Phutu...or is it?

9-20-2003 Last Monday and Tuesday I actually got a fair amount done on the house for the first time in over a month. My brother helped me get the two new windows set into the back of the house on Tuesday. It was a lot less complicated than I thought it would be. The only hitch was that the window for the bathroom didn't really fit. It was a little too tall. So I just took a chisel to the old window sill and effectively lowered it a little bit. I still have to do all of the trim work on both the outside and inside on the windows, but installing them made such a huge difference to the feel of the house that I could hardly believe it. The bathroom is no longer a dark dungeonous place and the kitchen is even brighter than it was before. On monday I didn't have quite as much fun. I had been stalling around instead of doing the mudding and taping on the stairway; but, with nothing else to do, I started in on Monday morning with the first coat of mud. It took me more than four hours to do it becasue of all the weird angles and joints that are in the stairway. I have stalled again before doing the second and third coats but I think that I might get them done this coming weekend. I still have to do some more electrical work in the basement and I still have to patch the siding on the back, but things are actually starting to look more and more finished.

In my ongoing pursuit of the manufature of miniature trees I have had an epiphany. Actually, it wasn't me who did the real thinking, someone just told me something that made so much sense that I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it before. I have been trying to develope nice looking branches on the Chinese corkbark elm that I have but they just haven't looked right all along. The tree grows extraordinarily fast and is very forgiving of mistakes so it's a great one to learn on. The keys, that I have recently come across, to successfully making a branch look more realistic are as follows: Don't simply have the branch split into two equal smaller branches and then have each of those do the same. There should be a main branch and a side branch. The techniques for this are more than I will get into but it is a very important distiction. Then, in addition to how the branches are proportionally, the side branches that come out first should overlay the main branch slightly in such a way that the foliage is back a little from the foliage farther down the main branch but still near it. This was really hard for me to vizualize, and I am sure that you the reader, unless you happen to be interested in bonsai couldn't care less. In any case, despite a little bit of frustration at the fact that I have to kinda' start over in a couple places, I am much happier that I have internalized this little bit of info.

I know I keep saying that I am going to put up a photo of Romi sometime soon...I haven't gotten a good one yet. We went on a walk to the top of our hill this morning and I forgot to take the camera along. It's not so pretty up there at this time of the year anyway. It's been months since there was any rain here and the grass and weeds on the hill have pretty much been destroyed by trampling. I took some photos of all the dogs in the park that we go to on the weekdays during the spring; I was looking at them the other day and realized how much nicer everything looked then. Right now it's all just a dustbowl. I guess that's true for many hills in California this time of year...but not many hills have as much dog traffic to beat them senseless all the time. Never fear, the puppy is in fine condition and I will eventually take another photo of him; in the mean time I am just trying to keep up with the amount of hair that he is shedding and the number of fleas that he seems to get. We use Advantage to keep them at bay, but you are only supposed to use it once every four weeks; it seems like about two weeks after I put it on him he has fleas again. So I sprayed the backyard with this insecticide; I don't really like doing that sort of thing because I feel that most of it will probably be absorbed by him and the cat and myself over the course of time that we spend back there. The one advantage of it though was that it seemed to kill or at least drive off almost all of the flies. I vacuum the house at least once a week because after a few days you can look down at the wood floors and see little drifts of black hair forming in the little swirls of wind that walking around the house causes. It's kinda gross, but I dropped a popsicle stick on the floor last night and when I picked it up it was covered in dog hair. So this morning I got out the vacuum and cleaned up the entire main room of the house. I'm sure that If I dropped a popsicle stick tonight it would probably happen again. It's not only the floor though; I seem to find his hair in places that I really don't think it should be. I can imagine ways that it gets there but I don't really know how it gets into the bathroom sink. Same thing goes for the top of my nightstand; or on the top of the top shelf of books. In any case, I'll just keep cleaning, and maybe he'll stop shedding at some point.

9/14/2003
8/13/2003
7/29/2003
7/19/2003
7/8/2003
7/1/2003
6/3/2003
5/29/2003
4/22/2003
3/18/2003
2/27/2003
2/18/2003
2/15/2003
1/31/2003
1/21/2003
12/18/2002

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