This is How it Starts

When we bought the house, we knew it would need new HVAC and a water heater because of its age.  What we did not know was that the driveway would become a basket case.  I took this last October, things still looked pretty good.

However, this started happening.  The end of the driveway is breaking up.

Cracks are forming, running across the width and length of the driveway.  They're actually much worse than this picture, but it's too cold and too windy to go out and take better photos.  Here's a better look at the cracks. 

Anyway, in May we're having pavers installed over the driveway.  The concrete forms a very good base for the pavers.  It is the nature of house projects that they snowball.  Since they're doing the driveway, we thought maybe it would be good to have the garage floor epoxied first, since they run the pavers up to the garage floor.  Then we thought, well maybe we should paint before the garage floor guys get here.   So we did that.

A previous owner painted this floor with an inappropriate paint.  It's coming up.  

It's an epoxy coating - which smells terrible.  They did the first coat Monday, after they ground off all of the old paint.  That was really noisy.  The hummingbird did not stick around for any of that process.  I am happy to report that even though the floor guys were three hours late and left after dark, she did return to the nest.  Here is where much of my cling wrap is residing.  We had to seal that door to keep the epoxy odor out.

Tuesday it rained and they could not do any work.  Allegedly they're returning at noon today for the sealer coat.  In 48 hours we'll be able to see how much paint dust is stuck to everything and how much washing of the garage will be required. Meanwhile the contents of the garage are distributed through out the house and on the patio.

Knowing what I know now, I would have done this before we moved in to the house, when we were still living in the RV.  Masking the floor before painting would have been the lesser of the pains in the butt.

Despite the bone chilling temperatures and the high winds, the new lemon tree we planted is flowering.   It started the blooming process back when nights were going below freezing, so the tenting with flannel was a success.  Next year we may need more flannel.  Before leaving for the summer, we're going to have to put up a deer fence to keep the tree from being eaten.

I read a really interesting article about how the western diet has derailed our modern gut biome.  There is actually science involved in determining the effects of diet on what's happening in the gut.  It has implications for auto-immune diseases, diabetes, and other ills of the western world.  Here is a teaser from the beginning of the article.

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

 It's a lot of words, but it's an interesting read.