Prolific

The squash plants in the garden have been prolific thus far. The produce is a round squash with nonexistent seeds and fluffy (for lack of a better word) meat (also for lack of a better word).


I'm going to give a couple away today at work. It's Friday! Yay! We're planning to give our neighbors Derrick and Michelle the biggest one (along with other stuff when it comes) because they gave us one of their old propane grills. Apparently he has seven different grills in his backyard and in his screened porch.

In other news, this is our last post for a while. We'll have a bunch of pictures to share when we get back to the keyboard, and man oh man, we've got a nice big home improvement tasklist to manage as well: asbestos mitigation, radon system relocation, basement walls, basement flooring, popcorn ceiling fixes, completion of yellow room painting, finishing the fence... the list grows by the day. Much, if not all, of it will be posted right here on ProPil. Looking forward!

Have great weekends, everyone!

PS
This set of signs at a toll booth totally confused me last weekend.


PPS
We watched Gran Torino last night. Have you seen it? We thought it was a great movie!

28 Miles

Yesterday's weather was amazing, so Sue took a nice long bike ride along the East Bay Bike Path. She ended up traversing almost the entire length of it; she estimates 28 miles! Woah. Here are some pics.





Happy Thursday, peoples!

PS
Do you know what this is?


Remember the bottom of Starter Bag?

Inconspicuous Flowers

I attended the first dragonboat practice last night. (My shoulder is sort of kind of okay, so I rowed. I'm icing it as I type.) There will be three races on the big race day, and each one will be 300 yards or about a minute and a half long.

The manager of our team came in third in the country last year in a different competition held at the festival: dumpling eating. He consumed 19. These are the big style dumplings. Woah daddy.

Vacationing Dr. Sue is consuming episodes of MI-5 (from the BBC) with similar abandon. I've watched a little. Characters die (are "disincentivized") like clockwork, and the music makes me feel like I'm at an uptight rave.

Anyway, this is a progress report on various plants. First, Viney the Vine.

JUNE 18


JULY 15


This is called Royal Ruby Hens and Chicks. I'm not so sure what happened. Under the heading, BLOOM TIME, the info card that came with it says: "Inconspicuous flowers". Ummm...

JUNE 25


JULY 15


One of our cucumber plants sprouted tentacle tendrils a few weeks ago, so I set up a bamboo tripod. The cuke seems to really like it. Now that it stopped raining so much and the sun is out more regularly, things are growing like mad. See in the second pic how it's lashed itself to the bamboo? Cool!

JULY 7


JULY 15


And this first pic is from Old Cedar Scraps on April 13. We planted Planty the Plant a week later on April 20.

APRIL 20


JULY 15


Last but not least... our burning bush is dead.

JUNE 8


JULY 15


BOOOOOooooo.

Addin' Your 'Euhs

Summer has finally set in. It's warm out, and it hasn't rained in three whole days! There are tiny tomatoes and a cucumber on the way.

As promised, Owl #2 was employed, though I changed up her head dress. This collage is 6 by 12 inches, and I used a glossy acrylic spray as opposed to the paint-on glossy glue. It yields a much different result - thinner coat of gloss, but much more even. Maybe I will use the spray and the paint-on glue together somehow in my next effort.


On Sunday, Little Rhody's largely Democratic Congress was written up in the NYT for what appears to be hard-nosed stupidity: Bucking a Trend, State Keeps Dog Racing.

PS
Last week, thebadverbs@gmail received one of its first non-spam emails. Here's the exchange from top to bottom. Ironic.

* * *

Hi and welcome to Providence.

I literally stumbled upon your blog while googling information
about street light replacement. I live with my family in a some-
what grander -- and more run-down -- Queen Anne house in
South Providence (which I've taken to referring to as "Moby
Dick"). Coincidentally, I also grew up in DC but I've
been here almost continually since the Fall of 1977.

Hope you're enjoying your introduction to RI (ah, I see you've
actually been here over a year now so you're probably droppin'
yer R's and addin' your 'euhs).

Anyhow, I noticed the photo of the corner bench in your basement
as well as the fact that you have renovation plans. Quite simply,
if you decide you want to get rid of the bench I might be interested
in purchasing it. I am in the middle of a long-term do-it-myself
kitchen renovation which calls for construction of a very similar
bench so it might work out. If you're keeping it, well, that's fine too.

James

* * *

Rob to James
Jul 7 (7 days ago)

hey there, james, that's crazy that you just emailed yesterday about the bench. unfortunately, this past weekend i demolished the bench (and the wall behind it) to expand our basement. just today i posted pictures of the process... you can see the befores and afters here:

http://providentpilgrims.blogspot.com/2009/07/bench-and-wall-demolition.html

sorry about that. best luck with the kitchen enhancements!

Ah Ha

I realized after publishing my last post, some folks probably didn't know I was working on hosting a conference. I looked back thru old blog posts to see if I had mentioned it. I thought I had, but couldn't find any evidence. Sorry about that.

Well, it was a fundraising conference for the organizational fundraising officers (meaning, those that raise money from corporations and foundations) from Stanford, MIT and the Ivies. A few folks in my office were putting it together, and I was in charge of all the logistics. As it has been for the last quarter-century, it was held at Whispering Pines Conference Center (great place, great staff) in West Greenwich, RI. It was a six-month process, and I'm glad it's complete now. It went very well.

When I got back home on Friday, I put some new plants in and put some mulch down on the west side of the house. A red azalea and four flats of pachysandra against the fence. Both are evergreens.

BEFORE


AFTER


Then on Saturday, we attended a wedding at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. Congratulations Zack and Vikki! They had peacocks walking all around, some awesome landscaping and fascinating sculpture.







This guy was confused by the reflection in the black car. He kept ducking and then peering into the reflection... "Ah ha!"


PS
We won our first soccer game last night. I got tripped and upended in the first half, landing a bit on my shoulder. Oof. I saw my old friend Doug Watson break his collar bone that way way back when. I got lucky I guess, but it hurts to raise my coffee to my face.

I'm a little bummed. I don't think I'll be able to row tomorrow for the first practice of the infamous Dirty Oars, who will be competing in this year's Pawtucket dragonboat race. Check it out, but turn your speakers down: The 10th Annual Rhode Island Dragonboat Race.

PPS
This is funny... sort of: I'm from Rhode Island. Got a problem with that?

Whoo-aiting

Sunday thru last night I fit in an art project. I've been wanting for quite a while to do a cut-out piece with an owl in it. If you look way back in January at Waddle Quack Waddle, you can see the first owl prototype. Here it is.


That was my first cut-out practice. I modeled it after this cool wrapping paper.


Now, here's the second version.


I will use her for something, but she didn't fit so well with the project, so I put her aside. I ended up with a silvery gray little guy. This is called Whoo-aiting.



The project is 12 by 18 inches. I put a coat of gloss on it that adds a sheen, protects the papers and brightens the colors, but the gloss makes accurately photographing it difficult. I tried a few different configurations with lights and what not. The colors in the first one are yellowed-out, but the sheen is handled well. The second one has better color (black is deep black as it should be), but there's distracting glare on the left. I think Sue or Jonathan will have to help me out, else I'd spend as much time trying to get a good photo as I did making the darn thing!

Anyway, this is my last post of the week. That conference we've been planning runs this afternoon thru Friday. Be good and do good!

PS
The first "haul" from the garden included three beets and one squash. The beets are mild. Haven't yet eaten the squash.

Bench and Wall Demolition

Ok, Team. Here's the set of bench and wall demolition pics. You'll also notice that I removed a pretty ugly shelving unit thingie in the process. Because the wall was coming out, the shelving had to go.

Some of that stuff in the first pic is Drew's (storing it for the summer), and the instruments are awaiting a better day. Eventually in the basement we'll put a used drum set and an old electric organ, and the guitars and Meg's old bass will have some friends.






That's not wood-paneling. It's just the outer faux-paneling colored paper on the face of the sheetrock.

There was one big surprise during the project. The walls in the basement are comprised of a 1/4-inch sheet of plywood and a sheet of sheetrock on top. When I pulled away the first piece of sheetrock (first pic below), I saw the woah-daddy music/dance-themed plywood beneath. For a second I thought it was a layer of plastic or something like Tyvek, but on closer inspection, the plywood walls are *painted* with that design!

Someone did some serious work on those walls with stencils and tiny brushes to do the curling staff and notes! I wonder if it's all over the basement. Cool? Creepy?





So, I lied yesterday. I thought I removed 10 feet of wall, but it was only 8 feet. In fact, I think we're going to take another 3 to 4 feet from the remaining wall. Didn't want to cut it or remove it yet, because I don't know what's going to happen with the radon system piping. That's the PVC pipe you see coming out of the cement. It has an exit at the level of the roof. (You can see it coming out of the basement in the first set of pics here if you're interested.)

Where those cans of paint are, we'll have a little enclosed nook. There will still be enough space to walk behind the wall (about three feet) to get to the oil drum. This part of the project will add about 48 square feet of living space to the basement.

For the Fourth

Sue left town on Thursday evening to visit friends down south. Left to my own devices with a 50% longer weekend, I got a lot done. In fact, my high school friends might agree that my productivity rose to the level of "buck" or "buck wild". I'll leave it up to you... you can judge whether or not I "got buck".

Here's a run down... removed cedar closet in basement, removed bench in basement, removed 10 feet of plywood+sheetrock wall in basement, tested fireplace with unusable, unfinished wood (It works great!), de-nailed all leftover wood, gave away via Craigslist old bedroom shelving unit, planted a fern and three ornamental grasses in backyard, mulched a few places, mowed lawn, acquired and installed auto-timer for living room lamp, buzzed hair again (gave my sideburn an errant nick), helped Julie clean her back gutter, did a bit of laundry, worked on art project, plus almost remembered to eat regularly.

Here's the closet removal series. The hole in the foundation you'll see appear halfway through leads to the sewer line six or eight feet beneath the driveway. The big pipe is from the upstairs bathroom. The drawers didn't work too well anymore.











It definitely feels more open down there, and as the boards came away, I discovered some significant non-structural water rot and some old termite damage.



The hardest part of the project, and the part that gave me the most cuts and scrapes, was removing nails from the boards. We'll use the cedar for something else, and I de-nailed and stacked up the leftover pine lumber in front of the house. Unfortunately no one has taken any yet.

You'd think I took an entire room to the studs or something! This is the pile of wood from the closet.


Here's the cedar all ready for another project.


This is how many nails had to be removed. Maybe... 500 in all? Yeesh.


I'll post the bench and wall removal tomorrow.

PS
I did fit in a little fun, too, in between all the getting buck. For the Fourth, Katie and Graham hosted an awesome BBQ at Colt State Park. Perfect weather, bocce, kites, frisbee, great food. Thanks Katie and Graham, and happy birthday again, Katie!