Happy Birthday!

No matter how many times I say that my birthday is just another day, I can't help it, when I wake up in the morning of July 6, it still feels special. 

Having a birthday so close to a major national holiday, it often falls on a vacation. As a child, we celebrated my birthday party with friends in early June, before school was over and everyone was gone for the summer. My family usually went on a little getaway for the long holiday weekend. My memories of childhood birthdays are of places like Atlantic City,  by the beach, salt water taffy, small amusement park rides, skee ball, and having fun times with my parents. Wonderful memories!

As an adult, it's often a day off from work. Now that's a nice birthday present!  But even when it's not, no one in the office knows so I have never had to suffer the "surprise" cake in a conference room. It's the only day I don't have to think to remember the date!

It's funny to do some ordinary little errand that requires a clerk to look at your ID. Suddenly there is a change from the bored required glance to "Oh, wait, it's your birthday! Happy Birthday!"  Yay!  They noticed!

No doubt about it, there is something about birthdays that brings out the child in me. If you have happy birthday memories, you wake up remembering them and anticipating nice things to happen all day. Thank you to everyone who has made those memories for me!

I am now going to work where no one knows but I'll probably be texting and smiling a lot. 

It's a Jungle Out There!

It seems like only yesterday that I had small starter plants all over the garden and it was so easy to pick off a few dead leaves and clip straying branches. Now you wouldn’t recognize the place. Despite my pruning every few days, a few tomato and cucumber vines have taken over the raised beds, covering all the other vegetables and flowers in their path. The bean pole, eggplant, peppers and leeks are fighting to get past them and it’s all a big tangle. Vines have gone down the sides of the raised beds and continue down the path. It’s a jungle out there. 

With 1000 cucumbers soon to ripen, what are my options?

Make pickles

Pro:   Holiday gifts will be ready early

Con:  House will reek

Hang a “You Pick” sign out front and charge $$/basket

Pro:  Make money and work less

Con:  Pickers will leave trash and traipse though the house to use our bathroom

Give them away to the food bank and friends

Pro:   I’ll feel good

Con:  Can’t think of one!

I found it hard to come up with a blog chapter in recent weeks because I couldn’t find a way to write that wouldn’t sound like an activity report. We’ve been very busy with many un-sexy household projects to improve the infrastructure of the new house. We had the entire electrical system upgraded, we had central heating and air-conditioning installed and next week a contractor will convert a closet into a powder room. 

The house has a lot of old appliances too and things are breaking faster than we can replace or fix them. Although the inspector’s report said the house is solid, it feels like everything is held together with duct tape. The previous owners was a fix-it-yourself guy and things are patched together. On the positive side, I am learning a lot of new vocabulary; words like: flashing, epoxy and p-trap. I’ve actually used the Santa Rosa Tool Library. I checked out an Orbital Sander and made a big mess resurfacing the butcher block kitchen island. 

I suppose I am suffering from "decision fatigue". This is the home in which we plan to grow old and these projects are things we will use daily for decades. You want to get it right. Eight weeks ago our bathroom contractor said "just find a toilet and a sink." But a bathroom, no matter how small, has a sink, faucet, toilet, flooring, baseboard, paint, lights, and eventually towel rack, toilet paper holder, mirror and storage. Starting to look for these items will take you down aisles of Home Dept you never knew existed. Your neck hurts from looking up at displays - rows of faucets mounted 6-12 feet above you. There are limitations to the size of what will fit into what is about the the size of an airplane lavatory.  Toilets come in so many shapes and sizes, flushing technology, water usage, seat height and length - and prices! 

There is little time for reflection when you’re shopping for toilets or interviewing HVAC vendors. I would like to say I stopped to smell the roses but the truth is, our rose bushes got black spot right after we moved in and I began spraying them every day with Neem oil and carefully picking off the diseased leaves. They’re better now.

While most infrastructure projects are not very exciting, there is one I must rave about, something that gives us great delight and was not a decision we had to make.  Our new heating and air conditioning system is on wifi. That’s how they're made now. So we have an app on our phone and we can change the temperature before we get home. Heading home from work….oh, it’s over 80 in the house…let’s bring it down to 72. Such magical power!

I also started a new job recently. I was laid off from the small medical company a few months ago and I’m now at a local tech company. The people are great, the pace is sane and I’m quite happy there. After spending nine hours at the keyboard, I head for the garden as soon as I get home and consult with Greg about whatever house project we’re working on. 

Of course, we could have left all the old things as they were. We could have blown a fuse every time we made toast. We could have left the old floor furnace in the middle of the living room and escaped to the coast during every heat wave. We could wait and take turns using the one bathroom. And I could just put in a rock garden and I'd have a lot more free time. But what fun would that be?