The El Nino Winter

It is so COLD.  Yes, I know, it’s probably colder where you are, but we’re cold.  Back before the house, we used to talk about owning a house, and invariably the question would arise – what would we do all day?  Hah!  Double HAH HAH HAH!  The house provides endless opportunities for entertainment.

After the rain moved out, we had a few nice warm days.  So we thought we’d get started on the staining project.  Here is Jim, scraping the wood, making a nice surface for staining.




Here am I, filling the holes left by the screws that previously held the gutters to the wood.  Note the two handed grip on the tube of wood filler.  After it reaches about half empty, it’s a pain to get it out of the tube.  It seemed like such a good form factor, but now we think maybe not so much.



We had planned to continue with the staining project, but the weather turned on us and it got cold and windy, to the point that neither of us wanted to be outside standing on the ladder.
More wind, bashing the Queen Palm.



Our favorite bougainvillea, inching towards world domination.



The night before last it went down to 32.  Last night it was colder.  Even though we covered all of the bougainvillea, two of them have a fair amount of frost damage.  We are very unhappy about this.
So, today we spent the afternoon applying additional plant protection.  The rest of the post will be extremely boring, but if I don’t write down what we did, we won’t remember next year.

This is the new lemon tree.  Next year he will probably need taller supports to keep the flannel off of his branches.  Note the glow at the bottom, that’s a string of Christmas tree lights.  The yellow flannel was used here for the sides and the top.



Here we have the Pygmy Date Palm in her warming hut, created from the peach and white flannel sewn together, topped with the grey and white flannel.  This required a lot of binder clips and clothes pins.



The Mexican Bird of Paradise is wearing a sea foam green top piece of flannel and white and peach flannel sides.  Binder clips and clothes pins were required to hold the structure together.



The bougainvillea by the downspout is covered in a long narrow piece of burlap along with an 80 inch by 80 piece of burlap.  Both burlaps are from Home Depot.



The new purple bougainvillea.  This year a two yard piece of bleached muslin was enough.  Next year, more may be required.



The bougainvillea on the way to world domination.  That covering is an ancient flowered sheet, and a sheet from Target that I cut down for the mattress in the 5th wheel.  Good thing they’re still with us.



The next door bougainvillea is covered with two 80 by 80 inch burlaps and a short piece of the 36 inch wide burlap.  This is really suboptimal.



The bougainvillea by the driveway got the worst frost damage.  Last night all we had was the fitted flowered sheet to go on top.  Clearly it was not enough.  There is now flannel, the sheet and an 80 by 80 inch burlap.  Hopefully there will be no more damage.



I used to quilt, primarily crib quilts made out of flannel.  We can see where all of my flannel has ended up, as well as my furniture covers for the summer.  Nights are supposed to by cold for the next five days, so I think we’re not going to uncover during the day.  It takes about two hours to get the fabric in place along with the binder clips and clothes pins.  We need to spend some time in thrift stores buying old sheets.  Sheets are easier to work with than burlap.

There you go, everything you ever wanted to know about frost protection in the Old Pueblo.

Boxing Day

Yesterday was windy.  We thought the weather heads had missed the forecast, predicting rain, but it finally arrived around seven pm.  It wasn’t epic rain, like the two low pressure systems we had in October, but it did demonstrate that the gutters are not leaking.

See the poor palm tree with her fronds being bent by the wind.  That was yesterday.

This is from today. It looked like it was clearing, but looking out to the west, there may be more rain. I do not like the El Nino winters!

That's all I have, wind and rain.

Christmas Day

People of Earth! – We wish you a Merry Christmas

From our house to where ever you are – we wish you happiness and joy.

HO!

Those are ornaments placed on the tips of the agaves.  A new Christmas tradition for us.

Even More Home Improvement

Happy Winter Solstice to all of you, as we celebrate the shortest day of the year, and the eventual return to daylight savings time.  Today we have had a thick cloud deck which will probably obscure tonight’s full moon.

This has been the week of contractors.  We are glad it’s Friday.

The house was built in 1999.  From what we have seen, maintenance, particularly preventative, was not always performed.  One case in point was the front door.  It looks OK from a distance.



Closer examination reveals that one could see daylight through the door.  See the flesh colored patches on the left side?  That’s wood putty Jim smeared on it last May, shortly before we left.  Also suboptimal feature was the daylight we could see under the door on the other side.  We suspect that’s how the scorpions were getting in.  Did you know that if you can slide a credit card between two surfaces, a scorpion can pass through the space as well?  Sleep well knowing that!



We spent a fair amount of time debating fiberglass vs. steel.  Then we went into Dale’s Doors, saw the wood doors, and all thoughts of a synthetic door went out the window.  Yes, wood requires maintenance, but it’s so pretty.  This is a knotty alder door with an arch and V grooves.  We had it installed Wednesday morning.  Happy we are not to have attempted that.



Wednesday afternoon Southern Arizona Rain Gutters arrived.  They do single piece extruded gutters (or as our neighbors to the north call them, eaves troughs). 



They have a roll of gutter material which is extruded to the proper length on site.  After the end caps are put on, they attach them to the house.  See the rectangular shapes on the parapet?  That’s where the water runs off the roof into the gutter.  They’re flashed on the bottom.  Whoever built this house had a brain fart and nailed the gutter to the support beam over the patio.  Water got behind the gutters and gave us that dark section of wood.  Fortunately it’s dry here so nothing has rotted, only discolored.  This will, however, give the homeowners a staining project they really did not want.



Now the water will be carried away, onto the new pile of rocks and down into the wash.  With any luck, the water will stop bashing the bougainvillea in the head.



Yesterday and today Sage from Door Medic was out sanding and finishing the door.  The side that faces out is done with teak oil.  The inside is satin spar varnish, non-shiny.  I love this door.  It’s stupid to love inanimate objects, but I do love the door.  It was open when I took this picture because Sage put polyurethane on the threshold and it’s still tacky.



Here is our very festive wreath on the front gate.  After we bought it we noticed the tag that says for interior use only.  If rain is forecast we’ll have to bring it in.



Speaking of rain, here are a couple of photos from the GPNW.  These were taken in Anacortes.  They’re had some pretty impressive wind as of late.


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So there you have it. Home improvement and wind.

December 20, 2018

Well, it has been a day.  Here is this morning’s front page of the Washington Post.



Katy Tur put that on Twitter 11 hours ago.  Since then General Mattis has resigned and the president is going to shut down the government in an attempt to get money for the wall.  General Mattis was particularly incensed about the Syrian withdrawal.

Two defense officials tell CNN that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis went to the White House to discuss Syria, and that Mattis was upset and “livid” after reading reports this morning about US local allies in Syria being targeted by Turkey following a withdrawal of US troops from Syria.

The officials said what set him off was a report that the Turkish Minister of Defense threatened to kill the US-backed Kurdish allies and put them “in ditches” once the US pulled out.

Mattis was incensed at this and the notion that the US was betraying an ally.

CNN reported earlier that Mattis decided to go to the White House early Thursday morning to discuss his concerns with Syria and try to change the President’s mind. Unable to change the Trump’s mind on the withdrawal from Syria, Mattis then resigned, according to a defense official and a White House official.

This CNN chyron pretty much sums today up.



I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.

On a lighter note, I will leave you with a very funny sequence of cat pictures.  It’s a link to a tweet with the cat. Update to post, the link is gone.

Downtown Tucson

Greetings Earthlings!  The sun was out today, it warmed up some, and we were all happy about that.  After the obligatory trip to Home Depot (where I bought yet another plant that will require digging a hole) there was lunch at Baggins and then a trip down to the area of the Mercado St. Augustin.

In late November 2016 I did a post about a new neighborhood downtown.  In that post I said the following.

Anyway, this neighborhood is really cool, with the following caveats.  An apartment building will be going up right next door to it.  If it's occupied by UofA students that will be bad.  The U makes no effort to mitigate students' bad behavior and its effects on the neighborhoods they infest.  It's also pretty close to a very low income part of town.  I don't know if I would feel safe using the modern street car after dark.  So, despite its high coolness factor, I doubt we'll move on it.

Today we wanted to see how things were going in the area.  I’m going to have to go with not so good.  Construction on the new apartments has begun.  So far they’ve dug a giant large hole in the ground, and wiped out a considerable amount of street parking.

This is the neighborhood we were so taken with.  They have lost their primary access in to where they live.  A construction fence has taken away their access.

Look how close the edge of the construction pit is to those houses.  This will probably go on for a couple of very unpleasant years for these people.  I feel bad for them.  Hopefully the new apartments will not be full solely U of A students and the residents will be good neighbors

Last year I did another post about new retail going in to the same area; in which I wrote the following.

Also under construction, or assembly, are these.  They appear to be rusting shipping containers.  Windows as well as electrical and plumbing have been installed, so they’re permanent.  I am really curious to see what these become.

They have become a very interesting shopping and dining area.  This is the pickup area for the burger restaurant.

The seating area for the burger restaurant.  Note the cheerful orange chairs.

Continuing to walk away, up the sidewalk.

There is a bar on site.  They have many things on tap.

This was in the window of a home decorating/skin care store.  I have no idea what “boy smells” are.  Note the container of “Stalker.”

This is the new Caterpillar regional headquarters.  It’s not a bad looking building.  We still can not believe they’re not installing solar panels.  The wires overhead are for the modern streetcar.

So, that was today, and it was a good day.