3 weeks later..

Three weeks have passed since I bought the shelves at the auction - quite a bit of work, but it's nearly complete now. As we would say in Kentucky "all we lack is finishin"

Here is large overview:





A view of just the shelves.
Another large view.

Now - for the fun part... All this stuff needs to be organized and put in those shelves and cabinets.




Here are the shelves that are left over. I'm going to give them away.

Total Cost:
Shelves and cabinets $10
Screws $6
Glue for base board $7
Donuts for helpers $6

= $29

I'll probably put some molding up along the wall but it won't cost much either.

A very mild winter

Like most of the part of the country where I live, we've had an incredibly mild winter. We only had one snow of consequence, and it was a wimpy snow. No days of multiple sub freezing temperatures. Quite amazing really. At the beginning of winter, I built some little tents to go over some of my cold weather vegetables. Remarkably some have survived all winter long. Here is how it's looking now:

Chard - it's lasted all winter long, we planted this 10 months ago. Just a little plastic tent is all it took.



Kale loves the cold, I didn't even put it under a tent, I just threw a tarp over it whenever it got below freezing at night.

Chives. Wonderful stuff for cooking. I actually planted this 4 years ago, and have moved it 3 times now. I'll move this one in a few weeks to the herb garden by the house.


Greek oregano - very happy after being in a tent all winter.

Snow Peas - I actually planted these a few weeks back.
The rosemary really liked the tent. This rosemary survived last winter too, but I just put a bunch of leaves around it and a translucent waste basket over it that winter. It was very sad looking a year ago. This is very healthy rosemary. I used some in soup last night. I plan on transplanting it to the herb garden by the house.
The pear tree in bloom.
Just a pretty flower.
And a yellow bush
More chard - a different set of it.
Winter savory - this is already in the herb garden, it just survived the winter.
Chinese chives. They are very happy.
Parsley. Most of the parsley bolted pretty quick last year, I just kept cutting it back. Evidently, it's a cold weather type of plant. I didn't do anything to the parsley this winter.
This is some kind of bitter leaf salad stuff - it's really bitter. It survived the winter with no attention.
More happy parsley.
The real garden isn't even out yet, but looks like we've got a good head start.

Updates on the bowling cabinets

It's been 2 weeks since I posted on all the cabinets. Here is an update.

We managed to get them all home - with big thanks to my neighbor Lindle. He is one tough 62 year old, he can sure outwork me! Lindle had the trailer and pickup to get the stuff home. After one late night, I was so worn out, that the next day I had to sleep 15 hours and had a 102 degree fever. Lindle just kept right on working in the yard that day.

The first set of pictures is where the cabinets are presently sitting. I still need to secure the laminate tops. This will be wonderful for storage and for working surfaces.


The bowling shoe shelves are a different subject. I have them all in place, but we've realized, there is only so much you can do with 6" tall non adjustable shelves. There are 12 sets of shelves. We will probably only keep 5 or 6 of them and give the rest away. What you see are 6 sets of shelves, but there are 6 more shelves right behind them.
Note the large red and light colored wood piece in the middle of the floor. It's 16 feet long. Getting that down 4 flights of stairs is something to tell stories of. We had to lower it at times down the stair well between the flights of stairs. It took 4 guys all the effort we could give to get that out.

Now, we didn't go to the auction to buy all these cabinets, we went to buy a couple of nice heavy duty tables and chairs. We did those things too, which at this point seem a bit extra, but we didn't know we were getting all the cabinets when we bought them.

Julie also bought some large chalk boards - really good quality - they roll around. Both sides are shown with an additional large chalkboard we already had. In front of the two chalkboards is a table we bought, it is very sturdy and heavy. The table cost $15 and the chalkboards $35 a piece.






Lastly, we bought a small square table and 3 chairs, each for $5. This table was meant to be a chess or checkers playing table. Very sturdy...
I think we have enough tables now..

Yesterday was an interesting day. On Friday a very large storm came through. You may have read of several deaths from tornado's etc. We were fortunate, we were only hit by one of the storms, it passed by at 60 mph, and literally was done with all significance in 3 minutes. We lost 10 shingles from the roof, but that is a common (and annoying) occurrence with my roof. I believe the previous owners had the roof installed when it was cold. The shingles never properly adhered to eachother. I've had to fix the roof at least 5 times now - it's annoying, but not too difficult to do. The point of this narrative, that part of my plans for Saturday was to fix the roof. That's pretty much all the plans I had.

Sonora ended up having a flute concert, so I took her there in the morning. Julie indicated that they were having an auction at the university and she was going over.

She called me and let me know they were auctioning a grand piano. The piano was a very good brand (Baldwin), but had received serious abuse over the years. We estimated it would need at least $3000 worth of work to be presentable. This was intriguing, if the piano were available cheap (like under $1000), it could be a fun project restoring it. Julie was the only one who went to look at it, so I thought it was possible nobody would bid on it. It was the last thing to be auctioned.

Well, Julie saw some chairs that she liked that she got for $5 a piece and a couple tables she got for $5 and $15, and some chalkboards. She left, and I stayed around until the end.

They are doing a major renovation of this building on campus and are eliminating a lot of stuff, including a room for playing pool and a bowling alley.

One guy bought 18 pool tables for $145 a piece. HEAVY pool tables. He will have some difficulty getting them out. There are no large elevators getting to that floor of the building (this will come to haunt me as well).

The 2nd to last thing they optioned was the bowling alley. I watched the auction just to see what was going to happen. One guy who owns a bowling alley in Hopkinsville bought most of the bowling stuff for a pittance. He probably got 200 bowling shoes for $200.

They got to all the cabinets and storage for the main counter (including the bowling shoes) and nobody bid on it. It got down to $10. I called Julie and asked her if she wanted some more shelves. I then told them I would buy them all or $10. Below are some pictures.




Now you may be thinking, what on earth can you do with all those cabinets? That is a good question. We have a large shop - which is more of an art studio for Julie. I would never have built a shop that big for myself, it's big enough to be house, but it came with the property and we got a really good deal on it. Below is a picture of what it looks like empty, and what it looks like now.





This is going to be a heck of week. I have until Friday night to get everything out.

Oh, by the way, someone else was interested in the piano too. I bid it up to $500 and then gave up on it - so he bought the piano for $500. It was almost a relief not getting the piano, because I didn't know how I was going to arrange moving that anyway.

Well, I still managed to get the roof fixed and then we all went to the shut down bowling alley and worked for 3 hrs last night unscrewing things. It's going to be a job, especially getting the laminate tops down the stairs. Katie and Sonora had fun, here they are dancing across the lanes, something normally not smiled upon.

Barbershop Competition

The barbershop chorus I've joined sang at a competition a few weeks ago. We're a pretty small chorus - and though I thought we did pretty well, the judges didn't like it as much.

Singing barbershop is a surprisingly difficult musical form. It requires precise tuning and vowel pronunciation. On top of that, it's a visual entertainment art form as well - and so one needs to move and gesture appropriately. My chorus could improve on that.

Here is our song set. The first one is called "Let the rest of the world go by". It's a ballad about going out west with the one you love. The second song is an upbeat song called "Little Patch of Heaven" I believe the song originally came from a Disney movie called home on the range - a cartoon. It was rearranged in a barbershop arrangement by one of the better arrangers out there Aaron Dale. It has a similar moving out west theme to it. I'm off in the far right side at the top. It looked and sounded a lot better in person. It was a load of fun to do and I hope to have the opportunity of doing things like this in the future. The particular stage we performed on was very hard to hear on. It made it hard to keep the whole group in tune with eachother.

Below is a link to the chorus that won 1st place in the competition. These guys only take the best and members commute a lengthy distance to participate. I believe they won 6th place in the international competition in July. They are top notch and hard core.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF2DyEHkQuo

Katie's latest project

Katie's skills at making costumes continues to improve. This fox she's making now with the intention of selling looks particularly good. A lot of work has gone into this project.

garden and herb garden

When we first moved to the house, one of the patio's had a planter filled with ivy. We never particularly liked it, and I was always concerned about the way it drained. Later on, we decided that it would be a good to have an herb garden and this seemed a place that was available and relatively close to the kitchen.

I dug up all the ivy and dirt down to ground level and put in plastic liners to assure drainage away from the house. I also mixed the clay dirt in the box with compost, peat moss and vermiculite.

A new store opened up that had a variety of herbs for sale. Here is how it turned out.


In this pciture you can see some lemon grass, sage, sorrell, marigold thyme and some ornamental flowers. These all started out as small little plants. They like their new home and have grown quickly.


There is more lemon grass in this picture, some basil, fennel, curry.

Somewhere in the mix is chamomile, chervil, thyme, parsley, majoram, oregano, lavendar, savory, rosemary and chinese chives.



I've rearranged the planter boxes in the garden. Here is a long view of the garden, some closeups are below. There is eggplant, beets, carrots, basil, onions, tomatos, cabbage, kale, brocolli visible.

I also planted some hills with various squashes, melons and cucumbers.