Rain and Shine

Ugh.  Today rained off and on, so no yardwork got done.  But during one of the sunny spates this afternoon I did step outside and take a few pictures!

First are these mystery plants, coming up by where a former owner of this house (to our knowledge, we are owners #3) planted daffodils.  I think these might be lily of the valley?

And here are the blossoms on the quince tree.  They're individual, rather than clusters like the apple and pear blossoms, and are a bit more cuplike.  Not much scent.

And, finally, the planted garden bed.  I'll mulch it soon, but I wanted to give the plants a day or two to get used to their new accommodations and perk up their leaves first.

Also, I finally got around to pressing fabric and cutting out face masks!  I've got four in mid-construction at the moment.  I'll finish them and then decide if I want to adapt the methodology any.

One Bed!

Woohoo!  I have one operational garden bed!  Today was dedicated to it.  I hauled the eleven bags (heavy!) of garden soil out of Wonderful Husband's car and to the back yard.  I cut them open one by one and poured them into the bed, crumbling the chunks to make them friable.  It ended up only taking seven and a half bags, so I have three and a half left over!  After the garden bed was full, I watered it a couple times, let that soak in, then started planting my starts.  Six tomato plants, twelve jalepeno plants, two 8' rows of carrots and radishes, and a few nasturtium seeds tucked in at the ends.

(I don't have any pictures today because I forgot.  Tomorrow!)

And after Wonderful Husband finished work, he and I hammered 4' stakes into the ground outside the corners of the bed and hooked rabbit fencing into it.  So theoretically the local wildlife won't be able to nibble up my work.

(This day was punctuated by Jazzy stripping off his clothes twice.  The first time included his diaper and a defecation on the lawn while I was inside checking what Squiddle wanted for lunch.  I came back outside to find him holding his excrement in his hand.  Sigh.  He's three....)

Never Could Get The Hang of Tuesdays

No pictures today, because it ended up being an energy crash day.  Despite that, however, I finally got my chard and some flower starts into the ground (we'll see if they survived transplant), got two loads of laundry done and put away, and stripped and remade both the boys' beds to ensure that they got baths tonight.  It worked - Wonderful Husband washed 'em, then I dried and dressed 'em.

Wonderful Husband also did a grocery run to Costco, and managed to get enough bags of garden soil to fill the bed!  So I know what I'll hopefully be doing tomorrow.

I've been rewatching these videos a couple times, trying to figure out her trellising system and how I might replicate it:

Because I have tomatoes and cucumbers and nothing for them to go up, right now!

Finishing Things

This morning I finally finished my planets watercolor!

I started making the stars with my smallest paintbrush, but they were a bit big and blobby.  (There's three of them near the planet on the bottom.)  After stopping and thinking for a minute, I grabbed a worn-out sewing machine needle and used that for dabbing paint instead.  I think it worked out fairly well.  As Bob Ross said, you can paint with anything!

And in among the rain showers today, I finished degrassing the soil into the garden bed.  Sadly, I still need a good deal more soil.  I checked with one of the local landscaping companies, and it would be about $178 to have a cubic yard of garden soil delivered... :/

I also baked two dozen banana muffins this morning (ten are gone already) from a trio of bananas that were going soft, made buttermilk pancakes and bacon for dinner, and churned two and a half loads of laundry through.  Productivity!

A Bed!

Today was a bit of running around.  To Wilco to get some herb plants (because I am not dealing with that queue outside Home Depot) and a bale of straw for mulch, and then to Home Depot again to do a curbside pickup of some lumber.  Did you know that 96" is the absolute maximum board length you can get inside a Honda Fit?  Because it is.  But it all ended up fitting perfectly.  And then I came home and Wonderful Husband built me this:

This is made from two 12" boards (one sawn in half to make the two sides) and one 8" board for the upper side of the slope.  We spent some time shifting around the soil underneath the frame so it's mostly level since the ground slopes both front to back and right to left.

I worked my way through the piles of dirt and grass chunks on the far and right sides of the bed, sifting soil and earthworms back into the bed and picking out as many rocks as I could.  I still have that pile in front to do, but I was aching and tired and wanted to leave off when I did.  I put the cardboard one of the piles had been on into the bed, to give the worms shelter from the local robins.

I'm going to need more soil to add to the top, even if what I've been gleaning off the grass clods is significantly fluffier than it was before I ran my fingers through it.  And I'm really missing my garden riddle that got left in California.  I need to build another one at some point.  But first, I need to get this bed done and planted!

Friday/Saturday

Friday I cleaned a bit, and watched through Bonnie Hunter's mask-making tutorial.  I have the knowledge, the materials, the tools... all that I lack is the will. :/

Today I didn't get much done aside from running some errands (curbside pickup at Home Depot, putting petrol in the car, doing a drive-through pickup to get a prescription refill) and playing Pokemon Go for the first coronavirus-era Community Day.  Which went not too badly; I got a full set of shiny Abras, and a set of shinies is basically my goal for any Community Day.

This morning was lovely and rainy, and this afternoon cleared up to wonderful mild sun, so after getting back from errands, I spent some time in the backyard.  The apple tree farther from the house is starting to bloom:

Though sadly it looks like only ONE of all the grafts I made took.  Alas.  And here's the pear blossoms on the pear/quince tree:

I also staked out where I want to put in some beds for a vegetable garden, and Wonderful Husband dug up the first 4'x8' bed for me before it was time to put dinner together:

Tomorrow morning I'll pick up some lumber and screws from Home Depot and we'll see about making a bit of a raised bed there, and then I'll shake all that dirt off those grass clumps back into the bed and toss the grass and dandelions into the yard waste bin.

And at some point I need to dab white stars onto that planet watercolor and call it finished....

Typical Tiny Thursday

Not much to post about today.  It was gray and raining on and off, so I only went out to get the mail, to put sun tea (rain tea, I guess) out to brew, and to clip off some dead bits from the apple trees.  Tomorrow I need to use the loppers - I can reach higher using them than I can with the hand shears.

Jazzy had his Zoom meeting with his teachers today, and Squiddle has his tomorrow.

I did manage to make a rather tasty pork roast for dinner, with corn on the cob for a side, homemade applesauce pulled from the deep freezer for another side, and orange jello for dessert.  But, sadly, that was the extent of my accomplishment today.

I've started reading Mrs. Greenthumbs by Cassandra Danz, hoping it will spark gardening urges in me whilst I'm in the doldrums....

Art and Craft

With a second coat of black for the background, the watercolor project is starting to look much better:

And since today was a rainy indoors day, I tried to get the boys to do an arts and crafts session today, with poor results.  Squiddle: "But I don't want to!"  Jazzy: *uses driftwood as a blunt weapon*

But my project turned out reasonably well:

I would like to eventually replace the cotton yarn with beading thread and add some beads and more tiers of shells, but I had very few shells left that had natural holes, and no patience today for trying to drill holes in more.

Beach and Planets

Today the boys and I went to Purdy Beach again and did a nice long (for them) nature walk.  We found sand dollars and watched some buried clams spit at us (clamming season is cancelled in Washington this year; maybe next year we'll dig...).  One actually jetted water up the back of my trouser leg, eek!  There was kerplunking of rocks into the water, digging in the san, and some beachcombing.  Only one other family on the beach.  Afterward, I did McDonald's drive-through as a treat for the boys then we came home.

I worked a bit more on my planets watercolor and got them all finished, only to discover when I removed the painter's tape that watercolor had snuck under the tape!  So I spent some time fixing it as best I could.

I think I'm fairly pleased with it.  I then turned my attention to the background.

I'm hoping that adding another layer or two of black tomorrow will make it look better.  Because I still need to decide on rings and potentially stars.

Projects

I hauled three bookcases out to the barn today, as well as the sander.  Wonderful Husband found we had an unused box of dust masks, so I took one of them and the goggles as well.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll get around to setting up the shopvac, and then I'll give sanding the very chippy dark little green bookcase that's been in my family for... forever.  I want to redo it in white and use it as a bedside table.

One of the others is a turquoise color I don't actually dislike, but it needs cleaning and some right angle braces.  The third bookcase needs a base, and while it's mostly white, it needs a good cleaning and repainting as well.  When it's done, it'll go into Jazzy's room and be his bookcase.

I also worked a little more on the planets watercolor.

Mercury is done.  Earth needs a lot of white clouds added on.  Jupiter I think I'm happy with?  I guess I needs to decide if I want to try to add more swirly definition the way I added craters to Mercury.

The original, again, for comparison:

In Bloom!

Well, as expected, Costume College is calling it for the year and moving to 2021.  At least I hadn't bought plane tickets yet, so I don't need to hassle about it.

Not much happened today other than me getting a start on the other four planets in the painting.  Uranus is done!  Mercury, Earth, and Jupiter are all going to be varying amounts of pain in the kiester.  Well, more work on them tomorrow if I can get up early enough.

And some of my fruit trees are beginning to flower!  The cherries are leafing out, and the plum tree finally starting to break dormancy.  But I'm most amused by how I can tell the pear branches from the quince branches on that tree.

Pear, blooming and ready to go:

Quince, hmmm, maybe considering flowers, it'll get back to you on that:

But I'm most excited by the pretty pink of these apple blossom buds:

Slow Saturday

Drizzly all day today!  Which is good timing on one hand, as Wonderful Husband finished all the mowing yesterday.  But less good in that I was giving the cut grass a day more to dry out before dumping it in the compost tumbler to sort out the lack-of-carbon balance in there, and now the grass clippings are all wet, ugh.  Ah well, they're not going anywhere.

After trying to sort out all the wood and plywood scraps in the barn, I've accepted that Wonderful Husband is right and it'll just be easier to buy new to build the raised beds I want.  Going by Home Depot's site, they'll cost about $45 each, not counting soil, rabbit proofing, or possible hoop house/greenhouse coverings for winter.  So I've sketched out a layout of what I want to do over the next three years, and we'll see what he thinks when he wakes up from his nap.

I've also started in on watercoloring that planets collage!  My version, so far (Venus, Mars, Saturn, Neptune):

And the original:

One Day At A Time

Sewing mojo not quite refound, but forced.  I sewed up four more blocks for the Edyta Sitar sewalong today.  Twelve more to go!  I also pulled a couple yards of two batiks and hot washed/hot dried them to make masks out of.

I also prepped a piece of watercolor paper for a project.  This image came across my tumblr account, and I want to see if I can copy it in watercolor.

Dinner was fried chicken, leftover mac'n'cheese (short people) and rice-a-roni (tall people).  More pie and strawberries for dessert.  Tomorrow I need to go to the store - we're out of catsup, sleepytime tea, and milk.  Also for tomorrow: make salsa, make sauerkraut.

And!  Wonderful Husband gave our new riding mower a whirl, and got about half the back lawn mowed before the light started to fade.

Missing Mojo

I've lost my sewing mojo; if found, please return to...

But at least the table saw was delivered, so theoretically I could now build some raised beds for vegetable gardening, or trellises for the same....

Day By Day

Ugh, I missed posting yesterday.  Sorry!

There's really not much going on at the moment, save for a grocery run yesterday, where the queue just to get inside Costco stretched to the back of the building.  After I got home, I did a bit of cooking: a dozen banana muffins, another fourteen steamed eggs, bacon/leek/mushroom/cheese quiche for dinner (made with the last three duck eggs), and a lemon buttermilk pie for dessert.  Hooray for feeling like cooking again!  Today was a bit simpler of a meal, but one the boys liked better: hot dogs, mac'n'cheese for them and rice-a-roni for the adults, with some pickled garlic on the side (and a bit of kimchi for me), and more pie or strawberries, either with or without cream, for dessert.

Wonderful Husband gave the boys haircuts with his clippers, or at least attempted to, in Jazzy's case.  His hair is mostly shorter, but could definitely do with trimming up in a few places.  Alas, the patience of a three-year-old is finite.

Our electric riding lawnmower did arrive today, and Wonderful Husband got it assembled and drove it out to the barn to fully charge overnight.  Tomorrow we'll see how well it works.  We got in some more badminton both yesterday and today, as well as a walk around the block, and I staked out where I would like a vegetable garden to go.  I need to to measure it out, adjust, and draw out a layout diagram.

And I may have written about four hundred words on another Check, Please! fanfic....

Eggs and Shuttlecocks

The egg hunt this morning in the backyard necessitated my getting up at half past six (given that Jazzy has twice this last week gotten me up at or before seven because he and his bedsheets were damp, le sigh) to conceal chocolate-containing eggs.  Once again, I was very grateful that I guessed a couple months back that there was going to be no city egg hunt this year, and purchased what I needed well ahead of time.

In the afternoon, Wonderful Husband pulled out the badminton set we had bought at Costco a bit ago and set it up in the backyard.  Jazzy was mostly interested in trying to hit rocks (or his brother) with the racket, while Squiddle easily gets frustrated by his lack of skill, and quit after breaking down crying about it.  Wonderful Husband and I persisted for a while, until we managed a volley of 10+ shots.  It's been a long time since I played badminton (rules? what rules?) but I remember it being my favorite sport in high school.  (The lack of hard balls coming painfully fast at my body may have something to with it.)  I had a really good time, got in a bit of cardio, and hope Wonderful Husband will agree to more badminton tomorrow.

Check, Please! and Fanfiction Writing

Another day of Not Much Happening (ah, the monotony of quarantine; may it remain unbroken).  About the only excitement was Check, Please! finally ending.

I reread volume two of Check, Please! and have gotten the werewolf AU fanfic I'm working on through Year Three of the comic, so I'm now a quarter way from the end of this story, and roughly at 4,300 words.  (I have, over the last several months of addiction to this webcomic, gone through rather a lot of the 9800+ fanfics of it on AO3 and read those that fit the pairings and/or genres I'm interested in.  And I noticed that in the supernatural ones, it's never Bitty who's a werewolf.  So I started poking at the idea, wanting to flip a trope.  Of course, since then someone else has posted a Bitty-as-werewolf fanfic, but there's just that one and it's not what I wanted to do with the concept, so we'll see.)

Easter Eggs!

So!  Yesterday, I steamed fourteen eggs because that's what fits in the pot.

Squiddle ate one and Jazzy ate four before they even got to the fridge.  (Jazzy is still only eating the whites, so calorically I suppose he only ate two, but volumetrically I was down four.)

The reason I cooked up another batch of eggs was so that we could experiment with this:

(They all have H written on them in Sharpie because that's how my mother always identified the hard-boiled ones in our fridge, and thus how I do it, and Wonderful Husband marked them before realizing I was planning to dye them.)

This afternoon I broke out one of the dollar store egg dying packets and the boys and I did the above!  Experimenting a little with things like, the longer the egg stays in the dye bath, the darker it becomes.  And then after we were done, they both wanted an egg, so they learned that the dye stays on the shell and doesn't color the whites or yolk.

(Given that Squiddle is still sometimes asking me to make Green Eggs and Ham, this seemed an important lesson.)

I have another dye kit, plus the pots from this left over, plus food dyes, so we'll probably do this again sometime.

I also wrote!  I banged out about a thousand words on a Good Omens crossover with Check, Please!, got it edited by Wonderful Husband, and tossed it up on the usual places.  If anyone wants to read it, you can find it here.

Not Much

Bleh.  Thursday was a mostly okay day that went south along with dinner not turning out well.  I did get in a game of Splendor with Squiddle, though Jazzy "helped" for scattered bits of it.  (I won.  But I held that back and let Squiddle keep buying cards so it was only by one point.)  And I got a little bit of writing done on a Check, Please! fanfic, though I knowknowknow I need to make it a scene, not just describe it....

(I also got an idea for a Good Omens/Check, Please! crossover fic, which Wonderful Husband at least thinks is funny.  We'll see if anything actually comes of it.)

Books and Blocks and Bird Eggs

Finally, a post with some pictures!

My doldrums seem to be fading.  *knocks on wood*  Maybe because I'm at the tail end of that time of month, maybe because I've let myself recharge, who knows.

I've reread a couple books lately.  One was Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  The other was The Ordinary Princess by M.M.Kaye.  Very different stories and tones, but both old favorites I was delighted to reconnect with.

I also just yesterday got Check, Please!: Sticks and Scones in the mail.  I treated myself by reading the Kent story that had been kept back from the webcomic, but I held back on finishing the story.  The author is posting the last several chapters now, one a day, so I'm going to draw it out because when it's done, there'll be no more.  If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it!  (As to the Kent comic, all I can say is a. someone has clearly been to a therapist since his last appearance and it shows, and b. Kent's reaction to finally trying Bitty's pie for the first time is both appropriate and gratifying.)

This week the co-op had turkey eggs on offer, so for novelty's sake I got a dozen for me and a dozen for my sister.  Top to bottom, these are a turkey egg, a duck egg, and a chicken egg.  I love the speckles!

I also managed to fit in a bit more sewing on Edyta Sitar's mystery quilt.  I came to remember my dislike of sliver trimming, but now they're done.  Here are blocks eleven and fourteen:

Only three more sets to go, and then I can lay them out and assemble the quilt top!

Tired Tuesday

Another day of not much done.  Squiddle loves his new math book (Math For Minecrafters) that his Granny sent him, so he did four pages from that.  I stitched some block parts to try and finish up Edyta Sitar's sew-along, so that I don't leave it eternally undone.  We took a walk around the block.  And, really, that was our Tuesday.

Oh, and we set up Squiddle's telescope and admired the supermoon!

But overall, not being able to go anywhere or interact with other people is making the world feel small, and time feel like an illusion.  I'm tired all the time, and I have to keep reminding myself be gentle, be gentle, this shall pass....

Those Monday Blues

Ugh.  It is now official: school is over for the year, at least here in Washington state.  That plus Squiddle having a meltdown over being denied video game time because he hadn't done any schoolwork, plus a very nasty review on a seven-year-old story on fanfiction.net... well, let's just say Monday was pretty much a total wash this week.  At least I got the workroom cleaned up, and we talked some with Jazzy's teacher?

Sunday Slow Day

Kinda of a slow Sunday due to waking up with a headache (and starting that time of month).  I did get a bit more trimming of the apple trees done, and watering of the outdoor plants, but that was about it.

(I also got a splinter in my finger that I can't seem to get out.  Probably a gift of the apple trees....)

Farewell Naptime

Wonderful Husband and I finished our watch of Good Omens last night.  It was a pretty good adaptation of the book.  Not perfect - we each found a few things to quibble about.  But a lot better than a lot of books get.

And it looks like Jazzy is now, sadly, no longer going to be getting an afternoon nap.  Because he was up and rambunctious until around or after midnight the last several nights... except for last night, when we had deliberately omitted his nap.  I'm a bit sad, because having a bit of downtime in the afternoon was so nice.  (Squiddle was, at the same time and under great protest, having a half hour's "quiet lie-down time."  Guess that's gone too.)

Today is yardwork (we've already gotten the heaps of apple tree prunings trimmed down and put in the yard waste bin, as well as three more bags of mulch spread) and wibbling about whether or not to go to the garden center.  Tonight, hopefully, I'll sew more Thorn blocks, as I've got two yellow and six blue kitted up.

Thursday's Things

Yesterday I (sorta) got back into the zoom of things.  I pulled three pots out of the garage and mixed up potting soil, compost, and worm castings to make enough soil to fill the pots and get ten of the (second) set of bare-root strawberries planted.  I still have like four more plants in the bundle, but for now they're in another soak cycle in their cup on the kitchen counter.  I also reassembled the fire pit (which someone, probably Jazzy, has been knocking blocks down from) and pulled cardboard out of The Barn and finished laying it down on that garden bed.  Hopefully today I'll have the spoons to finish mulching it, and water.

I also laid out the twenty-four Thorns blocks just to see how much ground they covered:

They look kind of neat like that, like raindrop ripples on water, but giving them sashing would make my life so much easier.

I also laid out the yellow Thorns blocks for my cousin's baby's quilt:

I think I want to make another six more, do a narrow sashing, and a narrow border.  Forty-two by fifty-five sounds like a good size that will grow with baby K. for a few years.

And after Jazzy went down for his nap, I persuaded Squiddle to try watercoloring with me.  We watched a youtube tutorial on the TV and experimented.

He wanted to make a robot:

Where I was more interested in making a colorwash or two:

Time Skip!

Wow, I missed an update yesterday!  Sorry, I've been trying to post once a day and I slipped.

(Posting daily was not actually my New Year's Resolution.  That was to not read the news.  The news only sends me into depressive spirals.  And I was doing pretty good on that resolution, until Covid-19 happened and blew it all to hell.)

Yesterday was a low-energy day.  As in I had little to none, though I did end up making pumpkin muffins.  I actually ended up napping on the sofa in the afternoon as the boys played with Duplo blocks in front of me.  I woke up when my "time for Jazzy to nap" alarm went off.  I did manage to get him to sleep, then left the house in charge of Wonderful Husband while I went and picked up the farmers co-op orders (Squiddle did not want to come with).  It was a bit strange - I left home to a partly cloudy sky, and by the time I got to the first pick-up point, about five miles away, I'd been through a downpour and it started hailing.  By the time I got to the second pick-up point it was bright sunshine and warm!  Both co-ops have now changed to a drive-up model, where you give them your name and they put your bag of items on your passenger seat.  We now have chorizo, mushrooms, leeks, spinach, and spicy salsa. ^_^

Wonderful Husband baked a pizza for dinner, I sewed a couple more thorns blocks, and I read Squiddle The Lorax for his bedtime story.  Hah, way to not make myself depressed....