In building the garden beds, I came across a lot of rocks. I filled up the voids in the cement blocks with the rocks. Some of the bigger rocks I whacked with a hammer to break them up so that they would fit the voids better. This was the most interesting rock to break open:
NPR’s first listen series streams soon to be released albums in their entirety up until their release date. The current selection has 3 strong albums:
Paul Simon’s new album is absolutely amazing- rivals Graceland, which is speaking volumes. You owe it yourself to track that album down.
While digging out footings for my raised bed garden, this spider was down in the dirt, under some rocks, mostly likely:
Poking around with an internet search leads me to believe that it was a mouse spider.
We are building raised bed gardens this year. Our [previous effort] on Gaines Street was very successful by our reckoning. With plenty of room, we are upping the ante.
We are planning two raised beds with 4′ x 8′ interiors. The yard slopes significantly, so I’m digging out the high side gravel footing to keep things level. Here’s the site work crew getting started:
We are dry stacking concrete block and using some super-dooper adhesive to help hold things together. We have been here a little less than a year and we have already had several bumper crops of rocks in the backyard- they are multiplying faster than the rabbits that live in our “coyote woods”.
All the baby rocks go inside the concrete block to fill the voids and add some mass. Here Graydon is figuring out which lumps are rocks and which are just dirt clods:
Despite appearances, she is not whacking her bunny with a mallet:
Our raised beds will be 4′ x 8′ on the inside and two courses of concrete block high. I picked this dimension for a few reasons:
One down and the second one started. We’ll paint the concrete block this week and probably put a nice looking cap on the top in the fall:
My old webhost has shut down. Lots of overhead on moving. Some secret projects, experiments and such have been packed away. Some will see the light of day again, possibly in new and improved incarnations.
Moving is mostly complete. The Unknown Dog should be back in action. Any of my two or three regular readers can give me a heads up on anything missing or broken. Am I down to just one regular reader? If so- hey pal, this blogs for you!
In other news, Graydon turned 3 years old on Mar 19!
Unknown Dog is in the process of moving and will be back soon.
Posts/images look to be good. Drop me a line if you notice something missing. Audio/video links still need some work.
So the lovely wife felt like the faucets and fixtures in our house look a little dated:
Ok, point taken. A set of new faucets later:
So the wallpaper is still a bit much for our taste and the hanging brass globes (not pictured) are kind of a drag, but if one strictly focuses on the faucets, it looks like a whole bathroom makeover.
Pfister faucet was a cake walk to install. Getting the old faucet out took at least twice as long as putting in the replacement. The [website for this faucet] has a blurb about “Quick Underbody Installation with quick underbody installation under the sink”. That’s kinda repetitive on their part, but maybe they felt that they wanted to say ‘quick’ two times to stress how fast and easy it was.
A recent pic from the archives- click the zoom icon for full size:
Here’s another one taken at the same time with different light:
Gabe loves to go to the library. Primarily because he gets to page through the Spiderman graphic novels while we are there.
I managed to lock myself out of my websites and haven’t had any new Unknown Dog material for my regular readers. Both of you will happy to know that I am back in the saddle and will hope to have some catchup pics and posts for your consumption.
In the meantime, I’ve found that my kids love being photographers. We have a little camera that is drop proof, waterproof and all that jazz. The [Olympus Stylus 1050 SW] is surprisingly kid friendly, though it is clearly not targeted for kids. The happy coincidence that the 2 and 4 year old can easily press the button and get instant feedback from the big LCD screen on the back of the camera is ever so useful.
While I first handed the camera over to my budding Ansel Adams with a pretty fatalistic cringe and fire-and-brimstone threats, I’ve progressed to offering nothing more than a brief overview and a briefer warning. My prodigy child has instinctively grasped his father’s nuanced strategy towards quality photographs: The more pictures you take, the better the odds something will be in focus. Barring that, you might get lucky and make something that can be passed off as art.
It is very cool to see Gabe start to form some sense of composition, or at least stumble upon it by luck. The 3 pics below were Gabe products- I put them together and cropped the left and center panes to space the whole, but I didn’t monkey around with anything besides that. Blog format may truncate the pic, so get clicky on the zoom icon for the entire thing:
