Safety

We here at 83 Durant believe in safety. Looking at some of our posts, you might not believe this, but we are. So, theoretically, a new law that makes toys safe is a good thing. But the more I read about the CPSIA, the more distressed I become.

In finding out a bit more about the CPSIA, I went to the source -- the website for the Consumer Products Safety Commission. They have huge lists of product recalls there. As a confirmed worrier about all things, I really should not be allowed near this site, or, really, the internet generally.

There I was horrified to learn that everything you have ever wanted to play with can kill you. Would you like a for-instance? Well, how about this one:

Hallmark recently recalled a line of snow-globes because,
"When exposed to sunlight, the snow globes can act as a magnifying glass and ignite nearby combustible materials, posing a fire hazard."

Just so you know I'm not making this up, here is the link:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml09/09073.html

People who live in glass houses.....

...should be sure to have a lot of band-aids around.

So I was cleaning up the mess of our shattered storm door (see below), which, thankfully, was made of tempered glass. Tempered glass shatterers into tiny little bits instead of big sharp-edged pieces. I should stress that it fractures into LOTS of TINY bits. It's actually kind of pretty.

While sweeping up the sparkly bits, I was transported back to the days one summer when I worked in a glass factory. Yes, dear reader, I worked in a glass factory. Worst. Summer. Job. Ever. I spent a lot of time sweeping up broken glass from the floor, not because I caused the glass to be broken, but because A LOT of glass gets broken by machines & people, and when you're the lowly summer help (and a girl at that) the only thing they really want you to do is sweep the floor.

One of the many miserable things about working in a glass factory is that you have to wear a lot of protective gear. First, heavy steel-toed boots. There are chaps involved. Also arm gaiters and multiple layers of gloves. As a (former) professional in the field, one would think I might have at least put on some garden gloves for the task at hand. But no, I took the term "safety glass" a bit too literally, and now my hand is covered in band-aids.

Shattered

We considered ourselves lucky in this last storm -- the Lowell Sun is calling it the worst ice storm of the decade -- as we were only without electricity for about 6 hours, and due to our ancient systems, our gas heat and stove were unaffected. But apparently, some folks in Lowell are still without power, and certainly many in more remote areas of Massachusetts and New Hampshire are still without power.

But this afternoon, when Jake went to go out for a bike ride, he discovered that 83 Durant has not escaped completely unscathed: we have a shattered storm door. It's the one that leads out to the backyard from the basement. I don't know when it happened. I'm glad it isn't one of the new ones we recently installed. It wasn't a super fancy one, and in fact, I had remarked on a few occasions that the latch seemed to well, unlatch and open of its own volition. Perhaps it was swinging open when the storm winds caught it and shattered the glass. In any case, we are now in the market either for a new storm door window, or perhaps a whole new storm door.

Power on (at least for now)!

The power came back on around 12:30, then went off again around 3:45; it's back on again now, but who knows for how long.

Campus is closed for tomorrow, too. Power is still off in various places around town. Yikes! Lucky for us!

Blackout at 83 Durant

Greetings, readers. 83 Durant is currently without electrical power. It went out at 7:30 am, and the latest update from the electric company is that it won't be back on until tonight. Woo hoo. There's a big ole tree that has fallen on the wires just half a block from our house. Finally, the trees have risen up against us.

I'm writing from the Wendy's up the road, which does have power. However, looking out the window, it's not clear why this is the case, since the traffic light outside the Wendy's does NOT have power. Hmmmm....

Anyway, here are some things to know about our house during a blackout.

1. We have gas heat, which is unaffected by the power outage, which is a nice feature.

2. We have an ancient gas stove (see previous posts) that doesn't have one of those fancy schmancy electrical ignitions, so we can cook on the stovetop or in the oven. Oh ancient stove, we shall never replace you.

3. Our one non-electric-type phone doesn't have a functioning ringer, so if you're calling us, we don't know that you're calling. Periodically, we'll pick up the phone just to see if someone's calling, but, well, let's face, that's not going to work very well. Oh, if you need to get in touch with us, call our cell phones.

4. No electricity also means no internet (even though our laptop batteries are fully charged, the internet box needs electricity to work). Boo.

So that's the situation. The University is closed (their electricity is also out), so we're just hanging out at home with Lucy, with little headlamps on our heads. Lucy doesn't have a headlamp of her own, but she really seems to want one.

Other than that, all is well. I'll post again from home once we're back in electricity.

Food Reviews by Lucy

Lucy has recently been trying out various solid foods, as you may have seen in all the flickr photos. But recently, she's been doing some taste-testing of various kinds of baby teething biscuits. As a public service to all the other babies out there [and by the way, WELCOME to Lucy's newest cousin, Greta and CONGRATS to her Mom & Dad!] we're having Lucy do a guest blog feature, Lucy's Food Reviews, Volume I: Biscuits!

UNEEDA BISCUIT



Lucy's Perspective:
Uneeda Biscuits are basically extra-large saltines without salt on the tops. I love Saltines, so I figured I would love these, too. It turns out, these are a bit harder than Saltines, and so I had a hard time biting into them. Once my mom broke them up for me a bit, I had a better time and was able to munch happily.

Bridget's Thoughts:
I bought these because because I love their name. Actually, I didn't even think they were made anymore. There used to be a very old "UNeedaBiscuit" ad painted on the side of a building in Northampton, and I always thought it was a great name. But I figured they'd been discontinued ages ago. But there they were, in the cracker aisle of my Market Basket. They're OK, but Lucy wasn't crazy about them. She's a big fan of Ritz, which she prefers over Saltines.


Arrowroot Biscuits

Lucy says:
Yum! But still, they're pretty hard, and I can't bite into them. When mom breaks them up, I can suck on the smaller pieces and eat those, which I like. Hey! There's a baby on the box! I like that!
Bridget says:
These seem like cookies. Should we be feeding Lucy cookies at this point? I'm not so sure. Again, some product nostalgia here; I didn't know they still made these.

Organic Biscuits for Teethers



Lucy:
These biscuits are hard! Very hard! I can't even break off a piece. It's like a lego! I love legos! Is this really food?
Bridget:
Super hard. And super messy. Incredibly messy. Basically, they slowly melted in her mouth and hands, completely covering her with a sticky brown molasses mess. She has fun with them, but we only feed these to her right before we're giving her a bath. In fact, she once ate one in the bath. So it's an edible bath toy.

That's all for today's installment. We'll see if we can get Lucy to do more food reviews soon.

Masonry Projects Complete!

Our mason did a terrific job fixing up the various problems at 83 Durant.

The main job was fixing the front wall in the basement, which has been the source of leakage over and over again. That area of the basement also had a bunch of weird built-in workbench type things. Why do I describe them as weird? Well, one of them was actually a door -- a cheap, hollow door -- made into a workbench top. It was kinda crazy, and we never used that area for anything, let alone as a workshop. So Jake's first job, before the mason could come to do his job, was to rip out all the junk. Here it is, most of the way broken down:


And now, here it is, all fixed up and water-tight!


We're now thinking that we should also have the side wall (where the window is) done later.

While we had him here, we also had him take care of a few masonry projects and repairs on the outside of the house.

This is a small area of the wall on the side of the house, towards the back. As you can see in the "before" picture, it looks like all the mortar has been chipped away.


The mason not only re-pointed, but decided that it would all be much stronger if he just coated the whole thing. So here it is, all nice and smooth and ready to paint (if we want to).





Here are the steps that lead out to the backyard from the basement:
They were once all cracked, and several bricks were missing. Now they're all better. (Sorry, I couldn't find a before picture.)

He also fixed up this little area of brick pointing:

So things are now nice and tight and hopefully water-proof and critter-proof! Hooray!

We're in Hot Water

And thank goodness! Jake did some research and made some calls, and we were lucky enough to be able to get Mr. Plumber to come and install a new hot water heater for us. Here it is, in its water-warming glory:



Here's all the fancy specs on it:

Please note that it is an "EverKleen" -- self-cleaning! I think all appliances should have this feature. In fact, I would like our whole house to be outfitted with this technology.

In other small updates, we've started preparing for winter. We've taken out and put away our air conditioners, and we've taken out the screens and put the storm windows in the storm doors.

We've also made plans with our mason (the guy who rebuilt our chimney) to do some repointing both inside and outside the house. All this should have us in good shape when the real New England fall hits.

Cold Shower

This morning, we woke to find that our "water heater" can no longer be called by that name; it is now demoted to "large, useless tank of cold water."  The water heater has been at the top of the appliance failure-watch list for quite some time, but did it have to go today?  I guess it's as good (or bad) as any other day, eh?

Blogging away my Saturday Night

Sometimes we like to dream of the renovations we might do if we had unlimited time and money and didn't care about living in a construction zone. One of the rather obvious focal points of our remodeling desires is the kitchen. It's not so much that the kitchen is particularly bad, but more that we use it a lot, and we can imagine ways in which it could be better. For instance, if we had a Viking range and a fancy-pants fridge. Those things aren't going to happen. But something we do consider doing is getting a real working hood. There is a hood over the stove, but it doesn't actually vent outside, despite the fact that it is situated on a chimney. It actually vents the exhaust right back into the kitchen, which isn't exactly ideal. It's clear that up high on the walls and on the ceiling, that the grease and other stove-top and oven particulate is creating quite the coating. But do we really want to cut a whole in the chimney? Is it even possible? Is it safe?

But today, we did a very slight upgrade: a $10 upgrade. I found and installed a new filter in the exhaust fan. There wasn't one there at all before, but now we have a brand spanking new one. Note to future self, it's Replacement Filter number WA65F from NuTone, part nuber 99010317 and the only place we could find them was www.rangehoodsupply.com . Whatever would we do without the internet?

Our other upgrade was another new medicine cabinet. Jake put it together and installed it in the upstairs bathroom. If you find yourself visiting us at 83 Durant, you can now find the medicines, band-aids, nail clippers and such in our medicine cabinets, rather than stuffed into drawers.

I recently finished making my first set of placemats. You may be wondering why I would make placemats when we have at least half a dozen tablecloths. Well, we discovered the need for placemats the other day when Miss Lucy was crawling around on the floor in the dining room and nearly pulled everything from the table down upon herself by tugging on the oh-so-tempting dangling corner of the table cloth. So there you have it, we are in the market for placemats for at least the next few months. I had recently purchased some awesome fabric at Purl Soho, and I was looking for just the right project for the hedgehog print. I only had a quarter of a yard, so a dress for myself was out of the question, and a dress for Lucy would be cutting it close. Not to mention the fact even if we ignore the fabric allowance, my seamstress skills are still at a fairly basic level, and I've yet to work on any sewing project with an actual pattern. Placemats are perfect, since they're small, are all straight lines, and we'll actually use them daily. I'm very pleased with how they turned out!

They have a hedgehog print on the front and plain navy fabric on the back; many thanks to Jess B. for the navy fabric, which she included in the fabulous stash she passed along to me before her departure for Oxford.

And for those of you who have stuck it out through this long and meandering post, I have a very special, late-breaking news item: Today we discovered that Lucy has her first tooth! She was acting all cranky this morning, and my mom suggested I should check her mouth to see if any teeth had popped up. I ignored the suggestion, as we've been sure Lucy was teething for about four months now, with nothing to show for it. But sure enough, we were sitting in the car late this afternoon, and I caught a glint of something on her bottom gum, and wow, it's the top of a tooth! We'll try to get a picture to post tomorrow, but that's the news from Durant Street.

Fixes and Baby-Proofing

Lucy's newfound mobility and increasing speed are making us jump to the long put-off babyproofing of 83 Durant. I'm installing outlet covers on the outlets in the pink room, dining room, and her room. We also bought a couple of baby gates. They're pretty much useless at the moment, as none of the doorways in our house are square, thus making the "pressure mount" fixtures useless. We're going to have to do some modding to make them work. Fingers crossed.

We had to replace the deadbolt lock on the basement door. It unfortunately broke in the "locked" position, so we couldn't open the door. We use our friend Bob at Mill City Lock. He came and took out the old one, and then showed Jake how to install a new, double-keyed one. The term "double key lock" might have you thinking it some kind of release-the-missiles thing, but it just means that there's a key on both the outside and the inside (unlike a typical key on the outside and knob on the inside). This is good, since the basement door has a window.

Other than that, we've taken on a half-bushel of peaches and half-bushel of tomatoes (that's a bushel o' produce for those of you counting along at home). We've made salsa, soup, and sauce from the tomatoes, and done some yummy things with the peaches (such as eating them just as they are, and saucing them, and cutting them in half, filling them with nuts and brown sugar, and baking them). Jake is working on canning the sauces right now. Right now, while it is 85 degrees out with 99% humidity. Nice.

Lucy is eating more and more table foods. Apparently at day care, she demands to have the same food as the other kids, and has so far enjoyed pasta shells with butter and parmesan cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, graham crackers, and ravioli. Right now she's chowing down on some peas and tofu. Yum!

Also, I made some barrettes for Lucy:

They're pretty easy. I used a few online tutorials:

Hair Clip Tutorial

Making Cute Hair Clips Tutorial

And of course, as with all things good and crafty in my life these days, the original source of the inspiration and further link-finding was Whip-up

Painting and Crafting

Today I painted the deck. This is a project that has been on the house to-do list since the day we moved in. Maybe even BEFORE we moved in. It feels good to finally cross it off the list. It also felt good to just make this part of the house look so much better. Here are a couple of before shots of the steps and the deck:


And here it is, after. Actually, this is technically in the middle, since I haven't been able to reach the very top parts. Jake will finish this off on Friday.

We used Sikkens Cetol SRD in "Dark Oak." It got good ratings on Consumer Reports, and, perhaps more importantly, only required one coat. It's also supposed to be a good option for decks such as ours that may (or may not) contain arsenic. We don't know the details of when our deck was built, but apparently this sort of wood, if made before 2004, was probably treated with arsenic. And if that's the case, we don't really want to be sanding it, what with all that arsenic then being freed into our air and lungs. So we just did a very thorough washing with a homemade recipe of Oxy-Clean and Borax a couple days ago. Applying the stain took about 4 hours and used almost a gallon of the SRD. Since it's a stain, it won't peel like paint would, which means that the next time we have to treat it, we won't have to sand then, either. Oh, also in the "note to self" category, we only needed one gallon, not the two that I bought. We can return the un-opened can; I figured it was better to have extra than to have to run out halfway through the job (a regular occurrence during most of our home-improvement projects).

I got the stain at Harmon's Paint & Wallpaper, a very friendly place downtown. After I bought the deck stain, I asked if they had any discontinued wallpaper books they were looking to get rid of. A very kind lady took me to the back room and showed me just what I wanted -- a terrific book of children's wallpaper samples (happens to be Ralph Lauren). I know, you're wondering, what exactly am I planning to do with a book of wallpaper samples? Redecorating a room in 18X15-inch squares? (Actually, that might look pretty cool.) Nope, I'm doing some paper crafts, and I read a suggestion for recycling wallpaper scraps, so I figured a sample book would be perfect. And it is!

Last night I was playing with fabric, and staring at the new chicken print fabric I bought a while ago. I was compelled to make a stuffed chicken.

In the background there, you can see my first wallpaper project: I covered one of Lucy's formula cans, since the first one has been such a hit.

In other news updates, Lucy is officially crawling. I put her down in the pink room while I went to get her dinner ready, and by the time I came back, she had crawled over to Carter's box of toys. She can really move now. Time to invest in some baby-gates.

Lucy's New Car! (boy, she grew up fast!)

Today on one of our many walks, we discovered that someone on our block had thrown out a perfectly usable kid car. We rescued it from the trash, and I just finished washing it. Wow! It wasn't really our plan to get Lucy into car culture so soon, but it was too good of a deal (free!) to pass up. Plus, we saved it from a landfill, so I figure that's all for the good.

Garden Delights; Lucy Grows Up

We've been overrun with produce lately. Check out all the stuff that was in our farm share this week:

Amazing!

And these are the tomatoes we picked from our very own garden:

And here is the deliciousness that Jake made with the tomatoes:

It's getting totally out of control in our tomato plant patch. We also harvested a huge batch of tomatillos, and made some delicious green salsa with them. YUM!

In non-produce-related news, over the past week, Lucy has grown up a bit. Or maybe, more appropriately, we have finally acknowledged that she has grown a bit. First, we decided to retire the baby swing. While it didn't list a specific size or weight limit, it did say "discontinue use when baby becomes too active." The very squirmy Lucy definitely qualifies, and since she seems to try to grab the bars as she swings past, it seemed like this was the time to migrate the swing to the basement.

Yesterday, I finally put an end to the very very very much over-taxed bassinet. This lovely bassinet has served us well. In fact, it sets an age limit of 3 months and a weight limit of 15 pounds. Lucy has long since surpassed these markers, but we continued to use it for diaper changes and bath prep, because it made things easier. We never leave her in it unattended, so it seemed like it was a reasonable place to put her for a fresh diaper or to undress her for the bath. On Thursday night, however, she showed me a new trick. She's become very squirmy when she's being changed, and her favorite thing to do is to flip herself over onto her front just when you're trying to get the wet/dirty diaper off. Nice trick. Since the bassinet is small and confining, she not only flipped herself over, but got herself up on all fours and started rocking. Her rocking meant that the entire bassinet was shaking. This didn't seem like a good thing. So bye-bye bassinet. You have served us well.

I'm actually not that sad to see these two items move on, as they were really taking up a lot of room in the dining room. Nice to have that space back, just in time for Lucy to start crawling (any day now).

Some improvements

Today we did an overhaul of the living room. We moved all the audio equipment into the TV/video cabinet, and got rid of the ugly and mostly inaccessible corner shelf that previously held the stereo. It makes for a little more space in the room, and makes the stereo actually accessible, which is all for the good.

Also, this makes it so you can see the door, including the patch of dark red paint where we were testing a possible color for the room (the color failed). You can also see the very sorry state that the yellow chair is in; I think it's time to start shopping for a new chair or at the very least, to invest in a slipcover. You may also have noticed that mountain of Lucy toys that towers over our living room. The kid has a lot of stuff.

We also installed a new closer on the front screen door. Try dragging a stroller w/ kid, plus the dog and whatever else you need through the screen door that will not stay open, and you will realize what a HUGE improvement this little device is. When I realized that I wanted to replace our old closer, I wondered what that little thingy was called. I figured that there must be some sort of technical name for it, perhaps something involving the word "pneumatic." But to my delight, I discovered that it's simply called a "door closer" and in fact they're quite easy to find on the internet. I wanted a particular kind of closer though, one that would easily hold itself open, but also easily close after we'd entered or exited with our sundry parcels and creatures. The "Touch N Hold" door closer was exactly what we needed.



Their website claims that the touch n hold is a "revolution in door closers," and, I have to say, though I laughed at that claim initially, it is a huge help. OK, my product endorsement time is over, and I hope we get nice fat check from the touch n hold folks for that.

One other big improvement was the addition of a medicine cabinet to the downstairs bathroom. We were keeping medicines and the like in the vanity drawers by the sink, but it was ill suited to the purpose (the bottles fell over and leaked; the drawer is also too accessible to a certain soon-to-be exploring little one), so we searched for a cabinet. We actually bought a couple at Home Depot, but returned them because they were terrible looking. I found this one on Amazon -- it's made of bamboo, with recycled glass for the doors.



Hooray! I think we might have to get a second one for the upstairs bathroom, which has the same problem.

Uncluttering

Here at 83 Durant, we've collected a lot of stuff.  This is the sort of behavior to which we are both prone; whether Lucy will be a similar keeper of things remains to be seen, but so far, her ability to squirrel away cheerios and peas in her high chair seems to point to a similar behavior.  Having a house with a giant basement serves to enable our pack-rat-ish tendencies.  Lately, we've been trying to limit our intake of stuff, and increase our releasing of stuff we don't need/want/use.  Here's what we've accomplished so far:

I did an enormous purge of books.  Enormous in this case means about 10 shopping bags.  I think this is enormous, but I should also point out that there are still many, many books filling our shelves.  Those books will go off to library book sales, where no doubt someone just like me will eagerly buy them by the bagful, excited about what a deal they are, and then line their shelves with them for many years without opening them.  I certainly hope for better for these poor books, but from experience, I know that I buy far far far too many books that I never get around to reading, especially at those fill-a-bag library used books sales.  

We've also purged a lot of old media.  We've been carrying around a box of VHS tapes for the past 5 years, despite the fact that we do not own a VCR.  What's the point?  If we haven't watched them in the last 5 years, chances are we don't need them.  So I freecycled those to a very happy family.  I've also let go of a box of cassette tapes.  This purge was a bit more difficult, and not as successful.  With the VHS tapes, I gave away the "real" tapes and just chucked the home-made tapes.  By home-made tapes, I mean, things I taped off of television, not home-movies or anything like that.  Surely here in this age of television on DVD and YouTube, there is no need for me to keep copies of episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, the Simpsons, South Park, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I taped off television with a VCR of suspect quality.  That decision was easy.  Not so with the cassette tapes.  I gave away most of the "real" music tapes, with the exception of a few that I'm keeping for our car (which only has a tape player), but when I hit the mixed tapes, I didn't know what to do.  Granted, they're a step above the taped-from-TV VHS tapes (although some of them do include stuff I taped off the radio), but really, do I need those tapes?   Aside from the tape deck in the car, we don't own a cassette player.  So they haven't been played for years and years.  But I can't quite bring myself to toss that box filled with 90-minute Memorexes with hand-printed playlists filled with exotic titles.  The mixed tape was once an art form for those of us of a certain age and persuasion.  I know my 14 to 24-year-old self would be horrified and outraged at the very thought of getting rid of such archives of music, such labors of love and hitting "play and record" at just the right moment.  The year after I graduated from college, someone broke into my car and stole a box of tapes -- it held 24 home-made mixes from various friends from various places and stages of my life to that point.  I was devastated.  They were never recovered.  I sometimes wondered if the thief just threw them out once he/she realized they were worthless (to him/her), although priceless to me.  Remembering this loss, I just couldn't bring myself to toss the mixed tapes yet.  So back into a (smaller) box they go, and back into the cabinet where they once lived with other defunct media, until a day when I'm a bit more vicious in my need to jettison the flotsam.

That's all for now.  Time to get Lucy at daycare.  It has been pointed out to me that although we've posted lots of pictures, the blogging has been lagging, so I'm going to try to get back into it.  Comments from our esteemed readers always make me smile, so please feel welcome to use that comment button, those of you who are lurking silently, and let me know you're there.

August Update

So the blog has kinda fallen by the wayside lately. Hopefully the Flickr pictures are providing sufficient info as to why we're not constantly working on the house or blogging

But we have managed to get some small projects done around the house. While Jake's parents were visiting back in July, they helped us out with a bunch of things. Rose did a ton of weeding and mulching, which greatly improved the garden situation. Rose also tested out a pink room paint color for us. She used a sample jar to test out whether we could do the pink room over in a dark red. Too dark. Hmmmm....We still need a solution to the PINK of the pink room.

John installed a new faucet in the downstairs bathroom. This project was not without its frustrations. After John completely installed the faucet we bought, Rose heard a slight leak. Upon further investigation, it turned out that the faucet itself had a leak in it. Argh! So a complete dis-assembly, and a second trip to the hardware store. But who's counting. Actually, it may have ended up being five trips to the hardware store on that one. But we have a lovely new leak-free faucet.

But because the world has an equilibrium of leaky faucets, we just discovered this week that the basement utility sink faucet is leaking. Ah, leakage equilibrium attained.

In other small improvements for the summer:

*We put carpet on the floor of the under-stair nook, where Carter has a bed, and where we park Jake's folding bike and Lucy's stroller.

*We installed a new toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom. While doing this, we discovered that there are two slightly different colors -- there's "almond" and there's "biscuit," and they're not the same. Also, toilet seat technology has evolved. We have a seat with "quiet-close" and "quick-release" functionality. Wow. We opted NOT to get the self-heating one. Ew.

*We got rid of a TON of random metal (fence posts and downspouts and the like) through freecycle. Awesome! We love freecycle.

*Jake (with the help of our fabulous next door neighbor, Lisa) got our gutters cleaned out. They were so full of tree muck that they were starting to bow out and pull out of the fascia boards.

*We got a dehumidifier for the basement. I can't believe how much water this thing takes out of the air! It makes the basement a more pleasant place for working on bikes and working out. This is good. And we've had such a wet summer, that I think it's also good for keeping the fieldstone walls a bit drier than they might be otherwise.

The garden is now giving us tomatoes, and the herb area is full of basil and sage (and others, too, but those are the big ones). We also have an apple on the apple tree!

I've been trying to fit in some crafting time when I get the chance. I've managed to make some little things for Lucy, like a tag blanket (I think this appears on Flickr a while back). I've also cut up some scraps of pretty fabric that she likes; we hide toys underneath them and she's thrilled to find them.

Today I made a few items that please me very much. The first is a simple can o' toys. I noticed that Lucy loved getting into the containers on the counter where I keep her baby products and hair stuff and whatnot, so I figured I should make her one of her very own. I just decorated an empty formula canister and filled it with fabric and some of her legos and other toys. She LOVES digging through it and dumping the can.

I splurged on some fancy fabric last week, and I've been looking for just the right thing to do with it. This evening I decided that the beautiful Mary Flanagan hand-dyed wool felt would make really lovely soft blocks. You can see the prototype (the purple one in the background) that I made from scrap fabric, and then the real one that I made with the six colors in the "Aqua" series: Mason Jar, Spring Rain, Deep Sea, Juniperberry, Evergreen, and Emerald Bay.

I'm very pleased with it. Soft and wooly. I may make more with another color set, too.

That's all I can think of for now. No promises as to when the next post will be, but we'll keep putting up Lucy photos so you can see how she grows. She'll be nine months old tomorrow! Wow!

July Garden Update

I'm afraid we've been pretty neglectful of the garden, and yet, it seems to thrive. As you can see here, we're tremendously overgrown with weeds, but the stuff we actually planted doesn't seem to mind sharing the fertile wealth with the weeds.

The herb garden is seriously overgrown, but luckily, it's overgrown with herbs!


The sage and the basil have really thrived. The cilantro got too tall and flowered, and then apparently spread itself everywhere. We actually have cilantro growing in our lawn. It makes for a nice smell when we mow the lawn!

A lot of flowers have arrived -- currently we have lots of lilies in white and pink in front of the house. The bees seem very happy:


Our tomatillos are very happy with all the warm, wet weather:

I did a little bit of weeding earlier this week, and while I was ripping stuff out, I was thrilled to discover some little shoots of a rhubarb plant!

They were buried under the weeds! Hopefully their new access to sunlight will help them grow. We won't be eating any rhubarb from the garden this year, but this little plant will hopefully come back next year to get our crop started.
The Jerusalem Artichokes have taken off. They're very tall, and I can only hope that their tubers are growing as well as their green tops are:

There's also an onion growing quite well, though it's a bit hidden in the artichokes.
Carter has been doing his best to keep up with eating all the grass that crops up in the garden. He's a helpful dog.


We'll be off for some family visits soon, so this may be the only July post. Who knows what the garden will look like by August?

Craftiness at 83 Durant

During Lucy's naps lately, I've been working on some crafty projects. This is a bird mobile I made for her room:


I got the pattern from this blog:http://www.spoolsewing.com/blog/2008/05/16/bird-mobile/,
which I found through one of my favorite sites, whip-up. The pattern is available via a free PDF. It's a nice project to help use up all sorts of fabric scraps. I used a bunch of bits I'd been saving from a variety of salvaged items. There's some nice black velvet from an old dress of mine, some awesome bright green brocade from a 1960's gown, and some funny maroon cotton with copyright signs all over it from an old shirt of Jake's. I used two different fabrics for each one, except the brocade. For that bird, I used the "right" side for the top and the "wrong" side (which was equally pretty) for the belly. I think it looks like a parrot. I'm not sure the other bird species are readily identifiable.

The birds are really easy to make, but the construction of the mobile was a bit more difficult. The birds kept doing nose-dives off the branches; I finally ended up using thin wire to keep them on. Then the twig kept twisting as I tried to tie them together for hanging. The eye-screws were the right solution. I also cheated a bit -- instead of finding the exact right single balance point for each branch, I put in two screws, so there's a bit more stability.

Next up, I did some more "upcycling" by taking the material off my favorite, but sadly, broken umbrella. I had found a neat article in Craft magazine about making various things out of umbrella fabric (why put that nice waterproof stuff to waste?). The article is in Volume 7 of Craft and there's a link here: http://craftzine.com/07/recycle/ (you need a subscription to see it). [On a side note, I think Craft is a great magazine, and the web site & blog both have a ton of great projects to oogle and inspire.] The article suggested making a cover for your backpack or laptop bag, but I didn't really want to make such things. What we here at 83 Durant could really use in the way of waterproof stuff was some bike seat covers. Jake has all these nice leather saddles, and when we go travelling with the bikes on the back or roof of the car, we need to protect them from the weather. A quick search led me to an instructable on making a bike seat cover: http://www.instructables.com/id/quick-and-easy-bicycle-seat-cover/
But this one seemed overly complicated. Thus far, we've used showercaps to protect our bike seats, so why mess with the simplicity? I cut a rough shape that looked like it would fit the seat, sewed a casing around the edge, threaded some elastic through, and ta da! Bike seat cover!

Since the casing and stitching are all gathered up underneath the seat and bunched together by the elastic, I didn't worry about the fact that it was a kind of uneven and messy job, as I had cut a rather asymmetric shape. Also, another bonus, the umbrella fabric doesn't fray, so no need to turn down a hem within the casing.

It was so easy, I made two. Now I need to find more umbrellas. If you have a busted umbrella, and have time to cut the fabric off, send it my way! We have a lot of bike seats to cover here!

I also made a couple of plastic bag holders to contain the frightening number of plastic bags we accumulate. We use reusable bags (like the one I made) for our big grocery shopping, but somehow, we still seem to have a lot of bags. I like to have some to use for trash can liners and the like, so now we have a handy place to store the ones we have for future use:

I got the fabric at IKEA. It's awfully cute, and I think I'll have to make something for Lucy with it.

I also recently finished my second pillowcase bag. I found the really great pattern and instructions here: www.kootoyoo.com.au/page10.htm


I got the pillowcase at our local St. Vincent DePaul here in Lowell (it's a really great shop!). I bought a small lot of 15 or so random packets of bias binding on ebay, so as you can see in the photo, I used two different colors. I'm using this one as a laundry bag for Lucy's clothes in the downstairs bathroom. I love making these bags. I had previously made a pillowcase bag back in April:

It was my first attempt at bias binding. It's an easy project with a big payoff -- it makes a HUGE bag! I'm on the lookout for old pillowcases.

That's about all for now. Happy 7 month Birthday to Lucy!

Brewery to Brewery Ride next Saturday

This is a stupid idea.

Garden Edition 2008

Garden 2008
Originally uploaded by Jake & Bridget & Lucy & Carter.

This weekend we did some more work on the garden. We picked up a small selection of veggies and herbs at Mahoney's Garden center. We realized that last year's garden was more ambitious than we were, especially since we're away for most of July. We returned to a crazy weed patch, as I noted in a post here: http://83durant.blogspot.com/2007/08/home-sweet-home.html



There were quite a few things that came back on their own this year, which was a nice bonus. We're adding a few things, but this photo has notes that shows what came back from last year (Click through the photo to flickr to see the details.)

the garden
Originally uploaded by Jake & Bridget & Lucy & Carter.

So we have some new tomatoes and herbs, but nothing too huge. I refused to get a cart while I was at the garden shop, so that I could only buy what I could carry in my arms. Without the big cart to fill, I was much more discriminating in my selection. I'm afraid we just don't have the time or energy to take on a full scale garden this year. You can compare this year's garden to last year's garden by looking at the flickr map of last year's garden on this previous post: http://83durant.blogspot.com/2007/05/83-durant-garden.html



Also, Carter has been wreaking havoc in the garden. I've put up some completely ineffective wire fence around it in an attempt to keep him out, but he just doesn't seem to get it. We fight about this daily. He likes to eat dirt, and he seems to think that the garden dirt is especially tasty. Infuriating dog!

That's all for now. Happy Memorial Day.

In which Lucy adopts a book!

We here at 83 Durant Street love books. So I was very excited when I heard about the American Antiquarian Society's first Adopt a Book Program. 

The AAS collections are really great.  I've used them just a little bit in my research, and I hope to use them more again soon.  So it seemed appropriate to support their conservation and collection efforts.  We talked it over with Lucy and she decided she would like to adopt this book called Girls' Stories.  It's from around 1874, which is a lot older than Lucy is.  Here is a hilarious description of the book from the website:

Six short stories; each of them exposes the sweetness and foibles of six different girls; includes the timeless tales of Rosa, the girl who "helped" her mother by jamming up her sewing machine; and of "Fanny the Fidget" who would not stand still for the photographer (quite the lengthy process in the 1870s!). 

It seems a perfect fit, since Lucy also has difficulty sitting still for photos.  Although she has not yet "helped" with my sewing, there's plenty of time for her to fulfill her destiny.  

Spring at 83 Durant

Spring is in full effect here at 83 Durant! Check out our daffodils! Unfortunately, our dog can be rather rude, and has taken to sitting in the middle of the flower bed. Argh. What to do?

We had a busy and productive weekend here at 83 Durant. We took care of boring stuff like draining and re-filling the boiler today. We also had the pleasure of our excellent gardening friend, Jess, coming out to help us get our garden plot in order. We did a ton of raking (oh the leaves! You'd think we were busy with something last fall!) and general spiffying up of the yard. We didn't plant anything, but we did get all the "moo doo" into the garden plot, and made plans for where things should go. The strawberry plants are already running around their area, and some herbs (chives, some others) are already popping up! Nice! Thanks so much for your help, Jess! This year's garden will probably be less ambitious. We're hoping to start a rhubarb patch (any suggestions on where to get good plants welcome!) and probably some tomatoes. Maybe some pumpkins, but probably a lot of flowers, since we don't have as much time for gardening this year.


I put mulch around the rose bushes; it's amazing how much better those beds look with just the addition of mulch!


We also set up the bird bath, this time in the front garden plot rather than in the yard, where it got in the way of grilling. Plus, we will be able to see any visiting birds from the front windows. Nice!


The little apple tree is starting to bud! I wonder if we'll get any fruit this year. Carter surveys the work we've done -- not bad!



Jake has also been making final fixes to the kitchen storm door, adding the thingy that closes it, and painting around the edge of the trim.

Of course, after getting all that work done, we needed a place to relax -- good thing Jake set up the hammock!

The beautiful weather continues, so maybe we'll get more done this week! Happy Spring!