Dog House Project

Hayduke has a pretty good life.  That little stray puppy huddled in the tree roots, hungry and scared, has made a fine life for himself in the house across the street.  He gets good dog food and an endless supply of toys and treats and belly scratches and long hikes in the woods.  It's his first winter here, and even though he sleeps inside at night, he needs a doghouse for the cold mornings and evenings he stays outside during the winter, or during the rainy parts of the year.

But will any old doghouse do?  No, it will not.  No doghouses we can buy locally are insulated.  No doghouses we can order online review well.  Most dogs in Arkansas do just fine with a non-insulated doghouse.  Most dogs don't read online reviews.  

We're BUILDING a doghouse.  We ordered plans online from doghouseplans.com and gathered ideas from reviewing hundreds of doghouse photos.  We've gone to Home Depot a half dozen times.  We've spent good money and large parts of four days building this doghouse. 

Guest Bathroom

When we bought our house, we knew that our second bathroom was sort of terrible.  The fixtures were nice, but the room was painted bright yellow with a sort of multi-layer brown/gold spongy finish.  I suppose the previous owners had thought that the effect would be rich and elegant.  I thought that the effect led one to believe that a large mammal had been smeared in its own poop and then had seizures in the room, blotting the excrement all over the walls.

Holiday Decorating 2011

When we pulled up in front of Bradbury's Christmas Tree Farm, a boy in a red ball cap met us at the truck with a smile and a saw.   Bryan and Mandy choose our tree based on height, color and even-ness; I have veto power because I'm the one who notices when a tree's trunk is so crooked it won't fit well in the tree base.

The Amazing Giant Cat Tree Palace Sniper Tower

We asked Nathan to borrow his Big Dummy cargo bike, and I swung by Pete's on Thursday after work to pick it up since that's where Nathan was storing it.  While doing so, I couldn't help but notice that Pete's neighbors across the street had put one of those enormously expensive cat trees on the curb next to their trash can.  Some of the carpet was worn through, but it seemed clean and bug-free so Pete and I shoved it into my Subaru.

I spent Saturday morning with a utility knife, ripping carpet and rope off the cat tree.  I vacuumed it and covered it with a just-in-case coat of flea spray.  Once Bryan discovered a similar cat tree for sale online for $400, he cheerfully supported my project.  We moved it inside and I spent some time over the weekend wrapping the now-naked legs with new manila rope.(four 50-foot packs of 1/4" rope and three 50-foot packs of 3/8" rope)

Hayduke thinks that, when the cats chase him around spitting and clawing for his eyeballs, that means they want to play.  Hopefully they'll use their new Amazing Giant Cat Tree Palace Sniper Tower to climb up and away from the overenthusiastic puppy.

Tent Cleaning

Seeing as how this blog's name is "Past Tents", you shouldn't be surprised to find out that we are frequent tent USERS but we're not very good about maintenance. We tend to leave our tents crammed into their stuff sacks for weeks after a camping trip, without airing them out or cleaning them at all.

Finally, we had enough of stinky tents and washed all four of them this afternoon. We scrubbed them down with soapy water, rinsed them, and even soaked each piece in Mirzyme to get rid of that wet-tent smell. We hung our strange laundry on the backyard line to dry in the breeze. Worked like a charm.

Kind People Live Here

Dogs show up in our neighborhood and around our yard on a pretty regular basis.  They're usually unfamiliar dogs, and they're usually in good shape, clearly just stopping for a little smell around on their way someplace else.  We're not above patting a head here and there, or making a phone call if there's a number on a collar tag.  We provide a bowl of water if a drink seems to be in order.  But for the most part we don't get very involved in the business of itinerant dogs.



You may remember that, about a year ago, two beagles showed up at our house and took a long nap in the shade.  They didn't seem inclined to leave, once we'd scratched their ears and given them some water.  They were tired and seemed like they needed some help.  We put out signs and put ads in the paper and took care of them for about a month.  Finally, we helped them find their home.



We kidded each other at the time that there was some visible-to-dogs-only sign above our house that said "stop here for a rest."  Hobos had their own system of pictographs; a little line drawing of a cat meant "a kind woman lives here."  Do we have one on our house?  I don't see it. 

But the sign is clearly there.  Today I got a text from Bryan:  "Mandy found a puppy."  The two of them had been doing afternoon errands and had passed by the mowed lot across the street several times.  They'd noticed a dark thing under one of the trees, but they'd thought it was a neighborhood cat, or maybe a discarded black t-shirt..  In the late afternoon, when the black thing had been there for hours, they finally went over to investigate.  They found a puppy huddled at the base of the tree.



He's in good shape - clear eyes, healthy skin, little pointy white baby teeth.  His tummy is round and fat.  He loves to be with people.  The vet near our house guesses that he's just barely six weeks old, only just weaned, and confirmed our hunch that the puppy has no microchip.  He eats in a sort of panicked way, but it may just be the hunger of a young creature who missed his lunch.

He has a collar, so hopefully this story will have a happy ending.  He's in our backyard now, and I'll make a "Found Puppy" sign tomorrow.

I Heart Hydrocodone

I used to have great teeth.  And then they absolutely went to shit.  (This happened around the time Mandy was born, so I've always blamed pregnancy and nursing.  I'm not sure if this has any foundation in fact, or if it's just imaginative fault-finding.)

I kept up with dental work for awhile.  But then there were the single-mommy-with-no-dental-insurance years, and it just wasn't possible to take care of everything.

So, now that I have good insurance, I've been working on getting my teeth fixed.  Last year, we did lots of cleaning and filling and a ridiculously complicated root canal.  This year's big project is to remove teeth that can't be saved.  Friday, I went to the oral surgeon and had four baddies cut out.

Christmas 2011

We had a good Christmas weekend at our house.  We slept late several days in a row, and we ate Chinese food at two different restaurants.  We went on a long bike ride with a friend.  It's true that there were lots of presents - we worked together to choose and send gifts to family and friends, and when Mandy got home from her trip to Tulsa, we took turns opening gifts from other family members and friends, and gifts for us from each other. 

At our house, Christmas isn't a religious holiday.  And while we do like presents, we try hard not to focus on them.   We celebrate Christmas by taking the time to stop everything else we're doing and be with the people we love.  We drink eggnog together and we lay in a pile on the couch, reading, for hours and hours, because it is Christmas, and because these are the people we care most about in the world, and because what we want is to be here, with them, in this warm house, always.

Tree Killers

Once again our family drove out to the Bradbury Christmas Tree Farm (9427 Donna Lane, Mabelvale, AR) and cut down a live tree.  Mandy and I really like fresh trees so we haven't fallen prey to the fake tree craze that everyone else seems to buy into.

We Have Bats!

While working on an outdoor faucet last weekend, Bryan noticed a bat on the bricks nearby. We scooped him up gently in a newspaper and moved him to a tree where he'd be out of harm's way. This Little Brown Bat (myotis lucifugus) has several friends in the gable-end attic louvre. We can tell because we hear them talking as they wake up in the evenings, and because of what's collecting on the brick ledge underneath their new home.

New Washer. New Haircut.

Here's a semi-responsible decision: we just upgraded our washing machine.

While our current washer wasn't actually broken yet, it was of uncertain age, with a questionable history, and was missing some paint. A store sale (25% off), combined with a 10% off coupon from said stores competitor, free installation & delivery, and Arkansas' current generous rebate for upgrading to Energy Star appliances ($175 off) meant that we could have a new washer for about half price including tax. Wow!

If Bryan were writing this, he would also tell you that all the online reviews for the new washer were very good, and that it will pay for itself in energy savings in just a couple of years. It seemed like a smart thing to do. But all the same, it hurt to replace something that still worked.

Now our washer and dryer match, which feels like a great luxury. Plus, the new washer is really interesting to watch. All three of us spent a considerable amount of time today with our heads stuck in the porthole, watching our clothes tumble around in the suds. I'm completely amazed that the new washer cleans things with so little water. Plus, it plays a cheerful little song when it's done, just like its new friend the dryer. They seem very happy together.

Also, did you notice in the photo above that I'm missing some hair? Yep, it's spring, and I was sick of my ponytail, and I went and got it all chopped off. WHACK. Gone.

They fly?

Here is a photo of the type of "squirrel" we've been dealing with in our attic. This one appeared in our living room tonight without any invitation, probably due to the cold weather we're having again. It (and the others I've removed over the last few months) are apparently southern flying squirrels.

Our cat Jose chased him into the kitchen and we thought he would take care of everything. Except all he wanted to do was play with the stupid thing. I was called to the scene to dispatch the squirrel and save the women folk and in short order peace was restored to the homestead.

Roof vent goopy-goop

With the eight inches of rain we received in two days back at Christmas time, we became aware that the ~23 year old house had a leaking roof vent.

So we took a clear afternoon and got out the ladder, some roof vent goopy-goop, latex gloves and proceeded to smear each vent with a layer of sealer.

We're hoping the sealer does the job and when we wind up replacing the roof (original to the house) we'll replace all the vents outright.

Delivery Day!

Yay... our old/recycled dryer has been burning out thermal fuses lately, and at $40 a pop that gets expensive quick. So we went ahead and bought a new one... "LG Electronics 7.0 Cu. Ft. Super Capacity Electric Dryer". It seemed to review good on several websites and we made sure that it could handle the run of new dryer vent pipe Mandy and I recently installed. The dryer vent that came with the house was clogged and the previous owners had the dryer just venting into the garage... which was making our outdoor gear yucky!

Does it ever end?

We decided to spend the weekend doing all the wonderful tasks that come with owning a house figuring we can burn a weekend doing that stuff and not piecemeal it over the rest of the summer.