Given that:
[A] I do a lot of cooking[B] A substantial percentage of our trash every week is peelings and cores and seeds and other bits from fruits and vegetables ( Read more... )

This year, my house turned 100 years old. This information comes courtesy of both the county auditor's website and the Lakewood Historical Society, which sent us a congratulatory letter this summer. According to data on their website, there are 7853 houses in Lakewood that were built prior to 1921 out of a total of 14,045 houses, which means that ( Read more... )

We started off our Thanksgiving holiday week with some excitement. Or at the molecular level, a lack of excitement. When we woke up Sunday morning, the heat was not working. This is always a fun way to wake up on a chilly day in November. We called the emergency number for our HVAC contractor at 7, and their person on call arrived at 9:45am. Half ( Read more... )

Ever since the start of this pandemic, we've really not gone much of anywhere. Basically, there's been:

- Trips to the grocery store every ten to fourteen days, all of which involved ordering curbside groceries.
- A lot of biking, none of which involved going into a business except for two drop offs and pick ups for repairs, and actually one of ( Read more... )

When we painted the inside of house, we had to take down all the curtains in the three bedrooms. Since all of those curtains had been there since I bought the house, and quite frankly looked like they might have been homemade by someone with marginal sewing talents, this wasn't necessarily a big loss. We left the pull down shade in the windows in ( Read more... )

The hot water that was in my house when I bought it started to die back in March 2011. When I replaced it in April 2011 I was told that it would last about ten years. It died last night after 9 years and 4 months, so I should have taken the under ( Read more... )

Two Sundays ago I was mowing the lawn when I discovered that there was a hornet nest in said lawn. Now, we had seen an occasional hornet hanging out around M's flowers this summer, but never very many or with enough movement to pinpoint a nest location. That didn't happen until my foot kicked a hole underneath a root after I had run the lawn mower ( Read more... )

This week is week nine of lockdown. Technically, the state of Ohio is starting to open things back up, but since we're fortunate enough to not have to leave the house, we're not leaving any more than we have to. Some weird thoughts from lockdown ( Read more... )

Originally, we were told we'd work from home for at least four weeks. Since then, the date has been pushed back two more times, and if it doesn't move again we'll have worked from home for seven weeks. My previous record for being out of the office was five weeks during my sabbatical, and nobody believes that we're actually going to be back in the ( Read more... )

After talking about it for a long time, we have gotten the interior of the house painted. I learned a few things during this process:
- We learned (ok, confirmed) that the contractor we hired to patch dry wall and plaster last year was even less competent than we thought when we opted to not have them paint. Our painter was horrified by the work ( Read more... )