I pulled a bunch of little caterpillars off the tomato plants last night, probably about 20 of them, and crushed them beneath my shoe. They destroyed the top foliage on half of the plants and in doing so killed off the third wave of fruit. Disgusted, I cut back most of the brown foliage, watered everything, and picked the remaining ripe tomatoes. There’s still some green fruit left but it’s pretty sparse, so this is pretty much the end of our tomato season for 2019. It looks like they are Yellowstriped Armyworms, which are pretty common up the eastern seaboard and love to eat crops.
After measuring and re-measuring the windows in the dining room, I called and got pricing for four new replacements, two for the outside wall and two for the porch wall. The outside wall should be a cut-and-dry operation, basically pulling the outer moulding, removing the windows themselves, and pulling the sash weight mechanicals. I think the biggest issue is going to be filling the sash pockets with some kind of insulation—whether it’s spray foam or compressed cellulose, I’ve got to find a good solution for getting in there and making sure they’re packed.
The front windows are going to be more of a challenge, because when the Doctor had them covered over, the workers chopped about 2″ off of each of the verticals in the windowframe so they don’t extend all the way to the edge that meets the wall. I’m faced with either ripping the entire dual windowframe out and replacing it, or taking each vertical board out one at a time and replacing it without moving the horizontal header and plate. The latter solution is the best, but requires nonstandard wood dimensions—the boards are 1 1/4″ thick, which hasn’t been standard since before the Second World War. So I’ll either have to have something milled or work with what Home Depot has.
Meanwhile the bathroom cabinets are on order (have I mentioned that already?) and should be ready in another 2-3 weeks, which gives me enough time to sort out the last of the geometry problems over the back door of the bathroom. Basically the windowframe and the doorframe both come together at an odd angle, close enough that the cap moulding overlaps in space. The way it’s set up now I’ve got to pull the side casing I tacked in off the door and replace it with new boards about 1/4″ higher so that the top of the window and door are at the same height.
Once that’s done I can move inside the closet and finish off the moulding inside and work my way around the perimeter of the floor up to the shower.
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Hazel is getting more and more used to our daily routines (such as they are) and mostly settling in to a schedule of her own. Inside accidents have reduced dramatically, and she’s very good at letting us know when she needs to go out. Her prey drive has ramped up though, and the cats are scarce whenever she’s out on her own. Her anxiety has also ramped up to double what it was when we first got her, so there’s been more whining and crying at night in the crate. We have a quote from the Invisible Fence guy to surround the house with wire, and I’m going to call him today to schedule it.
We’re scrambling to tie up loose ends and pack for the trip; with all of the curveballs we’ve been thrown this week it disrupted our plans to get ahead. The tree guys came back on Tuesday and hauled off the large logs they felled, which were sitting in the middle of the driveway. To do this they had to use the big grapple truck, and to get that in the driveway they had to prune one side of the tulip tree way back, so now it looks like someone with half a moustache. There’s a huge pile of chips where the tree once stood, and they ground out all of the roots that were surfaced in the middle of the driveway. When we get back from vacation and it cools off some I’ll have to figure out what we’re doing with that mess, and spend an afternoon spraying the east side of the house in one uniform shade of blue.
It’s also easier to see how shitty the garage looks now. The two sheets of plywood serving as doors have never looked good, so I have to think of some ideas for how to pretty them up. Now that the tree is gone I also want to dig a trench across the driveway to send runoff from the gutters into the neighbors’ yard and not directly into the front of the garage.
Jen texted me Wednesday, in the middle of the 100+ heatwave, to tell me the A/C in the CR-V had died. Given that we’re going to take it on vacation next week, we couldn’t defer this maintenance, but I knew it wasn’t going to be cheap to fix. Our local mechanic agreed to fit us in Thursday (god bless him) and looked it over first thing in the morning. The bill wasn’t cheap but it had to get done, so we pulled the trigger. We got it back last night and it is cool again, thank GOD.
Meanwhile the Scout is in Essex for what I’m assuming will be a substantial repair to the transmission while we’re on vacation. All of this happening at the same time sucks, but the fact that the average age of our vehicles is 20 years old means they’re going to need maintenance (this is somewhat tempered by the fact that we put a total of less than 10,000 miles on all three of them yearly.)
I set up the drip hose and timer in the greenhouse Wednesday night so that it runs for 15 minutes every morning at 6AM. We’ve got a bunch of nice tomatoes coming in (and we’ll have to pick a bunch and bring them to the beach) so I want to keep them alive until we get back. I did the same thing last year and it saved everything in there while I was stuck in the hospital, although it all grew out of control in our absence. I also collected one dead mouse from the traps I put out on Tuesday evening; someone was nibbling on two of our low-hanging fruit and I decided it was time to seek vengeance. Also, the tomatillo is gone, because Jen read up on them and found that there need to be two plants to cross-pollinate each other.
In the days since all of the electrical has been hooked up in the bathroom, I have to say a heated floor after getting out of the shower is AWESOME. It’s only set for 90˚ between 6-7AM, but it feels great to walk out onto toasty tiles. I’m going to turn it off completely tonight until the weather starts getting cold but I can’t wait to test it out for real this fall.
Jen and I picked a bunch of tomatoes from the vines yesterday. There were a ton of Romas waiting to be pulled, and two handfuls of cherries from all four plants. They all looked happy and healthy. The second Roma plant is still battling blossom end rot, as is (sadly) the Pineapple heirloom plant in back. On Monday there was one fruit turning a beautiful variegated shade of yellow/orange/red. Yesterday it went deeper read with streaks of orange, but the bottom was squishy so I had to cut it and a neighbor off the vines. The spray I bought doesn’t seem to be doing shit so I think I’ve got to add bone meal to the soil and try to salvage the rest of the season.
We are due to sign for our home equity loan on the 15th, the same day the long-awaited tree crew is set to arrive to remove the big silver maple next to the driveway. Both of these events mean big changes in our lives. The tree throws a hell of a lot of shade on the house and that shielding from the sun will be missed, but I’ll be happy to have a flat driveway and cleaner gutters. Having the loan in place means we can get a lot of projects finished, but I’m not looking forward to the monthly payment. Change always ramps up my anxiety, but I know these two things will benefit us in the long run and I’m itching to get them both done.
I was supposed to have some work done to the Scout on Saturday morning, but the mechanic failed to hear the words “International Scout” on the phone and realized it was going to be more than a 3-hour job. So we rescheduled for this coming Friday, and I hope they will be able to handle it without any further hiccups. In the afternoon we headed across town to hang out at Will’s house for some barbecue and a bonfire in the backyard; it was great to catch up with him while the girls ran and played together, and we stayed much later than we realized.
Sunday we got up late, farted around the house in the morning—eggs are back on the menu, so life is returning to normal—and got ourselves ready to hit the pool. After some last minute inquiries we picked up one of Finn’s friends, staked out a spot under an umbrella on the west edge and relaxed while the girls played in the water.
The greenhouse is producing a ton of tomatoes, and after a brief blossom-end rot scare I think the remainder of the fruit on that plant is safe. The weather was a lot hotter yesterday so by the time I checked in on things late in the afternoon there were some plants looking wilty. We’re looking at 5 days of hot, sunny weather this week so daily watering will be key to keeping things healthy. The cherry plants are by far the most productive, followed by the roma plant. I haven’t figured out what the heirlooms respond to, because no amount of fertilizing the flowers seems to get them to produce more than two or three fruit per plant. I’ve also noticed that there isn’t as much bee activity in there this year, which is worrying. I think the majority of the production we enjoyed last year had to do with bees discovering the greenhouse while I was stuck in the hospital, while this year I’ve been doing the heavy lifting for Nature.
Speaking of hospitals, I’m waiting on communication from my doctors about our next steps. My white blood cell count has continued to drop. They ran a bunch of rule-the-weird-stuff-out tests and I’m happy to say I don’t have hepatitis A, B, or C, and I tested negative for HIV. Not that I was expecting a different result.
Update: looks like I’m going to be scheduling another test.
Celebrating the fact that I got paid this week, I promptly ordered a prehung closet door from Home Depot for the new bathroom. It was a little tricky to find something that fit the style of the rest of the house but HD had what we needed in the size we wanted. And as luck would have it, the door was on sale this week so delivery will basically be free. The only downside is that it won’t be here until the end of the month. I’ve been stalled in the bathroom on trimwork waiting for this door and for movement on the cabinetry, which is wrapped up in a larger ongoing discussion about other project priorities and how we’ll wrap those into a home equity loan. I think I’ve identified what my maximum loan payment will be, which obviously caps the amount we borrow, so it’s now a matter of filling out paperwork and getting the loan started. Meanwhile, I haven’t been able to nail down my neighbor the electrician to finalize the wiring, so we haven’t fired up the heated floor yet.
Once the door is hung I can continue with the trim surround all the way to the shower and start putting kickplate in permanently. The next big trick is going to be adding 3/4″ shim around the inside of each doorjamb so that the casing will sit flush with the wall. (I left the sheathing intact on the walls, which may have been a mistake, so there’s sheetrock over top of that; thus the jamb is generally 1/2″ too narrow. But what’s done is done). Then I can mill and install casing around the back door. The front door will get done toward the end of the project, once the cabinetry is all in place.
The greenhouse is looking great, although one of my Roma plants has developed blossom-end rot. This is due to a lack of calcium in the soil, which means I’ve got to amend it quickly before I lose the whole plant. I’ve got some products coming from Amazon to combat this and hopefully we can catch it before all of the fruit is damaged. Two of the cherry plants have grown taller than the ceiling and are still producing flowers, so I know everything else needs fertilizer too.
Strangely, half of the marigolds Finn and I planted are happy and blooming, and the other half are 6-8″ tall and continuing to produce new leaves but no flowers. I’m going to give those another week to bloom, and after that I’m going to toss them. Apparently I let them get too leggy too early and didn’t pinch off new growth soon enough. Honestly I think the cheaper seed is doing better than the expensive stuff.
Finn was having a problem booting up one of her favorite apps after school yesterday, and I had to sit down and troubleshoot the issue. I locked down a ton of different settings when I set up her iPad so it took me a bit of time to go through the list and figure out what was blocking her (the app icon didn’t even show up on her desktop). When I logged in as her parent it was visible to me, and I spent a bit of time in the Restricted Apps section wondering why it didn’t show up. It wasn’t until I looked closely at the app itself and realized it was rated in the App Store for 12+ and I had her iPad blocking everything 9+ that I realized what the issue was. As soon as I switched this, it showed up fine. I was initially a little annoyed at Apple, but once I understood how the system worked, I appreciated the ability to switch these settings from my iPhone so much more.
Grading is complete, grades are submitted, and all my grading sheets are in the Outbox. The last step is to shoot some pictures of student work and then drop it off at the university.
Stuff I accomplished this weekend, in no particular order:
- Took a load of stuff to the dump; my nostalgia/hoarding filter is extremely thin right now, so I finally chucked a bunch of stuff I swore I was going to save to “use later,” including two of our old kitchen cabinets I had to take off the wall to be able to fit the fridge. Little by little, the basement is clearing out (aided in no small part by a trip to goodwill last weekend). I still need to figure out where to dump the old CR-V hood, two Scout brake drums and a spare steel wheel; the dump doesn’t take car parts of any kind.
- Mulched the rest of the front bed with Jen. This also allowed us to find several of the gladiolus bulbs poking through the soil that we’d planted a couple of weeks ago. Success!
- Ran over to Christi & Glenn’s house to pick up my ladder, which they’ve had in their garage since last fall. While I was there Glenn and I crawled up on their garage and removed about 30 pine boughs from the tree behind it, which were sitting directly on the slate, as well as about 6″ of pine needles stuck in the snow catchers. We threw all the boughs into the yard of the retirement community behind them, who haven’t pruned their trees in decades.
- Replanted a bunch of marigolds from the big pots Finn and I had planted them in to separate singles, and learned you have to pinch off everything past the first two pair of leaves to promote blooms and keep them from getting leggy.
- I was taken down by a stomach ache Saturday afternoon, probably from the sushi we’d had the night before, and had to lay down for a nap until dinnertime.
- Cleaned the gutters over the new bathroom, which were completely filled with helicopters and sprouts from the sugar maple in the driveway. Which is living on borrowed time, because I emailed a signed contract to the tree removal service on Sunday in the hopes we can get it taken down in the next couple of weeks. I’m also hopeful they can drop it and leave the wood away from the central part of the driveway so I can get our cars in and out.
- Fertilized and trimmed all of the tomatoes back. I’ve been using a different method of pollination and it seems to work better; it’s basically just flicking the flowers with a finger for about 10 seconds. I’ve been pretty lethal about cutting stray shoots and old growth back, and the plants are still alive, so that’s a relief. The romas by the door have gone absolutely crazy—there’s at least 14 tomatoes working on that plant alone.
- Took an hour or so with Jen to wrap the grape arbor with netting to try and save as many of the new shoots as possible. This involved cutting half of the old netting away and attaching the new netting to the remainder; picking grapes later in the season will be interesting.
- Rebuilt the edging around the herb bed, which dates back to 2004 or so. One side had collapsed, so we picked up new wood on Saturday and I had the new bed complete by Sunday afternoon.
- Disassembled and cleaned out the A/C units for our bedrooms, which were disgusting. This prompted me to look into ductless air conditioning systems, something that could be a workable, cost effective alternative to heavy window units or rehabbing the whole house for central A/C. The system uses a single compressor outside and relies on thin hoses that go up the side of the house into wall-mounted units in each room. This avoids installing a giant air handler in the attic and a bunch of ducts in the ceiling; while having an appliance bolted to the wall of each bedroom isn’t the most attractive approach, it’s a hell of a lot better than plugging up the windows. If I’m serious about a home equity loan to finish the bathroom, this might be the other thing we spend on to raise our quality of life.
Here’s our children as of yesterday afternoon. You’ll notice some leaf discoloration on the plant closest to the camera; I think this is a bacterial infection that can be treated with a copper soap spray (ordered). The marigolds have this too, which leads me to believe it’s something bacterial. That is to say, I’m hoping it’s not Verticulum, which is untreatable and basically means you’ve got to throw the plants out.
I’ve been a lot more mercenary with these plants this year, being sure to cut back any new shoots from the main stem before they produce flowers to prevent the giant explosion of leaves and branches I had last year. Because they’re in the center of the greenhouse they can grow taller instead of wider and it’s easier to access both sides to prune them.
Meanwhile, they’re all beginning to set fruit! The romas (up front) have four, the Beefsteak have three, there are several dozen cherries starting, and I think all but two of the rest have at least one fruit. Still no love for the tomatillos yet.
I did my year-and-a-half cancer checkup yesterday, and after a sonogram, a CT scan and bloodwork, it appears the clot in my arm is gone, I’m clear of any new passengers, and my white blood cell count is low. This last bit is alarming, because we don’t know what’s causing it. I’m not run down, I’m not sick, and there’s no reason we can think of for it to be so low (it’s roughly half the count it was when I was laid up with a busted small intestine). So there will be some more tests performed in a month and we’ll wait to see what they look like before any drastic action is taken. Meanwhile, I’m cleared to have the port removed sometime in the next couple of weeks, and when that’s over with, I’ll be off blood thinners. Hooray!
That’s the full flock of tomatoes right there. They’ve all been staked (the tallest is now 3′ high) pruned and watered. I put plastic down over the soil because they have fungus gnats, which are annoying and harmful to seedlings but probably won’t hurt these more adult plants. In 10 days or so I should be able to remove it. I cleaned up a pair of clippers and pruned a pile of branches and leaves off each of the plants to keep the bottom of the tubs clear and keep them focused on producing flowers, something that got away from me last year while I was in the hospital. Finn and I hung a cheapo box fan from the ceiling to keep air moving across the leaves and hopefully draw some pollinators inside. Finally, I set up another rain barrel outside and transferred all the water from the garage barrel into that, so we’ve got two full ones and a third waiting for the rain we’re expecting tomorrow.
And, there are a total of four tomatoes already growing! A big fat Beefsteak and three cherries are already underway; all of my hand pollinating is slowly paying off because there’s another Beefsteak starting on the same plant as the first. I’m a month ahead of last year!