Feeling the urge to get creative in the garden

It's May, the snow is gone, the hummingbirds are back, and once again I'm indulging in the Water Feature Fantasy. Back when I first discovered BBC America, that channel carried a lot of shows that were popular in Great Britain: "Cash in the Attic," "Changing Rooms," "Ground Force," and a number of others with names I've forgotten. I loved "Ground Force." The team would go in to someone's minuscule back yard, which is always referred to as a "garden" in Britain, even when it's a patch of bare dirt with not even a weed to be seen, and turn it into something lovely in what seemed like record time and without huge expenditures of money. Every so often they'd incorporate a water feature.

Not quite what I've got in mind, but close. 

Well, "Ground Force" is long gone -- the BBC cancelled the series almost ten years ago -- but the memories of the water features linger on. The fantasy went dormant during the Omaha and Atlanta years, but it's back now. Our yard slopes, which makes a water feature a little easier to design. I had been thinking about various possibilities, but then this weekend I spotted something that might be the perfect vessel: an old cast iron sink that we used back in the '70s as a feed trough in the pig pen. The pen is long gone, and I thought the sink was too -- a lot of the old iron that had built up through 90 years of frugal Finlanders never throwing anything away did get picked up and sold as scrap metal a few years ago. I was a little surprised that sink got missed, but it was. And now the Water Feature Fantasy is back. An old kitchen sink, a broken pitcher pump, . . . the possibilities are definitely there. Now all I have to do is find the ambition to follow through on them.

Farewell, Kelvinator

Today, if all goes well, we're bidding a fond farewell to the Kelvinator in the camp. I'm not sure just what vintage that refrigerator is, but it's got to be about the same age as the  model pictured in the ad, which is from 1940. I have a hard time picturing any appliance made today lasting for over 70 years, but our Kelvinator is still muddling along, sort of.

Unfortunately, although it may work, it works inconsistently. There's a real fine line between "not cold enough" and "everything freezing solid." It  has a freezer just barely big enough to hold two ice cube trays, and, despite its ability to freeze lettuce on the bottom shelf, it can't manage to prevent a pint of ice cream that's actually in the freezer from turning to soup. It also takes up more than its fair share of floor space in a camp that's not especially big. Considering that the amount of usable space inside the thing isn't much bigger than a dorm fridge, it's massive (it easily takes up as much space as a modern 15-cubic foot fridge, but has barely 6 cubic feet of interior space) and, the one reason someone is willing to haul it away, it  sucks up a lot of electricity when it's being used.

We noticed an ad in the REA magazine informing members that turning in old, energy-sucking appliances, like our ancient refrigerator, would garner us a small credit. Given how difficult it is to get rid of an old refrigerator (landfills and scrap metal yards won't take them unless you can prove the Freon's been removed), we would have been happy just to have them haul the beast away -- the credit is a bonus.

The S.O. and I were wondering, though, just what happens to the refrigerators once they're collected from people's homes. Where do old refrigerators go to die? Our assumption is that their fate must be similar to that of cars traded in during that "cash for clunkers" program a few years ago -- the crusher, the shredder, and a slow boat to China -- but who knows?*

[*rhetorical question. I know perfectly well that if I were sufficiently curious I could Google it and learn more than I ever wanted to know about appliance recycling.] 

Recycling

I finally got around to making some shopping bags to replace the ones my neurotic cat peed on a couple weeks ago.  I know the bags Publix, Target, et al. sell are a mere 99 cents apiece, but I'd also realized right after we bought the ones that got pissed on that those bags are made in China.  Somehow it didn't seem particularly 'green' to buy a reusable bag that had traveled many thousands of miles. So I decided to make my own.  I thought I had some hideous upholstery/drapery fabric hiding in the stash, an inheritance from an aunt who could not resist remnant sale tables, and I was right:

The bag pattern I had said to use a piece of material 48 inches long and 22 inches wide.  This chunk of unbelievably garish fabric was 50 by 48.  Perfect.  Two bags worth.  The only other thing I needed was webbing for the handles.  That I had to actually buy from Hancock Fabrics.  End result:

The webbing was $1.79 per yard, each bag requires 3.25 yards, so instead of spending 99 cents per bag at Publix, I've now spent at least $5.82 per bag, not to mention the externals involved (e.g., the other $30 I spent at Hancock, because being unable to resist remnant tables is apparently a genetic trait) or the opportunity cost of spending an hour sewing when I could have been doing other things.

On the other hand, the sense of moral superiority I may have gained by using not just my own bags, but the Ugliest Shopping Bags on the planet is priceless.

And this is Cleo, who pees in laundry baskets and on area rugs, pillows, and shopping bags when she's feeling stressed out or unhappy:

Quilting and recycling

Nerf was nice enough to send me a photo of the jeans quilt I made for her birthday last month. I've been making quilts using recycled jeans for many years now, but this is the most complex pattern to date. Wasn't able to get a decent photo myself due to lack of floor and/or wall space. The quilt is approximately queen-size.

Old but not necessarily gold

It's been kind of an odd day here. I'd been feeling the urge to wander up the hill to the Goodwill store and browse the books section, and then maybe hit the health foods department in Family Dollar (Little Debbies, Moon Pies) but every time I started pulling myself together to amble that way clouds rolled in, ominous rumbling sounds were heard, and sheets of rain began to fall.

So I've spent most of the day reading and listening to music, thanks to Ranger Bob and Utah Savage both mentioning classic songs and groups in recent posts. They inspired me to dust off the record player and then stroll down memory lane.

Most of what I've played today consists of LPs I'd forgotten I owned, regional oddities from the late '60s like The Baroques (think they were from Milwaukee) and the Tayles (a Madison band, think their sole LP release was "Who Are These Guys"). I probably saw some of the groups live, but, as the saying goes, "if you can remember the 60s, you weren't there."

For some reason the Baroques always remind me of carnivals -- they sound a lot like the organ music that plays in the background on the midway, especially "Mary Jane" and "Rose Colored Glasses." Maybe it's the harpsichord. "Iowa, A Girl's Name," on the other hand, has lyrics and chords that seem to have been written for "F Troop." Really strange.

Although nothing has been particularly memorable, I'm not regretting dragging all this vinyl around through multiple moves over the past 30+ years. I guess all the true turkeys in the record collection got made into flower pots long ago.

Yes, we recycle

Also known as "the day The Crusher came" back in August 2006.

Checking to see if it'll fit. . .

Going. . .
Gone.
So much for the Pimp My Ride fantasy.

It is, by the way, amazing just how much old iron can be found hiding in the bushes on a U.P. farm.