound sack of flour and a huge jar of kalmata olives. They didn't have that latter so I made up for it by buying about $100 worth of other things. Strange how that can so easily happen at a place like Costco. I think the real reason we went to Costco was to have a Polish dog and soda (for only $1.50!). We love those things.

So on Saturday afternoon I started painting the dining room trim while Dave continued to prep the guest room. We realized AFTER the fact that I should have painted the base board BEFORE installing it since it is very difficult (for me, at least) to avoid painting the floor and the wall. Dave helped me slide/jam paper under the baseboard and behind it so I could paint freely. That worked well until I had to remove it. Even with a razor blade to score the paint line it was hard to remove. We'll have to come up with a better plan for the other rooms.

Just to ensure that we actually get rid of our icky garage-to-dining room door I decorated it as I painted the door casing. Isn't it gorgeous? I'm quite the ar-teest.
Before Dave starting laying the laminate, we re-read the Ikea directions (and by read I mean "interpret their non-lingual drawings"). Surprise, surprise, we weren't doing it the way they recommended when we did the dining room. It turns out laying the laminate IS a one person job! Haha! So Dave got busy with the laminate and I got busy putting away all my china and crystal.

The third thing that kept us off-track was that our table saw blade suddenly went very dull. Dave was in the garage and I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I started to smell something smoky, which isn't too uncommon when you're ripping lengths of wood on the saw. Just like on the magic shows Dave suddenly appeared in the kitchen in a cloud of smoke. He said he'd have to go buy a new blade because the old one wasn't working well. He had me look in the garage and there was nothing but smoke.

When my parents were here last weekend my dad brought his brad-nailer gun for us to borrow, which uses compressed air to drive in these little nail-like brads. For the trim in the dining room we'd used a hammer and a nail setter to drive the nail heads down below the surface so I could putty over them and paint them. Bye bye hammer. Hello brad-nailer! This tool is wonderful for installing trim; it is fast and easy. The dogs don't like it because of the sound. While Dave was using it I was painting the window sills in the dining room. I had both dogs sitting on my feet, with their heads tucked between my legs. I'm surprised I didn't fall over. To them I'm sure the sound was confusing and scary. To me it sounded like the toaster popping up the bread.

Once he got started the floor-laying went very quickly. He trimmed-out the doors (which I will paint in place) and cut and coped all the baseboard. Hopefully I'll find time to paint the baseboard this week so we can install it this coming weekend. I have a physical chemistry midterm on Friday that I should study for instead...
Here's what the dining room looks like now. I'm still searching Cragislist for an oak buffet or dresser to place opposite the hutch and I have some shelving to paint for the other end of the room. But basically, it's done!

For the last 3 weeks I've made pizza on Sunday evenings. This week's was by far the best yet. To the dough I added black pepper, red pepper flakes, oregano, and thyme. Oh. My. Gosh. It was goooood.

The dough:

The pizza...perfect with a glass of Pinot Noir and a salad:
I added a few more pictures of the dogs to their slide show at the bottom of the blog. Make sure to take a look at how CUTE they are!

Levie Men and Lamb Legs...

My parents came up to Davis this past weekend for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, my cousin, his wife, and their darling baby boy were in the Sacramento area for the long weekend to visit with my aunt and uncle. None of us had met Conrad, the baby, yet. Second, my dad also wanted to get over to Woodland to buy about 200 pounds of urea for his very woody compost and to purchase a 325 gallon water tank. Third, my mom wanted us to (finally) celebrate my dad's 59th birthday, which was a month before.

On Saturday morning (while my mom was at a wedding) I dragged Dave and my dad over to the Farmer's Market to buy all the goodies I needed to my graduate group's wine and cheese party. While there we ran into my favorite undergrad professor, Carla. I bought oranges, pears, olives (which I actually forgot to even take to the party after all that--oops, I guess I'll have to eat them myself!), and LOTS of cheese. YUM. With only an hour before the fertilizer store was due to close, we loaded up into to Cliff (my dad's Big Red Truck) and shot down the highway to Woodland. Of course, we'd left the directions and phone number on the coffee table at home but since Woodland is a very small place we assumed we'd find the place. We knew it was on East Street but after confirming the address from a gas station phone book we still couldn't find the place! Oh well, at least we tried. We were successful at the Tractor Supply--my dad bought his 325 gallon water tank and I convinced Dave to let me raise some chickens in the backyard. (I spent a good amount of time flipping through chicken raising books and perusing all the feeders and waterers. It turns out my dad wants to raise chickens, too, so we've decided to order at least 6 chicks come Spring and he'll take half back to Livermore.)

When we got home and jumped out of the truck, my dad spied our nasty tree stump by the driveway and said "Hey, why don't we take the out this afternoon? It shouldn't take too long." I said "Go for it, " and left him and Dave with the pick-matic and shovels while I busied myself with rewiring some lights in the garage. It only took them about 2 hours to get the whole thing out. This is great, because now I can plant pretty things all along the driveway!

The whole was REALLY deep:
...just kidding!
The stump was large, but (luckily) it didn't have a major tap root so they just chopped off dozens of smaller roots and wriggled it free:
Later on my dad and I went to the Food Co-op and bought ourselves a whole leg of lamb to grill for his birthday dinner. Preparations went about the same as before, with him posing for pictures just like Edward did back in December. This time we used fresh parsley instead of dill and it was very yummy with couscous and yogurt.
I also made a red velvet birthday cake--I'm totally not impressed with this cake (or perhaps just this recipe). It tastes like sugar and butter, which I guess makes sense since the frosted cake contains about 4 cups of sugar and about that much butter. Ick. Can you believe it requires a WHOLE 1 ounce bottle of food coloring? I think Red 40 is carcinogenic...perhaps I should rename this cake Red Cancer Cake. At least it is pretty!

There goes the whole bottle of cancer into the batter:

The finished cake (I messed up my gel icing "5"):

On Sunday we went to Fair Oaks to visit with my mom's family--unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera and didn't get any pictures of baby Conrad. (Just imagine the most adorable boy with the best temperament and you've got the picture...) We went out to eat at a brewery and then visited at my Aunt Bev and Uncle Bill's house. (Uncle Bill is my mom's twin brother; Dave also has twins in his family and we're hoping we'll end up with twins of our own some day.) The visit was super fun (but too short), since I haven't really hung out with my cousin Mike (or his wife Delonna) much ever. I wish we lived closer to them... Hopefully I can get one of them to email me a picture from that day (someone took pictures of me and Conrad...) and I will post it here (hint, hint!).

Reincarnation As A Shower Curtain

Right after we became engaged in Paris, my mom bought Dave and I some Paris bedding from my favorite catalog, Garnet Hill. We had a queen bed then but upgraded to an eastern king sized bed once we realized there’d never be enough room on a queen for two humans and two dogs (who also require their own pillows, mind you). Since I gave Edward and Allison our queen bedroom furniture this past summer we’ve not been using these cute sheets at all.

This is what the bedding looked like (from the Garnet Hill catalog):

So I decided to turn them into a shower curtain for our hall bathroom. (If my mom is reading this, I bet she’s having a fit: “She did WHAT with those nice sheets I bought for them?! Tisk. Why would she go and ruin such pretty sheets like that?”) But I think she’ll be pleased to see how it came out and how it looks hanging in that blue bathroom. We already had Moulin Rouge prints hanging in that bathroom (that’s where Dave proposed...at the Moulin Rouge, not in the bathroom...) so it all “came together” with this new curtain.

I used some neat trim and some ribbon I found amongst all the sewing stuff I inherited from my late Grandma so it wouldn’t just look like I hung an old sheet up.

The remaining material from the sheets and duvet cover will probably come back to life as curtains for our gray-walled office. We’re thinking of painting vertical stripes on the walls of the office to make it look taller—we’ll use the same color of gray but in a different finish (we have satin up now so perhaps we’ll use a semi-gloss).

I might also refashion a red king duvet cover I got for our bed so that the center of the duvet is Paris print. My intent for buying the red duvet set was to (try to) mask the dirt and grim the dogs bring into our bed everyday. Potatoes is the main culprit--right after he's done going potty after breakfast he runs straight back into the bed and snoozes in one of the human spots (it is still warm and he adores ANYTHING that smells like Mama or Daddy--yes, even our dirty clothes.) Because he's a boy (not because he's a dog...) his paws are especially prone to coming back in trailing leaves and clumps of dirt. The red duvet DOES mask the dirt, but not all the white hair. So it ends up looking messier than if I just used one our girly pastel floral duvets where the paw prints just sort of blend in with the flowers. I know some of you are probably completely grossed out, but that's just life with dogs. And when you know your dogs are angels sent directly from Heaven (as mine are, of course) then you just take it as your Earthly duty to deal with dirty paws in your bed. =o)

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back, But Finally At The Finish Line

After a whole month, Dave and I finally finished the dining room! Well, mostly.

I had loaned Dave's favorite, variable speed drill to his brother earlier in the week (he was going to try to repair their own automatic garage door) so Dave and I tinkered around with the door casings and rosettes until Michael could drop the drill off to us in the afternoon.

We put the casing around the door to the garage and it looks so nice! The rosettes posed a bit of a problem since our walls are so textured. After using a square to position the rosettte at the corner of the door frame, you're supposed to nail and glue it to the corner. We kept having to scrap away the texture so it wouldn't move. After the garage door we did the sliding glass door frame.

Here's Dave working on the rosettes on the door to the garage:

Once the drill arrived, I anxiously watched Dave trying one last time to get that darn transition stuff to work. It turns out I had just misunderstood him last weekend when he said that it wouldn't work. What he meant to say was that the cheesy blue plastic rail wouldn't work because he drilled it down too close to the sliding glass door frame. This meant that there was no "wriggle room" to slide and snap the faux laminate transition on. So I watched as he had to drill a whole new set of holes (again, using all his weight and a brand new masonry bit).

The problem with our house is that it is crappy--it is a run-of-the-mill 1950s insta-track house made of, at best, medium quality materials. The concrete slab has stones in it, which are harder than the surrounding concrete. So your drill bit can wander away from vertical if you happen to hit one of those stones. He had to be very careful to keep those holes vertical so that the rail would end up exactly where he wanted it. I suggested that when he met resistance, that he remove the drill from the hole and hammer down there with a long nail. That seemed to help get past those stubborn parts.

What a handsome transition piece! Davie does such good work:

He was able to install the transition piece under the pocket doors to the kitchen linoleum without too much trouble and he only had to let the drill cool off a few times. (He has this weird method of testing how hot the tip is with his lips...).

Before doing the casing around the pocket doors, we started fiddling with the pretty new baseboard we bought. We cut a little piece and put it next to the door casing to see how it would look. Ick. The baseboard stuck out away from the wall past the casing material. It looked baaaaad. We flipped through our new book from Home Depot called "Trimwork 1-2-3" to see what we'd done wrong. The book showed people also installing plinth pieces, with are decorative wooden pieces that go at the bottom of the door frame and meet directly with the baseboard. The last thing we wanted to do was to go back to Home Depot for more stuff like that. After another 15 minutes of playing with the piece and experimenting with angled cuts, I decided that there HAD to be a logical solution to this. I mean, this baseboard and the casing we bought are sold in "professional packs" of like 120 linear feet. Contractors buy this stuff by the ton and trim out entire houses with it. It is MEANT to be used together (we're just adding the rosettes because we're a) lazy with mitering and b) they look pretty). I finally realized that we must have installed the casing backwards; it is angled width-wise and we positioned it so that the thickest part was closer to the door, not to the baseboard.

Simple as it sounds, it wasn't much fun: we removed all of the casing (being very careful not to upset those rosettes) and reinstalled it the other way around. It still looks so pretty! The baseboard installation went pretty smoothly, once we figured out how to use our new coping saw to cope one part of each corner. It is truly amazing what a difference that large baseboard does to that room. The walls are still peach but it looks so nice with the new flooring!

The new casing around the sliding glass door. It will be mostly covered since I usually have curtains here to keep out some of the southern sun:

Look at how crappy our door looks now (we'll either hang a new panel door or just paint this a crisp white and get new hardware):
We raised our dining room table with casters to make it easier to clean the floors:I spent last night filling in all those nail holes with putty and I touched up the peach paint from where our hammer smacked pieces of tiles hit the walls. Hopefully I'll be able to get all the trim painted before my parents arrive this weekend. Then I get to put all the furniture back in (this is my favorite part--I LOVE arranging and rearranging furniture). I'm painting two little shelves a clean white to use in the dining room and am on the market for a used sideboard/buffet that I can also paint.

Recipe: Bean Soup with Greens

I modified a recipe I found on AllRecipes.com and made soup last night with some of our garden goodness:

Bean Soup with Greens

• 1 tablespoon olive oil or canola oil
• 4-8 large garlic cloves, crushed or minced
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 2 chopped carrots
  
• 4-6 cups chopped raw greens (I used a combo of turnip, collard, and mustard)
  
• 4 cups low-fat, low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth (don't waste your homemade stock on this dish...the other flavors will mask it so just use canned stuff from the store)
  
• 2 (15 ounce) cans white beans, such as cannellini or navy, drained and rinsed
  
• 1 quart chopped tomatoes (or a large can, undrained)
• 2 teaspoons dried Italian herb or Herbs de Provence seasoning if using the latter, also add 1 tsp orengano)
  
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1/4-1/2 tsp cayenne pepper, to taste

Saute first 4 items over medium high heat until carrots are just softening, about 10 minutes. Dump in the greens and stir to coat. Let wilt. Add 3 cups of the broth, the tomatoes (with their juices), and 1 can of beans. Add seasonings. Let soup simmer while you puree the remaining beans and broth in a food processor, Magic Bullet, or blender. Add that to the soup and let the whole thing simmer until the greens are the texture you like. Older greens (like you'd buy at the store) will need to simmer for at least 20 minutes. You can use kale in this instead of the greens I used.

This soup is seriously fantastic! It has levels of flavor. Last night Dave and I were in separate rooms eating our soup (he was watching Smallville in the living room while I was watching Friends on the office computer...) when I got up to go tell him how good I thought the soup was. When I opened the office door he was standing right there. He was coming into the office to tell ME how much HE liked the soup. (Yeah, it's THAT good).

How does your garden grow?

We planted our winter garden back in late September and have been lucky to enough to eat from it since before Thanksgiving. The turnip and collard greens have been abundant in our kitchen. Since these are the young leaves they don't require much cooking; we prefer them lightly sauteed with cooked bacon or ham. They also work well in soups.

Here's a poem I wrote about myself. The only problem is that pole beans are not a winter crop. Any suggestions?

Julie, Julie, quite unruly
How does your garden grow?
With turnip greens, and blue pole beans,
And cabbages all in a row.

I took these pictures this morning:

Turnip, collard, and mustard greens:
Broccoli, cauliflower, and brussel sprouts (Allison had better come for a visit to help me eat the latter):Beets of two varieties and carrots:
Cabbage patch kids--just kidding! Here we have Chinese cabbage and head cabbage:
A few weeks ago I also planted a few climbing roses near the gates and they've finally started to sprout. This is exciting because it means that I didn't kill them AND that we'll have some beautiful greenery to cover the arches over each gate come summertime.