Cut that Rug
I decided to make a rag rug out of old T-shirts, sewn on a base of a large towel from Steve’s father’s estate. I thought it might be a little boring if I just sewed them straight across the short side, so I drew this curved design on it with a marker. Here I have […]
Dyeing en masse
This week I had a tiring but interesting time tie-dying shirts with six classes of first graders.
Another Round of Ice Dye
I started with a trip to the Thrift Store. I found 6 shirts and added 2 that I already had. Four shirts in each tub was a bit crowded, but it would have been worse with bigger shirts. You can see that there are large gaps with no dye. I should have put more dye. […]
More Ice Please
Back in March, I tried ice dyeing for the first time. It turned out great, so I finally got around to doing some more. This time, I had four different batches of dye. I started with two off-white shirts and used a reddish mix of dyes. I started it around 10:30pm and rinsed it the […]
I dyed today
Today was the day. It was slow, but not too painful. I finally got the tie-dye box out and I had found my tie-dye book with my notes on amounts and conversions, so I decided to try the technique I saw on Dharma Trading: Ice Dyeing. I dyed two of Steve’s shirts. One is a […]
Call Me, Maybe
I’ve had a T-Mobile prepaid phone since 2005. It worked well for me to pay by the minute since I don’t use the phone very much. But times have changed and I am feeling the limitations of that kind of phone plan, so I did a bunch of research to see what other kinds of […]
Something to Get My Hands Into
Hanging out in beautiful Mexico too long can cause problems. Even though there is always something to do in Oaxaca I found myself near the coast with beautiful beach, perfect climate, wonderful people, etc. After a few months I just got bored, sad to say. Wanted to get my hands into something. So, Joy and […]
Xeriscape Symposium
We went to a Xeriscape Symposium on Saturday and the best topic was rainwater harvesting. The only trouble is you actually need some rain to harvest! Texas A&M has some information about calculating the size of the storage tank for the size of your catchment area and flushing out the first dirty part of the […]
Candy Corn
My brother Robbie sent me some pictures yesterday, saying I thought you’d like to see some of the corn we grew this year. The crop was terrible because of the extremely dry weather, but the kernels are still pretty. I think they are gorgeous! They look like candy. Robbie continues, It’s interesting to see how […]
The Morphing of a House
We haven’t had much to say on here for quite some time. Mostly there isn’t much to say about losing a brother/friend to brain cancer and having to manage all of his affairs alongside your own. Basically, we’ve been pretty busy. But as of June 29th, we are no longer working on or living in […]
Changes in laptops don’t compute
I spent all day looking at computers and I finally ordered one at 8:00pm! I had done some research on several days previously, so I’m more knowledgeable than I was, but I’m tired of it. I never did like hardware. I wanted to get a laptop that is leading edge enough to last me 5 […]
Windfall from next door
The next-door neighbor has a mature pecan tree with lots of nuts. I saw them raking up leaves in the front yard and wondered what would happen to all the nuts. Guess what! They don’t want to take the time to pick up the pecans and shell them! So this morning I picked up “a […]
Just Enough and No More
I’ve been spending some time lately researching how to fix Mike’s computer. He has a motherboard with RAID, so of course he was using it, as the boot disk. Then on the 13th or so, it got caught in a reboot loop due to an error on the disk. It took me a while to […]
Economy of scale
Joy wrote: The BusinessWeek article “Yuan poised to become Reserve Currency, Goldman’s O’Neill Says” shows we have to watch out for China. It has the power to do whatever it wants. Robert Reynolds wrote: Laura and I talk about this problem frequently. There just isn’t anything left for people to do in this country, except […]
Holes in the ground
A twenty year old pond is bound to have some problems. This one in Florida has been losing water and is full of slime. After catching what fish he could, Steve has stepped in to see what the matter is. He worked hard to get to the bottom of things. Just a little scrubbing will […]