Trying to take care of my little piece of the planet
I’m off work today and should get outside to continue putting the gutter in place, but it’s forty degrees and windy rain. So, I’ll procrastinate a few more minutes and upload a few pictures of the past week’s progress in building the new roof over the area that will contain the two 2500 gallon tanks. [...]
Posted on December 26th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rainwater Collection | No Comments »
The item above was purchased by a friend during a last minute gift buying spree on Christmas Eve. Given all the recent furor over lead-based paint in kids toys made in China, I wasn’t sure whether this manufacturer was being market savvy or punctuation deficient. A sticker declaring: ‘Made in China’ on the base of [...]
Posted on December 26th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rants and Musings | No Comments »
As I write this, it’s probably dawn in London. Dawn’s still six hours away here, but it’s technically December 26th, and we just finished our sixth ‘Christmas’ in six days. Last Friday, old friends rolled up our long driveway as I was still furiously vacuuming up dog and cat hair, and the holiday unofficially began. [...]
Posted on December 26th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Family Life, Rants and Musings | No Comments »
Yesterday evening after work I made another of my somewhat weekly trips to visit my mom. For the last three years she’s lived pretty independently at an assisted living facility about forty miles from my home. As I said in an earlier post, she’s eighty-three and quite healthy, other than the slow onset of Alzheimer’s [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Family Life, Rants and Musings | 2 Comments »
I’m a news/politics junkie; have been for decades. During the years (and years, and years) of Dubya’s presidency it has been one of my more self-destructive habits. And while I can’t force myself to stay uninformed for long, neither do I need to devote otherwise productive time to being helplessly over-educated about the state of [...]
Posted on December 18th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Books/Movies/Podcasts, etc., Rants and Musings | No Comments »
I didn’t make enough progress last weekend to take advantage of the two inches of rain that rolled through on Saturday night, but I did make headway. Last week I took two days off to get the shed area ready for the tank installation. My first task was to dig out three holes for the [...]
Posted on December 18th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
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Well, ‘winter’ has finally come within sight here in the Piedmont. Saturday was a grumpy day, with cold misting rain starting in mid-morning. Just enough to cause me to change plans about working on the roof and start me battening the hatches. With my wife’s guidance, we used a tethered tarp system to cover the [...]
Posted on December 18th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Family Life, Meat, Eggs, etc., Nature Diary | No Comments »
This weather is creeping me out. Today was 78 degrees. At two o’clock I almost turned on the air conditioner in the truck. Instead I opened the back window and sweat a bit less. At seven o’clock tonight I had the doors open at home while I sat on the porch in my tee shirt. [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening, Nature Diary, Rainwater Collection | 1 Comment »
Took another day of vacation today; trying to get things moving before the weather turns bad. Today was cold (high in the mid-forties) but not unpleasant. As predicted, the ‘backhoe’ showed at 8:00 sharp, though it was actually some other piece of equipment (I’ll work on the name). I was skeptical when I first saw [...]
Posted on December 6th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rainwater Collection | 1 Comment »
Tomorrow the backhoe guy is supposed to be here at 8:00. I met him here a couple of weeks ago so that he could give me an estimate, and despite having never been to our place in the boonies, he was like the atomic clock – within seconds of his ETA. So, I expect him [...]
Posted on December 5th, 2007 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rainwater Collection | No Comments »