June 2010 – The Beehive

June 24, 2010

Looking a $20,000 Gift Horse in the Mouth

The other day, I was watching a video on CNN Money entitled “How Would You Spend $20,000?” Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to link to it, but if you go to CNN.com and click on the Money tab, you’ll probably see it in the video section. They asked people on the street what they would do if they had $20,000 to spend. Most of the responses were unremarkable: pay bills, pay off student loans, take a vacation, buy a new car, that sort of thing. One respondent, however, had a tough time with the question. First, he said he’d like to buy a loft, but he’d need $2 million in addition to the original $20,000. Ultimately, he couldn’t really answer because $20,000 is just “not that much.” Really? Someone drops twenty grand in your lap and you can’t figure out how to spend it because it’s not enough?

Personally, I’d probably put $5,000 towards rebuilding the transmission in Steve’s car, put some towards the little yard project we’ve been working on, then put the rest in the bank.

What would you do with $20,000?

June 22, 2010

More Yardage

We continued with our work on the front yard this past weekend. Thankfully, it was not nearly as hot as last weekend (although I did neglect to wear sunscreen on Sunday and got a bit burned!). Last weekend, we cleared out scattered rosemary bushes and white landscaping rock from the center of the yard area. This weekend, our goal was to remove the mature rosemary and white landscaping rock from the top of the slope.

The mature rosemary plants were much more of a struggle than the smaller ones we removed last week. The roots tend to grow sideways, which meant we did not have to dig terribly deep, but there were a lot of roots and some of them were very large.

Steve also somehow twisted his elbow pulling out those big plants, so he was mostly sidelined on Sunday. That meant I did the majority of the rock-shoveling and carrying it into the back. Tough work for one person!

Here’s what are neighbors are looking at now:

Next weekend we’ll be heading down to the bottom of the slope. Hopefully we can clear the last of the rock, but I’m sure the remaining mature rosemary will be an ordeal, as will the large, unidentified bush in from of the Mulberry tree, so it may take us a while to get that done.

June 21, 2010

Hallmark in Cahoots with the USPS?

Like many of you, I addressed, stamped, and mailed some Father’s Day cards last week. One in particular struck me as a bit strange because the envelope was marked “Extra Postage Required” in the stamp area. The card did not seem to me to be particularly heavy, so I broke out our kitchen scale and weighed the whole thing before I sent it. Sure enough, the card and envelope together were less than an ounce, requiring zero extra postage. It just made me wonder, what’s the deal? I am sure a lot of people would have put that extra postage on as instructed without giving it an extra thought. How many cards out there are like that?

Greeting cards are virtually the only thing I send through the U.S. Mail these days (and, much as I hate to admit it, I really don’t send many of those). Bills are paid online, and I send email instead of letters. I know the Postal Service is a real money loser at this point — could they be teamed up with greeting card companies to find a sneaky way to increase revenue? I know it’s a stupid, paranoid conspiracy theory, but it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched when you think about the way greeting card companies essentially manufactured holidays to provide themselves with business.

On a lighter note, happy belated Father’s Day to all you dads out there, especially my dad!

June 17, 2010

Allison’s New Bib

My mom busted out her sewing machine and made this clever new bib for my niece, Allison. She bought a tea towel with a fun stripe on it, cut a hole towards one end of it, and edged the hole with ribbing to slip over the baby’s head.

Voila, it’s a bib that provides way more coverage than a typical bib for messy feedings.

Allison looks super-cute in it too. Of course, she’s always cute.

June 15, 2010

Yard Work

This weekend was a hot one in our neck of the woods. That didn’t stop us from getting outside and doing some work in our front yard, though. We’ve been unhappy with the look of it since we moved in, and our neighbors are not too thrilled with the white landscaping rock the prior owner was so fond of. Here’s a look at the area we’ve decided to tackle first just as we were starting on Saturday morning.

On Saturday, we pulled out all the “volunteer” rosemary. Rosemary bushes were planted around the edge of the yard area, but they self-seeded and created little mini-bushes — and some not so mini — all over the center of the yard. The weather was great and a strong breeze kept us cool while we worked.

Sunday, we cleared a bunch of the offensive white landscaping rock from the part of the yard we cleared of rosemary the previous day. This was a real chore. I don’t think we ever came up with a really efficient way to do it. We tried rolling up the weed barrier with the rocks in it, but they spilled out the edges. Further, the prior owner didn’t use conventional weed barrier for the entire yard; in some places, flattened out bags from mulch or potting soil were used, and we even found Home Depot shopping bags in some places. We also tried using the weed barrier to move the rocks into piles, which we then shoveled into buckets, but that seemed to take a long time as well. And, we were left with this nifty pile to deal with when we were done.

So here’s what our neighbors have to look at now, until we get back to it next weekend. Probably won’t get any better, since we’ll just be pulling out the mature rosemary and removing still more rocks. But we’ve got plans, and it will eventually come together, slowly but surely.

June 8, 2010

Great Expectations?

I finished the first semester of my interior design program. I plan on posting a quick update with some of my final projects, but first, a few words on my summer class.

I’m taking computer aided drafting (AutoCAD). I have been looking forward to this class for several reasons. First, I like computers. I’m pretty handy with Photoshop, designed our wedding invitations and save-the-dates on Illustrator, and spent hours in front of PageMaker during my yearbooking days. So I’ve been interested to learn a new graphic program. Second, I like the drawings generated by hand drafting, but that gets messy and frustrating, and hard to erase when you make mistakes. Learning to do that neatly and cleanly on the computer sounds great.

Today was day two of my six week class. Yesterday was a bit slow, but that’s not entirely unexpected. First days are often spent going over the syllabus and other administrative matters. I was a little disappointed that the pace didn’t pick up a bit today. In fact, it slowed down. For this 8:00 a.m. class, the instructor did not start lecturing until nine. Because it’s a summer class and people — who voluntarily signed up for an 8:00 a.m. class — have trouble getting to school by eight. I really didn’t need an hour of lab time at the beginning of our second day of class; I was hoping to learn something new.

But it’s only day two, so I will keep an open mind and hopefully things will pick up. I still do think I will like working with AutoCAD. A number of my friends are in the class as well, so we should have some fun.

June 3, 2010June 4, 2010

Just Desserts

We have a cherry tree in our backyard. Last spring/summer, it did a whole lot of nothing. My parents had a cherry tree in their back yard when I was growing up, and it also never produced fruit, allegedly because it was the only cherry tree around an you need a second one for pollinating. I figured ours had the same problem and it would just stand there and look pretty.

Needless to say, we were a little surprised when we saw little green cherries sprouting out all over it several weeks ago. I still wasn’t convinced that they would ripen. I thought maybe they’d be like the cucumbers we tried to grow last year, which shriveled up after not being pollinated. But the cherries actually ripened!

We picked a bunch yesterday and ate them for dessert. We think they are probably Royal Anne cherries, because they still have some yellow on the outside, even though they are ripe, and the flesh on the inside is also still yellow. Rainier has a similar look as well.

Steve tells me that Royal Anne are the variety most often used to make maraschino cherries (confirmed by Wikipedia). Further research confirms that sweet cherries do need a second pollinator tree, while sour cherries do not. This should also be a pretty easy tree to maintain, as sweet cherry trees only require pruning to remove diseased or injured branches. Score!