200!

200 This is my 200th blog post! Not quite as big a deal as the bicentennial celebrations back when K and I were growing up. There will be no commemorative coins, and I doubt that NASA will paint the DIY Insanity logo on the side of the vehicle assembly building, despite the logo's Napoleonic loveliness.

I've been working on grading and adding more drainage, and yesterday K and I mixed and placed 8.5 bags on concrete to serve as the foundation for steps to her office door. There's more work to do on all those things, but they'll have to wait a while as the rain started today. Not too heavy so far, but too wet to be doing much digging in. Fortunately there's lots to do inside for the kitchen remodel. And of course the ever-important blogging about the work I'm not doing.

Reefer Madness

Here's a picture of me playing an elaborate practical joke on K, switching the hinge of the refrigerator and freezer from one side to the other, but leaving the handle on the same side. Priceless!

Actually, I'm switching the hinge and the handles in preparation for the reefer's³ stay in the living room during the kitchen remodel. It's also the side it needs to be on in the final kitchen layout which is why I'm bothering with it at all.

I ended up doing most of the work twice. I measured and thought we could get the refrigerator into the living room by leaving off the handles. I failed to measure one little bumpout on the back, which meant we had to pull it back, take the doors off again, then move it into the living room. Next time we move it, we'll take it the longer way around through the dining room, because the openings we'll have to pass through are more than large enough. Or will be by then.

It was also a good opportunity to clean the parts of the fridge and under it even though the vinyl flooring I'm sitting on will be going away. And because the refrigerator partially blocked one of the doors into the already-too-small kitchen, having it gone makes the current kitchen, well, not spacious, but not feel quite so cramped. We're both still doing double-takes, turning around from the sink expecting to find the refrigerator, but we're rapidly getting used to the new layout.

A Classy Joint

The last couple days I've been doing a variety of things, including regrading the ground between the front walk and the door to K's office. In part because it's a good idea, to help encourage the water to flow the other way around the house, instead of into the middle of the 'L', but also to make a nicer, more usable space outside her office. And I've been straining my brain to figure out the different levels of the yet-to-be-poured new front porch, the yet-to-be-built steps to K's office, and of course where the grade should be for ideal drainage. There's a French drain ('freedom drain'?) we added a few years back, which the mayhem a while back tested nicely, but every little bit helps with drainage when an El Niño year rolls around.

I think I've managed to explain my different ideas for the steps and the front porch to K, but I sometimes have a hard time explaining spatial stuff because I can usually picture it, like one of those CSI re-creations of a crime scene, though my mental graphics don't look as wizzy and spin around, and there's not a driving rock tune going as a soundtrack.

But today while I was digging my neighbor was practicing her singing. She sings in the choir at her church, but she also sings opera with some local productions. It made for a lovely soundtrack while I worked. How many of you have done your DIY work to the sound of live opera?

Quite a classy joint we runs here, eh?

Before and After

before

after

After doing some major spackling on the recovered 12" siding, sanding, putting up trim, and caulking, today the new wall was ready to paint.

Katarina came home early (she's been busy working on some of the docs for Android) and said it looked great, but in reality it's more like Fox News coverage. At first glance it looks pretty good, but when you look closer you see it has some dirt and has some holes, and when you see it in the full light of day you realize it just plain stinks. But at some point we need to repaint the whole house, so this will do for now.

World Food Day

On the heels of the Blog Action Day on poverty comes World Food Day, "to increase awareness, understanding and informed, year-around action to alleviate hunger." Food is tightly tied to poverty; if people spend all their waking hours trying to get food, there's no time for anything else like education or trying to improve things for your family.

But hunger is one of those things we've licked here in the U.S., right? Wrong. With the recent economic meltdown, the numbers of people utilizing food banks have soared. Even before that, our local food bank was providing assistance for 40,000+ people, the majority of those children and the elderly.

It's likely to get worse before it gets better. In the 20th century, the U.S. went from from smaller farms raising a variety of crops to industrial farms raising a single crop. Fertilizer synthesized from fossil fuels helped create huge increases in yields, and government subsidies helped make yield the only thing that mattered (you can read more about the industrialization of food in The Omnivore's Dilemma.) It lead to corn becoming ubiquitous in processed foods, especially fast food. Corn-fed beef, corn-fed chickens, sweetened with corn syrup, fried in corn oil. If we are what we eat, a lot of us are corn. But that cheap corn is dependent on fossil fuels (even as some of it is being used to create alternatives to fossil fuels, a misplaced approach if there ever was one), and as supplies drop and costs rise, that will effect the cost of those cheap processed foods. The monoculture of industrial farming also leads to depletion of nutrients from the soil, downstream pollution, loss of genetic diversity in food plants, less nutritious foods, and a host of other problems.

There's no easy answer, but increased awareness is where it begins. Read Michael Pollan's open letter to the next president for more information. Support your local food producers. Eat less meat. (As an added bonus, it's healthier and cheaper.) Plant a vegetable garden. And volunteer and donate to your local food bank.