Nothing Happens At Ten

A while back we were in the garden center of the Big Box store, and my son picked out an innocent looking bulb to plant. It turns out that the innocent looking bulb is an “Elephant Ear” plant. You can see in the photo below why it is called that.

The leaves really are that big. No trick photography here. And they are growing fast. You can see the next one unfurling right next to it as I type this. Pod people!

Oh, and that big  sun room we had……. it’s full.

I guess we have lots of oxygen to breathe.

We recently noticed that the polywogs have hatched in the local creek. So we trudged down there today with some buckets and captured a few of them.

It turns out that the old aquarium that we used to raise polywogs in years ago seems to have survived the house project. It is cracked, but fairly intact, so we put a rock in it and some pond water and the polywogs. You can see some of them in the closeup below.

Pretty cool. I will see if I can get some photos of them after they frog. Polywogs keep you young.

For those of you who have not yet heard my “Oh my achin’ back” lament, we dug up the front garden last weekend and put in some plants. The landscaper wanted an arm and a leg to do the job, so we sacrificed our backs instead and did it ourselves.

We pulled some rocks out of the ground.

Yes. All of those rocks came out of that garden. The rocks that came out of the garden on the other side of the steps have already been hauled to the back. Some of the largest rocks have been repurposed in a decorative manner.

That’s not my work. The younger man in the house found the energy to schlep those things back into the garden. I went back in the house and searched for the liniment.

Our new refrigerator has a really nifty Control Center on the front of the freezer door. It is over the ice and water dispenser.

This is the new, high tech way of controlling a refrigerator, not just a couple of thumb wheels inside the door.

Zooming in on the Control Panel, you can see that it has nifty icons with push buttons to do things like set the temperature and set whether or not you want the ice to be crushed or whole.

But, looking closer, something spooky has shown up recently. Look at the upper right corner of the display.

Our fridge is giving us commands? That is a pretty terse demand! It doesn’t sound like a request to me! I haven’t seen anything like that since Audry said “Feed me!“. Our appliances are giving us orders! Has the takeover by Skynet begun in earnest?

And what are those blood-red drops going into the tank below the demand? It looks like blood to me! Is that a threat? What happens if we don’t “order filter“?

Spooky, hunh?

It rained all day today. So I spent most of the day down in the basement in my shop. I built this saw horse:

I bought the brackets for the saw horse about 30 years ago. Yeah, thirty years ago. I’m a bit behind in the projects. The 2 x 4’s that are required to build it were not included, just the plastic brackets, so the box of parts went into the garage to be made into a saw horse when I got a round tuit…. and then they sat there for 30 years.

Every time I came across the box of parts I thought, “Gee. I ought to get some wood and build that saw horse”. But we all know about good intentions.

However…..  since it was going to rain all day today anyway, and I will need a saw horse for a project I am going to do soon, I went to the Big Box Home Improvement store and procured 12 feet of 2 x 4 and then cut away everything that didn’t look like  a saw horse.

It’s not exactly Chippendale fine furniture, but it came out rather nicely I think.

I wonder why they call it a “horse”?

The backsplash tiles behind the stove were installed today.

Looks pretty good.

Ignore all the little wedgie things sticking out. They are there temporarily to hold the tiles in place while the glue dries.

They remind me of a dental project I was involved in once.

Grout and sealant tomorrow.