Nothing Happens At Ten

I have put up my first batch of home brewed beer since we moved into the new house. It is now sitting in the broom closet waiting for the yeast to wake up and get to work.

The beer is in the glass carboy under the blanket on the right. The large hose goes from the top of the carboy into the bucket of water that serves as a giant airlock. The blanket keeps the beer dark and warm while the yeast does its magic. The very large hose keeps us from getting beer snork on the ceiling when this thing takes off.

I used to know how to do this with my eyes closed in our old kitchen, but it took a while to figure out where everything goes in the new kitchen. In the end, it was certainly easier to brew in the new space than it was in the House From Hell (HFH).

So, we do brew, do you? (sorry, that just spewed out).

New Kitchen

If all goes well, the beer goes into the bottles two weeks from today.

Our fingers are crossed ( which makes it difficult to drink beer, so we will uncross them in a couple of weeks ).

I named the generator, “The Beast“, so I thought that it might be fun to name the new snow blower too.

I think “The Augernaut” has a nice ring to it.

It is finally a beautiful day after all that rain. The air is cool; the sun is warm. The impatiens are blooming on the front porch.

The birds are singing, and the roses are blooming out by the vegetable garden.

So…. what comes to mind on a gorgeous day like today?

Snowblower.

Yep. Today we took delivery on the snow blower that guarantees that it will never ever snow ever again in New England.

You can thank me later.

But, why think “snowblower” on a day like today?

Because you don’t want to go shopping for a snowblower when it looks like this:

We are being saved from the mold monster by our very own R2-D2.

That is a Sears Kenmore 50701 dehumidifier, capable of pumping 70 pints of moisture out of the air every 24 hours. So far it is pumping a lot of water out of the air. The humidity was 75% when I discovered the mold last week, and it is now down to 52%.

Today I made the stand that the dehumidifier is sitting on. The purpose is to elevate it a bit so that we can attach the hose, which is the coolest thing about this model:

That is just a regular 1/2″ garden hose that goes over to the sump hole. With the hose attached, the water goes directly into the hose, bypassing the bucket, and we won’t ever have to empty the bucket again.  So, the water from the air goes into the hose, and from the hose it goes into the sump, and when the sump is full, the sump pump will pump it out into the yard. So all we have to do is turn on the dehumidifier and let it run. Pretty cool.

While I was poking around in the basement last weekend, during the recent hurricane, looking for water leaks, I found this:

How’s that for maximal ick factor?

That, dear friends, is the bottom of one of the new shelves that I put down in the basement last Winter so that I could get the boxes off of the floor ….. so that they wouldn’t get moldy. So the shelves got moldy. Go figure.

The problem appears to be a very humid basement and shelves that are made out of pressboard. The Mold Guy from ServPro told us that we need to de-humidify the basement….. and get rid of the crappy shelves.

This shelving stuff can’t even properly be called particle board since it looks like it was made out of sawdust or paper. It had already started to cave in under the weight of anything heavier than an empty box anyway. And now it has a bad case of Night-of-the-Living-Dead, seriously gross, hangy-downy, monster-drool mold.

So we have 7 sets of shelving, each of which has 5 shelves in it… and a bunch of them look like this. What to do?

First, we ran out and got a big de-humidifier so that we can dry out the basement, and then we donned our HAZMAT costumes….

and spent the weekend replacing the pressboard shelves with plywood. Joy.

Never owned a basement before. Who knew?

Perhaps you remember from a few weeks ago that we found a Big Rock where we were digging the rose garden. If you scroll down a few frames in this blog you can see it.

Yesterday we pulled that rock out of the hole. We used the latest tools and techniques of ancient Egyptian technology ( ropes and rocks ) to get it out. You can see our setup in the photo below.

Originally we hooked up the rope as a parbuckle, thinking that we would roll that sucker out of there with ease. No such luck. The rock was too heavy and not round enough, so we could not make it roll with just the ropes.

That is where the Egyptian rocks came in. We could move the rock just enough by prying it on with a shovel and pulling on the parbuckle so that we could stick a smaller rock underneath it on the far side.

Rock by rock, we rocked and rolled a little bit at a time until we could scoot the rock out over the edge of the hole. And here it is set into its final ( and I do mean final ) artistic resting place.

By the way, while we were out in the yard we ran into one of our former tadpoles. Look at this.

There’s one handsome dude… for a toad. We let him go back into the yard to eat more gnats and mosquitoes.

Speaking of ambitious plants, they seem to like the environment in the plant room. This one is reaching for the very top of the cathedral ceiling.

I don’t know what it’s plans are once it reaches the top.

Just so you can see how huge these plants really are, I have hung my hat on it .

Scary.

While I was poking around the yard, I ran into our scaevola plant. Here is a closeup photo of one of the flowers.

It is a wonderful blue color.

Years ago this strange flower with a hole in the middle caught my eye. But when I looked closer, I noticed that it is really made up of a ring of half-flowers, each one resembling a fan. Strange thing. Nice though. We have one every year now.

Hey! It’s been more than a month since I added a post to this blog. Yikes! My excuse is that I spent the whole time trying to dig out this rock.

No…. wait… that was a lie.

Anyway, today we were digging the rose garden on the West side of the house, and we ran into a rock. We kept digging until we unearthed the whole thing, and there it is. It is 2 or 3 feet long. It is really heavy.

Now we have to get it out of the hole. If anybody out there has a strong back… or a winch… come on over.

Meanwhile, the cat from across the street came over to help.

Well, not exactly to help… but to watch. Cats love work, you know, they can watch people do it for hours.