2023, Business, Family, home

Home Project Lessons

November 29, 2023 verily sherrilee 35 Comments

I learned a couple of things during the course of our bathroom project.

First… do everything in your power to get a good contractor. Hugo was highly recommended (by my next-door neighbor, who is the head of construction, maintenance project and capital planning for the Minneapolis schools. Hugo communicated well through-out, was easy going, delivered bad news gently and, of course, did a nice job at a good price.

Second… also do everything in your power to have a handy person living in your house with you – especially someone who is invested in the outcome of your project. I have YA for this. She is MUCH handier than I am, as she is more patient as she goes about whatever she is working on. She installed the toilet paper holder and the towel racks. She un-installed the new light sconces because she thought there was a “ridge” along the edge, spackled and sanded and then re-painted. She also installed two slider baskets on the bottom shelves of the vanity so it would be easy to get at our stuff. And she also took a teeny paintbrush from my studio to “straighten” a couple of the paint seams.

And she gets credit for most of the decisions in the bathroom. She picked the tile, the flooring, the wainscotting design, the medicine cabinet and the light sconces. I had final approval but most of the time, her choice was OK with me.

So between Hugo and YA, I don’t really get any credit for the bathroom, unless you count having to arrange all the financing!

Any lessons you’ve learned this week?

2023, home, Uncategorized

Great Expectations

November 28, 2023 verily sherrilee 40 Comments

Yesterday marked exactly eight weeks since our bathroom project started. It started as what I thought would be a quick (and inexpensive) fix of my weird shower system and very quickly went straight downhill. The hot water assembly was so old that when an interior piece of the handle broke, those words “not up to code” were uttered (for two different parts of the bathroom) and started that proverbial domino effect.

When the contractor was finalizing his proposal, I asked him for a guesstimate on how long it would take. He said four weeks. I assumed he was padding that and then padded it again myself so I wouldn’t be upset if the bathroom wasn’t up and running again in a month. Good thing.

The first issue was that the plumber put in the wrong tub for the project. It took several days to get this resolved; I ended up having the contractor replace the tub and I stopped payment on the plumbers until they refunded a chunk of change.

Second issue was the tile. We chose a tile that showed in stock at our local Home Depot. The day we went in to order it, the person who helped us said “Oh yeah, we took a pallet of this down yesterday – there’s plenty.” When contractor went to pick it up the next day, Home Depot said they didn’t have enough. This is when having a good contractor comes in handy – he beat them up enough that they ended up getting it at another store and delivering it right to the house.

Third issue was the vanity. Home Depot SAID that it would be delivered in 2-4 days. They must have meant hours on Mercury, because it certainly didn’t arrive within 4 days. Then when it did arrive, they informed me that they couldn’t deliver it up the steps onto the front porch because I hadn’t paid the additional “in house” delivery fee. Grrr…. Luckily my next-door neighbor was our in his yard and between him and me and YA, we got it onto the porch fairly easily. Of course, when the contractor arrived the next morning and opened it up, it was broken:

Since the return process didn’t go smoothly, I ordered the second one sent to the store. After another set of Mercury-long days, I got multiple messages via text and email saying different things about where the vanity actually was. Called Home Depot and got told the vanity was at the store. I called the store and talked somebody into checking that it was actually there. Called contractor (I spent a lot of time on the phone for this project) and told him he could pick up vanity in the morning. Then lo and behold, overnight I got an email saying vanity had arrived at the store broken. Apparently when the guy at the store told me it was there, it hadn’t been taken off the pallet yet so they didn’t realize it was broken. Sigh. I made kind of a large stink at that point. Not sure if it helped or not but the third vanity arrived undamaged. And even though the store said they had checked it, my contractor made them open it up so HE could check.

Did I mention that during the tear-down process, the toilet got cracked? The brand new toilet that we had put in just seven months ago? Contractor took full responsibility and ordered a new tank. In the meantime, I’m here to tell you that FlexSeal really works. Not sure you can really seal up a boat and drive around the Everglades like in their commercial, but it held the toilet together really well until the next tank arrived yesterday.

Now I realize that this isn’t too bad compared to a lot of the horror stories out there, including some we’ve heard here, but it was enough that the contractor’s 4 weeks and my 6 weeks weren’t padded enough. But overall I’m feeling relatively lucky; this is the second major project that hasn’t been nearly as bad as I expected. Before and after pictures tomorrow!

How do you keep your expectations in check?

Automotive, holidays, Kids, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Driving Me Crazy

November 27, 2023 verily sherrilee 26 Comments

When YA was first driving, I asked a good friend of mine, who had two daughters older than YA, “when will I be able to get in a car with her while she’s driving, and not fear for my life.” Without even a blink, Lori said “when you stop getting a car with her.” I laughed at the time but 13 years later, I realize she was absolutely right.

YA wanted to drive on Thanksgiving. She said it was to see if she could get better mileage on her new car (she bought it in July) but I think it was really to show it off to the Thanksgiving crowd. She drives closer to other cars than I do and it makes me nervous. I put my foot out a couple of times as if I could brake. YA thought this was pretty funny.

She did NOT think it was funny on the way home. It was dark and a couple of times she pulled into a lane with very little space between us and the car in front. I tell myself that she actually drives more these days than I do and she hasn’t had an accident yet. But I’ll admit that at one point I gasped and threw my hands out in front of me. It was involuntary. She gave me a stern warning and I sat on my hands the rest of the way home.

I don’t have these kind of issues when I’m riding with other folks. I went all over Nashville two weeks ago with my friend Pat driving and never flinched once!

Do prefer to be the driver or the passenger?

2023, Automotive, Family, Farming Update, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

Brevity? None Here!

November 25, 2023 verily sherrilee 70 Comments

The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I hope everyone was able to have the kind of Thanksgiving they wanted.

My friend Jia, teaching English over in South Korea, didn’t get a Thanksgiving this year and she missed it a lot.

Someday I need to learn brevity. But not today!

I figured out how to get 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag (from last week), you just get rid of 5 pounds. That happen when my truck had a dead battery. Or two. (because it’s a diesel, it uses two batteries to start) so the whole trip to Northfield and then John Deere got postponed and instead, I went out and finished chisel plowing.

This picture is the last bit of ground to be worked up. And that was a ‘mic drop’ moment. Whew. If you notice the line on the hood of the tractor, I scrubbed the left side to remove the grime, but not the right side. It DOES look nicer, and make a difference and I’d like to get the rest scrubbed off. Depends on the weather. I used the hose and washed off the chisel plow and some of the tractor, since the pressure washer is already tucked away for winter and too much trouble to get back out. (Boy, next year, with my new heated shop, it won’t be such an issue! Maybe!)

A highlight for this last day of fieldwork was adding a steering wheel spinner. Dad had them on all the tractors. Back in the 1990’s, my hand would cramp up (already had carpel tunnel, evidently) and I took them all off. Now, making all the turns on the ends of the fields, with my fingers tucked around a steering wheel spoke, makes my fingers sore. And since I had carpel tunnel surgery several years ago, I put spinners back on. It worked well.

When you look at this photo, you’ll see two fields planted to rye:

on the left and right of the tractor. It’s hard to tell how much of that is oats regrowing or the rye I planted late. The oats will not over-winter; it will die off. The rye will survive and grow again. Meaning come spring, and these fields will be planted to corn, I’ll need to have the rye “terminated”. Plowing it up won’t stop it. And if it’s a warm wet spring and it’s late spraying, it will be really tall, meaning there ends up being a lot of trash (plant material) to move through the equipment and it makes a tough seed bed. So, we’ll see. I look at this photo and I see a potentially difficult spring, and a leaking hydraulic hose on the chisel plow, and how I should replace all the hydraulic hoses on it, and the chisel shovels I need to replace. But the sky is pretty.

Doing the fieldwork really is meditative. I had my tractor buddy with me and I saw bald eagles. Boy, there was a lot of ears of corn on the ground this year, in some fields more than others. Damn deer, they tear off a lot of ears and nibble on it a bit. And it was a mixed bag this year because of the drought. The stalks were shorter than normal, and more brittle than normal, and then because the stalks and corn dried out sooner, it was easy for the deer to reach them, easier to pull off, easier for all the kernels to pop off the ear.

Driving around, I would see ‘combine loss’ in the fields, kernels that didn’t get into the combine. Kernels on the ground is not helpful and it means money lost. There are a lot of extra attachments to help corn or soybeans get into the combine. Air systems to blow kernels in, brushes to help feed the kernels in, extra brushes so they don’t pop out. But I don’t own the combine, so… not much I can do about that. Kernels might pop off because the soybean pods are so dry, they split open just from being ‘jostled’ before the combine header gets to them. Or the corn ear might break off the stalk, hit the header, and fall on the ground, or hit hard enough the kernels fly off. Harvesting is kind of a cataclysmic process, yet it needs to be somewhat gentle not to damage the kernel. There’s a lot happening in the moment in the combine, and it’s not surprising to see kernels on the ground. But there was a lot this year, and it means money lost and it’s kinda frustrating because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll try calling it the angels share.

We got some mail order pork delivered In a box with dry ice. I got some hot water and we had some fun.

You wouldn’t think the most dangerous part of farming would be trying to adjust the right-hand mirror on the tractor. It’s 8 feet up, out in the middle of nothing. When at home, I use a step ladder to adjust it. Then out in the field, I hit a tree branch and it gets knocked out of place. And there I am climbing up over the three-point hitch and onto the tire trying to get this back out in place and focused right. And trying to get back down, I think about all the hard, sharp edges, and pointy things I can snag myself on, or fall on to, and sometimes I leave the mirror where it is. Newer tractors have steps to reach allow cleaning the windows and reaching the mirror. And the ‘delux’ cab, has remote mirrors. Someday.

Next week, did we make any money?

ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OF THIS? YOUR LAST ‘MIC DROP’ MOMENT?

2023, Family, Fantasy, Music, Uncategorized

Would You Like To Be A Pip?

November 24, 2023 reneeinnd 44 Comments

For some odd reason, Husband was musing recently about what it was like being a backup singer in one of the various musical groups from the 1960’s and 1970’s. He thought it would be fun to be a Miracle, a Blue Note, or a Pip.

This brought up memories for me of the Ronettes, the Marvelettes, and the Vandellas, although I don’t think it would be much fun to be an Ikette. I would have to put up with Ike.

What backup group would you like to sing with? Got any good ideas for names of new backup groups?

Baboon Achievers, Media, Music, Stories

The Sound of Our Lives – Steve Grooms

November 23, 2023 verily sherrilee 30 Comments

It’s been two years since we lost Steve. Below is one of his most iconic posts (in my view).

I’m passionate about music and life, so it is not surprising that the two often meld for me. Certain moments become inextricably associated with the music I was listening to at that time. The most familiar example of this is how couples can have a song or performance that becomes “our” song. But that sort of things happens over and over for people like me. We end up associating music with certain times places we have known. I keep hearing the phrase: “the soundtrack for my life.” And that, for many people, colors how they think of moments from their past.

The worst place I ever lived was a shabby little house on the West Bank near Seven Corners, but that place is also associated with the moment I discovered the music of Leo Kottke at the nearby Scholar Coffeehouse. As awful as that house was, Leo’s music was one of the happiest discoveries of my life. Some of the associations we make are complicated.

Sometimes the soundtrack we can’t help associating with something is wildly inappropriate to anyone else. I discovered the Lord of the Rings trilogy early in grad school. At the same time, I was listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar sitar music. Clearly, the epic trilogy is as thoroughly European and Nordic as Shankar’s music is Indian, but when I read Tolkien I keep hearing sitar music. It is, after all, exotic, and I found the novels exotic.

I think of these matters a lot now because I keep encountering two types of music that are linked in my mind to the pandemic. I discovered the music of the traditional jazz band Tuba Skinny just as the virus reached the US and changed our lives. When I listen to YouTube videos of the band, as I do for maybe an hour each day, I keep reading comments from others who say they could not bear the pandemic without the uplift of Tuba Skinny music.

Similarly, early in the virus shutdown period, Mary Chapin Carpenter began recording Songs from Home. She films herself with her animals (White Kitty and Angus, the golden retriever) at her farm home in Virginia. She delivers her performances (filmed on her phone, I think) with a breathy intimacy that is incredibly calming. Unless you somehow hate her music, I urge you to sample some Songs From Home to read the comments of all the people who say their sole salvation in this difficult time is the music she makes for them.

What about you? What music do you associate with particular moments from your past? Do you have “our song” with anyone?

2023, Business, home, Technology

Photo Finish

November 22, 2023 verily sherrilee 42 Comments

In the last seven weeks I haven’t gone more than a day or so without having to stop by either Home Depot or my local hardware store. There are only a couple of bits left until the bathroom is completely finished, but we are now slowly putting it back together. This has driven me to the hardware store several times in the last week. Screws, anchors, springs, plugs, paintbrushes…. I feel like I’m practically living there.

Last Saturday morning, they were slammed; I wasn’t the only one with a home project. Rather than wait around for help, I ventured to the back where the entire wall is filled with drawers and boxes of nails, screws, bolts and the like. I needed some kind of rubber plug for the end of a spring I had bought the day before to hopefully allow us to keep using our current shower caddy. (Anything to staunch the flow of cash into this bathroom!) I did actually find something that would work perfectly.

None of the store employees was at the back of the store and I didn’t trust myself to remember the part number or even the price until I got to the register, as I had a few other things to pick up. Although I had a pen, I didn’t have anything to write on. I was just about to write on my hand when I suddenly realized I could use my phone to take a photo of the price and sku. Not an earth-shattering thought but I’d never thought of it before. Snapped the above picture and headed back to pick up my other items. The young cashier did actually thank me profusely. Apparently most people expect the employees to know all the prices which means a quick trip to the back of the store to check; I got good-customer brownie points!

When was the last time technology pleasantly surprised you?

2023, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Bad Habits

November 21, 2023 verily sherrilee 36 Comments

I bought my house in 1991.

The bathroom light switch was on the wall OUTSIDE the bathroom. I don’t know why. But for 30+ years I have switched on the light before I go into the bathroom and switched it off when I come out of the bathroom. Also for 30+ years, anytime a guest has used the bathroom I have cautioned them “the light switch is on the wall in the hall”.

Since the entire inside of the bathroom got ripped up for the remodel, including the wall where the electrical box was located, I figured we might as well move the switch to the inside of the bathroom. The electrician also moved the fan switch and overhead heat lamp switch over as well, so all three switches now live together.

Here are the three switches in their new location:

This is where the switch used to be:

It’s been two weeks. I still try to turn the lights on/off outside the bathroom at least 5 times a day.

How long does it take you to change a habit?

2023, Family, home, Uncategorized

Hot Mess

November 20, 2023 verily sherrilee 32 Comments

We’re in the very last death throes of our bathroom remodel: the time when you realize you need a new shower caddy, a little table, new towel racks, new shade, new curtain…… aarrggghhhh.

Home Depot feels like it has become our home away from home. We were there last night for a toilet paper holder, a new shade (we have a new window that is a different size from the old window) and some towel rods. YA is fairly handy and took on the toilet paper holder on Saturday afternoon. She didn’t like the size of the anchors to attach the handles so we had to make a trip to the hardware store. It was the third hardware store trip of the day for me, although the other two trips were about the shower caddy, not the toilet paper holder.

Once we were home, she was able to get it finished up in less than a half hour. When she called me to look at her handiwork, the photo above is what I saw. Quite a bit of mess for a toilet paper holder. She’s not traditionally as good about cleaning up after a project, but she did straighten up. I suggested she could clean up more and she reminded me that she’ll need these same tools for the towel racks. Good thought.

When I had to take a picture of the big mess for the little project, she objected and then said “why didn’t you take a picture of the holder?” So… voila:

Are you good at cleaning up your messes?

2023, animals, Business, Farming Update, Seasons, Uncategorized

Ten Pounds in a Five Pound Bag

November 18, 2023 verily sherrilee 51 Comments

The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

This week has been a little nuts.

Sigh.

Really, the last few weeks have been a little nuts. I’m burning the candle at both ends, and I need more hours in a day.

CROPS ARE OUT!

And I had a few hours alone in a tractor, with hopefully more to come.

Big Sigh.

Nice.

Kelly and I spent some time on the roof of the machine shed caulking trim pieces and looking for loose nails and trying to figure out why I have water dripping in my new insulated shop area when it rains. Remember, earlier this summer, when I couldn’t get up on the roof? I bought these new ladder extensions, which give me a hand hold 3 feet above the ladder, and they were worth the money. But it also led to a discussion about ladders. I have an old 24-foot aluminum extension ladder that I’m pretty sure dad got used, and it is better than the old wooden ladder we had been using. I bought a really nice 24-foot fiberglass ladder, but of course, that’s at a theater and used for lighting. It has my name painted on the side, meaning I’ll get it back at some point, but it’s more important to have it at the theater now.

I feel like I should replace this aluminum ladder. It’s got a slight twist on one leg. And it doesn’t have a top step where most ladders have a step now days. As good as fiberglass ladders are, they’re really heavy. And because I don’t expect to get any stronger as I get older, I will probably buy a new aluminum ladder.

It seems fitting that by the time you shouldn’t be climbing on the roof, you’ve also reached the point where you can’t pick up the ladder to get on the roof anymore.

The corn went surprisingly well, averaging 120 bushels per acre, 16 or 17% moisture and 57 or 58 pound test weight.

Remember, corn has to be at least 56 pound testweight to not get docked by the elevator. And it needs to be dried down to 15% moisture to store long term, anything above that incurs a drying cost. I know a couple of my fields were only doing about 55 bushels per acre, and some fields were doing amazingly well to get 120 bushels average. That is pretty good this year. Last year I had about 150 bushels per acre.

Soybeans were terrible, but I knew that. 55 pound testweight, soybeans need to be 60 pounds. And typically, moisture is not a problem, they need to be not over 13% and mine were 11%. They averaged about 20 bushels per acre. Again, considering some years I get 50 bushels/acre, and some places can get close to 100b/A, this growing year is good to have over. We will see what Crop Insurance does with all this.

Pictures tell a thousand words, so here’s a bunch of pictures. (Click on each photo to see the best view.)