Sunday, February 24, 2013

Spring in my step

hello my name is Tys and I wear crocs.  Actually, fancy leather topped crocs and just around the property as a sort of 'garden clog' but they are in fact, crocs.   A while back the stitching started coming undone on one of them, so the other day I finally got around to sewing it back up. I used dental floss, which worked perfectly. The stitching could look a little cleaner, but I didn't want to spend too much effort getting the old threads out of the holes, possibly screwing up the leather more. 
 The almond tree closest to the house is blooming pretty much at full-tilt now... I hope there's more rain this spring, but I also hope it comes down softly so as to not pound the blossoms off. 

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Baby Innovations

With only a few minutes here and there to get something done, I did manage to come up with a swing for the baby:  tied to the leg of the desk in the loft, the big basket swings pretty well through the kitchen. I had to create a sort of trench for the baby so she wouldn't flop from one side to the other and stay on her back, but other than that, this old basket from Grandma Chieko works pretty well with a new hazel stick handle.

and, while not exactly innovation, I thought I'd show off our diaper changing area: the nice antique dresser with a pad on it (gotten through a friend who got it on freecycle!) next to the window (with the wipe on the sill).  The dirty diaper bucket is outside the window, easy to get to since the ground isn't that far down.  

and, check this out: I saw a picture of someone re-starting their lettuce nubs so I gave it a shot.  These are egg cups, so you can get the size, but it's quite surprising to see growth right out of the rind I was going to throw away. I hope we can get some nice baby lettuce out of this experiment.

Saturday, February 09, 2013

New Member of the Team!

 Well, the reason productivity has gone down around here has finally arrived.  The newest member of the team on the Journey is in and healthy at 7lb 9oz.  We're settling in and getting used to all this:

Melissa's work on the bassinet that was handed down to us from our sister-in-law is working perfectly (in fact, better than we figured, as it's very light, and we can move it around the house easily, depending on where we are:

We're feeling extremely lucky to be a part of such a wonderful thing.

and the house is now become even more of a home.

Design Mistakes in my cob house

So, I have long meant to create a list of mistakes I made when designing the finishings on our house.  Now that we've lived in it for a ...