It's almost summer..

.. and that means it's almost time for sitting on the front porch in the late evening with a good book. And, let me tell you, this year, I have quite the line up and I can't wait!

At the moment, I'm getting to the tail end of Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. It's an interesting little reconstruction of the 1856 cholera epidemic in London's Soho neighborhood, centering specifically on the pump at Broad Street. Johnson follows two "amateur" public health detectives - John Snow, London's premiere anesthesiologist, and Reverand Henry Whitehead - as they work under the haze of the miasmatist theory (which states that disease is spread through noxious air, in a nutshell) to pioneer the theory that cholera is actually waterborne. The book contains a hefty collection of footnotes, but they're not marked in the text, so I haven't been keeping up on them to know what is actual fact or based on the writings of those mentioned and what is conjecture. All the same, it's enough of a "story", instead of a pure factual account of the events, that's mostly held my interest. It also likely helps that I have an inclination toward public health and the findings of Snow & Whitehead (and a fair number of their contemporaries, like the guy whose name I can't recall at the moment who engineered London's sewers so they wouldn't dump raw sewage into the Thames) were more or less the first real push toward modern public health.

Up next will be either Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, or Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones, both of which were gifts from my dear friend Kim. She recently read both of them and they immediately caught my attention. Much to my surprise when I mentioned that I wanted to pick them up in conversation with her, she popped right over to Amazon and had them sent to me! The anticipation of both of them has almost been enough to make me be unfaithful to Ghost Map, but so far I'm holding out.

I also have a couple "young adult" books in the stack - Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce and Coraline (warning - Flash-heavy site) by Neil Gaiman. I read Trickster's Choice earlier this spring after picking up both books when our local Waldenbooks went out of business and while they're written a little simply for my usual taste, the plot is still very engaging and I enjoyed it. Coraline is has been on my nightstand for awhile, mostly because I'm curious about Neil Gaiman as a writer for children. I simply love his novels - American Gods especially - and the Sandman series of graphic novels, but both tend to be a little grittier than I think might be suitable for kids, so I'm curious to see how he tones it down without losing the intensity. I like to know what young adult literature is out there, both to know which authors are good authors for when we buy books for our niblings, but also to know what the niblings might be finding on their own.

The last two, at least so far, are a couple that have been around for a couple years and spent a fair amount of time in the spotlight - Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. While these both caught my attention at the time they were the latest hot read, neither of them captured it enough to make me run out and get them right then. But in talking to bibliophiles who've read them, I've gotten more intrigued about them, so they've been acquired (both through used book stores in paperback) and added to the stack on the night stand.

So.. any other suggestions? What are you looking forward to reading this summer?

Saturday morning in the backyard..

We have a nesting pair of cardinals in our neighborhood that appear to come back each year (or at least, we have at least one pair every year, even if it's not the same ones). My mom suggested that we put out a tray feeder with safflower in it because, unlike black oil sunflower seeds, they won't try to seed in our lawn and the squirrels don't like it, but the birds do. Especially the cardinals (you'll have to click the pictures to make them big enough to really see - it's the male in both, and possibly a juvenile at that; in the first he's in the apple tree and in the second he's in the shadows on the ground).



And the doves.



The finches, on the other hand, at least the goldfinches, seem to prefer the shelled sunflower seeds in the upright feeder. The purple finches will eat either, though.

We've also had several dozen juncoes (I'm not sure if that's spelled properly) the last couple of weeks - little black and grey guys that will sometimes eat from the platform feeder, but more often pick stuff other birds have spilled on the ground.

Wilcoxon has a hat..

Okay, so really it's the start of my next pair of socks - just a plain stockinette foot so far, but my first every toe up sock. I used the Magic Cast On, which took me a bit to wrap my head around, but now that I have it, I have it, you know? I looked for patterns to use for the foot and decided that cables would get lost in the color changes and lace would be too busy, so this pair will pr'bly just be straight stockinette with maybe a ribbed ankle. I've wanted to learn to do toe-up socks for awhile because I never seem to make the ankles long enough to wear comfortably under boots when I do them top down.

Unfortunately, now I need to go practice my drum for a while. We have a sort of big performance next week and it'll be my first time performing all four of our pieces. Two of them I'm really comfortable with, the third I'm mostly set for, but the fourth I manage to get lost in the middle of almost every time. :/

Stairs.

Before:



This is the best shot I have of the stairs before we started doing any remodeling. This is actually from the day we closed on the house and I wasn't really focused on getting great shots of the stairs from the top, but you can at least sort of see what they had in for carpet on the stairs.

After:



The left shot is the three steps from the landing to the upstairs hall; the middle is the main staircase from the top; the right is the main staircase from the bottom. Folks who make carpet runners for stairs are tricksy - see how the pattern lines up on each step? It's kind of neat, but totally unplanned on our part!

And this is what Jali thinks of all this remodeling nonsense:

A quickie before moving on to other things..

The pansy Jaywalkers are finished!



They're.. well, not my favorite socks. :/ Even though I knit the ribbing on needles a size smaller than the leg, the ribbing is loose and the leg is still a bit snug at the top, due to my shapely calves. The foot is a bit loose as well, because the stockinette for the sole should also likely have been done on a smaller needle size but switching between two different sized needles for each round would have driven me to distraction. *shrug* I'll wear them, I just won't likely make another pair.

In other areas of productivity, we've been back at the remodeling this weekend. Dad came to help us finish hanging the rest of the drywall:



That's Dad hamming it up as he paused before mudding the last corner so I could take the picture. *smile* You may also remember that there was a heating vent over the large hole in the wall on the right that was painted that lovely (*choke*) green; that was picked up this morning, along with the hardware from the door, by a man who lives just outside of town who does sandblasting. We should get them back all nice and clean later this week. We won't be painting them. Ever.

Hanging the rest of the drywall also meant that I could dig the door out from under the tarp (where it had been stored with the drywall to keep it from getting rained on - really an extra cautious step since it takes a very hard blowing wind to get rain back to the porch wall!). Now, before you look at the next set of pictures, remember that this door had been painted over completely at least four times, on top of a coat of varnish...



The worst part, not surprisingly, were the bits around the panels - they're rounded, or concave or however you describe them; the paint stripped out pretty clean thanks to the varnish underneath, but getting the varnish out required quite a bit of hand detail sanding and at least an entire pack of medium grain sandpaper. It looks infinitely better, but in truth, we still need to strip the varnish off the other side. :(

In a fit of.. something.. not quite sure what.. we also decided that it was time to make the stairs not quite so squeaky. At the moment, each and every stair creaks when you step on it. And this morning, there were rectangles of what used to be an off-white, rather thick nap carpet on each step that was *impossible* to clean - the vacuum couldn't quite get to the back corners, it was nearly impossible to clean the area up to the edge of the carpet without a toothbrush, etc. So the first step was to rip out all the little carpet pieces. Fortunately, they weren't glued down, just nailed, so while dad was mudding corners upstairs, I pulled nails out of the stairs, swept and mopped:



They're still rough - they really need to be properly refinished, but that's a bigger project than we're ready to undertake at the moment, so we're doing what we can with the knowledge that we'll need to undo it at some later time to do it all properly.

Tomorrow, Jack will nail the steps all down again, which dad tells us should stop the squeaking. Once that's done, we'll put in the carpet runner I picked up this evening:



(You can really see how bad the stairs are in this shot.. *cringe*) I think it will look really nice with the woodwork, but it does somewhat limit our options for painting the wall in the stairwell. *shrug*

Now with 100% more knitting pictures.

Okay, so I'm still recovering from last week and it's already Thursday (! How did that happen?!). That's awfully pathetic. *sigh*

Since I showed you the picture of the too-small-Jaywalker, I figured I owed you pictures of the right sized ones:



The color is a smidge off in this, but you can see that they no longer pool the way I didn't like in the ankle. They do in the foot, but I'm strangely okay with that. *shrug* I have a couple rounds left to finish up on the toe of the second one and then they'll be finished. I'm really not in much of a knitting mood these days, though, so I might just switch to spinning for awhile (at least assuming the remodeling hasn't left my hands too rough to work with roving.. hrm..)

There might have been more.. but I seem to have forgotten what it might have been. Oh well!

A different type of fiber..

Specifically, fiberglass.

This is how our upstairs bathroom looked Wednesday (all pictures are clickable thumbnails; click them to get a bigger version):



You can see that we've already started ripping up the linoleum flooring, and that we've removed the sliding glass shower doors, but otherwise, very little has changed. Yet. (Yes, we had lovely hardwood floors throughout the upstairs.. lovely hardwood floors that someone decided to cover with linoleum. Poorly, at that.) Note the absolutely atrocious paint - that's some brand of aqua green and it's the same as the color I'm trying to eradicate from my kitchen. What you can't see in the picture is that they also painted the entire door a combination of this aqua and white - an entire, old, farmhouse door with four recessed panels. The most egregious part of this bathroom, however, isn't clearly visible from the door.



Those are two shots of the plumbing nightmare that Dumba$$ Do-It-Yourselfer who decided that a 5x8 foot bathroom needed a shower concocted. You'll notice in the second shot, which was taken with the camera resting on the floor of the bathroom, that the copper pipes come up above the level of the floor. Presumably, this was done to allow the pipe to travel over a floor joist (though we're not quite sure why that was necessary at all) rather than acquiring the tools to route the pipe through the floor joist. To cover this unsightly mess, said DDIY built a shoddy "box" out of 2x4 and plywood that created a still unsightly and unstable step up at the back of the bathroom. Also note that there's a sewer trap that's just barely visible in the second picture that also comes up through the floor boards. This trap was installed for the shower and connects to the toilet sewer drain.

We decided some time ago that there is no need for this house to have two full bathrooms (or rather, 1 and 3/4 bathrooms), especially given the terror that was the upstairs bathroom. We've speculated that this bathroom may at one time have been the only bathroom in the house and that there may have been a small-ish clawfoot tub where the shower was installed. However, the owner prior to us had an addition put on the first floor that consisted of a large full bathroom and a back entry/laundry room, so there's no longer a need for a full bathroom upstairs (and we've never used the shower, not least because the drain in the floor was set 1/2 an inch too high so it wouldn't drain properly). The first order of business, then, was to remove the damned shower:



That's my dad - who is really quite an accomplished carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc. This is at least his fourth bathroom remodel - he did the bathroom in my parent's home some twenty years ago and has more recently constructed and/or remodeled both bathrooms in my sister's house extensively. We hope this will be his last bathroom remodel, but there are no guarantees!

At any rate, you can see pretty clearly the mess they made in installing this shower. To begin with, the room simply isn't big enough, so in order to brace the back wall of the shower, they had to install a piece of 3/4 inch plywood that covers most of the window. They then proceeded to epoxy the shower surround to the plywood and the adjacent wall. We had to utterly destroy the surround to get it out, but both glass doors were salvageable.

We removed all the trim in the room because the better part of it needed to be replaced anyway; they cut through the window sill to install the shower, so we need to completely reconstruct the trim around the window. We didn't think it was worth stripping the paint off the 6 inch kick board, or the door trim, so we'll be replacing it all with something likely smaller and pr'bly more modern (for better or for worse) once the rest of the room is finished. In so doing, though, we found that the lumber for the trim in this room (and likely the whole house) was supplied by H.P. Nelson & Sons, Caledonia, MN:



Up next, we wanted to move the vanity. We're almost 100% certain that the vanity has been in the front corner of the bathroom since the house was built because they worked the lathe-and-plaster around the drain and the water pipes. However, we wanted more counter space in the bathroom and without a tub or shower by the window, there's plenty of room to put in a 4 foot vanity and still leave adequate space around the heating vent. So we moved the vanity and sink over by the window. (By the by, if anyone knows someone in the SE MN/SW WI/NE IA area who wants a 30 inch wide by 22 inch deep bathroom vanity and sink, have them contact me.)

Because the shower was already plumbed (albeit poorly), we didn't have to run new water pipes up to the bathroom; we just had to fix the ones for the shower and route them properly through the floor. (We also capped the water pipes and drain for the old sink.) We opted to move the only outlet in the room from the front corner to the back corner so it would be closer to the new vanity, and to remove the built in medicine cabinet that was above the old vanity.



The plumbing and electric work took dad the better part of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In the meantime, I stripped the paint and old varnish off the door (no pictures - it's out on the porch under a tarp with the remaining drywall at the moment), which involved no small amount of detail sanding. Sometime after dinner last night, though, we were able to lay the first concrete board for the new floor:



You can also just barely see the new outlet in this shot, as well as the fully unobstructed window and the mess of the wall left after we removed the shower. The wire that you see along the back wall is actually our phone line, which was glued in behind the shower and tacked to the kickboard to run through the room into the den, which is the next room over on the right.

This morning, we laid the rest of the concrete board for the floor and hung the drywall on the left hand wall:




Dad will be coming back next weekend to help us finish hanging the drywall (he has a small bit of plumbing work left, too: the old sink drain is capped, but sticks out too far from the wall, so he needs to open up the wall and remove the elbow just inside to put the cap inside the wall), after which we'll prime and paint the room (we picked up a lovely lavender paint) and then lay down ceramic floor tile (a matte grey that looks like chiseled rock) over the next few weeks. (We'll put the toilet back in after next weekend so we can use it in the interim; not that it's necessary, just nice in the middle of the night!) Dad will be back in early May, at which point we expect to finish the last bit of floor tiling (some of the tiles will need to be cut to go around the toilet and the plumbing for the new sink and we're not quite up to that job without supervision!) and install the vanity & trim.

All in all, it's been a very productive and moderately exhausting week, especially as all of this remodeling fell immediately on the heels of a work-related trip to South Carolina for three days. That said, I'm very, very pleased to have this project started and well on it's way and can't wait to get the rest of the dry wall hung so we can start the painting and tiling in earnest.

In brief..

I ran out of yarn with 6 and a half rows to go to finish the toe of my first Jaywalker. This happened while I was on a plane from Minneapolis to Detroit, so I could really maneuver so that I could try the sock on to see if it would be okay to just rip back and start the toe decreases a repeat or two earlier. Now that I'm settled into my hotel room, though, I definitely think that's in order.. the sock is.. boxy at the toe now, so decreasing earlier, even if I end up decreasing more in the long run (the pattern says to kitchener the remaining 28 stiches.. way to boxy for my comfort in shoes) sounds like a good plan. I'm a little torn, though.. going up a needle size definitely fixed the issue with the socks being too tight, but I think they're also now just a tad too big. *sigh*

My other option is to start a different pair with the Lorna's Laces (Barb - it's the Bucks Bar colorway which is a sort of pale blue/green/pink/beige one) I brought, but I sort of want to finish the Jaywalkers. We'll see.

Sorry about the lack of photos.. I decided that I didn't want to try to figure out how to get the digital camera into my carry on safely, so it stayed home.

I thought there was more of this post but it seems to have wandered away. *shrug*

If only all things were this easy to undo..

My husband had oral surgery on Tuesday. It was not terrible, but it was a bit more invasive than your typical tooth extraction. I'll spare you the details of the surgery and instead show you what I started to occupy myself while waiting:



Yup, it's a Jaywalker done in KnitPicks Memories in the Pansy colorway. It's a quick little pattern, easy to memorize, and therefore just about perfect for waiting rooms. I have to admit,though, that I wasn't thrilled with the striping - I didn't like that the colors *always& pooled in pairs, so that the black and dark purple were always striping and the yellow and magenta were always striping - so I wasn't too terribly upset to discover that the sock was much to tight when knit on US 1 needles.



So I ripped it out and started over, doing the ribbing on US 1s and then switching to US 2s for the chevron pattern. So far, I like it much better - the striping seems to be more mixed up and it's definitely not as dense as the first time.

This will likely be my plane knitting for my trip to South Carolina this weekend, but I'm also bringing some newly acquired Lorna's Laces (my first time ever using this yarn!) just in case I finish this pair before I get home.

PSA: CALL CONGRESS TODAY IN SUPPORT OF SASP FUNDING FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008!

Representatives Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) are circulating a "Dear Colleague" letter that is intended to demonstrate to House Appropriators how important the Sexual Assault Service Program (SASP) is and to request full funding for the program in Fiscal Year 2008. Dear Colleague letters are generally initiated by two Members of Congress (usually a democrat and a republican). These letters are sent to each Congressperson to ask for their signature to show support for funding a particular program or to gather support for pending legislation.

We need your help to get as many members of Congress as possible to sign on to this letter to show that SASP is an important program to all communities across the country. The deadline is this Friday, March 16. In 2006, 110 representatives signed a Dear Colleague in support of SASP funding for Fiscal Year 2007. It's crucial that we show the same level of support for SASP in 2008.

Background: The Sexual Assault Services Program (SASP) was authorized by the Violence Against Women Act of 2005. SASP is the first federal program to provide a direct and dedicated funding stream for services to victims by rape crisis centers and other sexual assault organizations. SASP funding is also directed to Native American tribes as well as culturally-specific organizations to better reach and serve victims in communities that have been historically underserved. In addition, SASP makes resources available to state, territory, and tribal sexual assault coalitions who work to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of local programs. For more information on SASP, visit the National Center for Victims of Crime website.

Please call your representative today to ask him or her to sign onto the Baldwin/McCotter Dear Colleague letter in support of SASP. Congressional staffers who have questions or want to sign on can contact Elizabeth Pika in Rep. Baldwin's office at 202) 225-2906. If you don't know how to reach your representative go to www.house.gov or call the Capitol switchboard at 202.224.3121, and they will connect you.

If you have any questions, please contact Ilse Knecht, Deputy Director, Public Policy at 703-732-2446 or iknecht@ncvc.org.

Current signatures include:
1. Tammy Baldwin
2. Thaddeus McCotter
3. Dennis Moore
4. Rick Boucher
5. Neil Abercrombie
6. Jim Costa
7. Carolyn McCarthy
8. Todd Russell Platts
9. Luis G. Fortuno
10. Elijah Cummings
11. Howard Berman
12. Mike Michaud
13. Dianna DeGette
14. George Miller
15. Jim Langevin
16. Michael E. Capuano
17. Stephanie Herseth

[Note: We are still uncertain about the Fiscal Year 2007 funding levels for SASP. Because Congress passed a continuing resolution for the whole of 2007 for all agencies and did not direct how federal agencies are to spend those dollars, federal agencies are still sorting out how they will spend those funds].

{All above text excerpted from an email message forwarded by the staff of Houston County Women's Resources.}