Around the hood

I love going for walks in my neighborhood.

Man with ghetto blaster: Excuse me, do you think maybe we could get coffee together sometime? You're so pretty.

Me (in work boots, hoodie, and jeans): No thank you, I'm married.

Man with ghetto blaster: Okay, got a spare cigarette?

New laces for old boots:

And the tiniest egg ever, at an impressive 30g. Not sure which hen that came from, but I sure hope they get bigger, since we don't have any half-sized people around here to cook breakfast for.

As it happened...

I didn't even get to begin the reign of plumbing terror. When I went out to buy the blade, I remembered that I had to pick up some chick starter (finely ground feed for babies, sounds like a pickup line) and should probably get the chicks better situated in case I was in for another 48 hour labor.

By the time I was finished turning the grow pen into a sort of stage-2 brooder, the mama was calling me to come. She and her partner worked beautifully together, and it turned out to be one of the most relaxed and fun births I have been to in a while! Baby H was born at 1:17am, en-caul.

Today's soundtrack for a cloudy day:


It may rain outside, but hopefully after today, no more raining in the crawlspace!

Fun with Plumbing

Pardon me while I ramble on about neglected 1950s plumbing, without a single photo of cute animals or flowers.

I had a secret plan to try to get the master bath functional again while the husband was away this week...I thought it would be such a nice surprise for him to come back and have it all working and lovely (though it will still be cramped, dated and ugly...can't win them all).

This bathroom had two problems - one, when you ran the shower it rained downstairs (seen here). It also leaked around the edge of the shower pan where the grout had crumbled. Two, the bathroom sink took about four hours to drain after you washed your hands. Sexy.

Yesterday I cleaned out the p-trap for the sink, and it is better but still draining a little slow, probably in need of augering. The shower pan got new silicone caulking all around the edge, and I replaced the nasty, broken cast iron piping directly under the shower a while ago, but it was still raining under the house.

The master bath shower and the shower on the ground floor directly below it share a drain line, and we couldn't use either of them because of this hot mess under the house.

This problem isn't as visually obvious as the other one, but where the red arrow is, the pipe has rusted out completely and detached from the pipe below. You can wiggle it back and forth, and water sprays out in a lovely 360 degree fan when you run either shower. Since you can't tell that this is a problem unless you happened to be looking into the crawl space while someone is in the shower, which I happened to do one morning while I was feeding the chickens, this could have been happening for years. I'm not thrilled with our home inspector for missing that.

Anyway, since all the pipes are rusted solidly (or not so solidly) together, the only solution is to cut away the cast iron (where the red lines are in the drawing) and replace a big section of the drain line with ABS plastic. There is a special tool for cutting cast iron pipes, and at first I was really excited about having an excuse to buy another weirdass plumbing tool, but they cost about $650 dollars...plus, reading further, I was warned that trying to use one on rusty old pipes could cause catastrophic results. Instead, I learned that I could get a special blade for an angle grinder, which I already own, and slice through that pipe like butter.

Or so I am told. Plumbing retrofits never goes that easily in my experience. Plus, I have a client going in for labor induction today, so I'm probably not going to get anything finished...but I'm off to the hardware store to buy that blade anyway. Nothing makes babies come faster like getting into some complicated, messy project entanglement, right? It would be unfair to that mama NOT to get to work on it.

Chicken Math

Folks who have chickens know how it is. Folks who don't...they may not understand how you could accidentally buy five more chickens.

Straight run, two Silver Laced Wyandottes and three New Hampshire Reds. Wanna place a bet on how many roosters I get?

I love having chickens, but I have a love-hate relationship with brooding chicks. I feel like I spend half of each day emptying shavings out of their water bowl, and they really do stink up the laundry room.

On the plus side, these guys are three weeks old already. I'm going to keep them in a couple more weeks and cool them off slowly before they move into the big grow pen outside.

Just in time for five day-old Freedom Rangers to take their place in the laundry.

Bunnymania

Let's see...today so far:

Up at 5:30am to get to LAX, then 90 miles north to Lancaster and Odyssey Ranch. Traffic was horrible. Soundtrack was awesome.



By the time I was done with my pickup there I was starving, but pressed on without stopping for fast food. After all, how can Jack in the Box compare to this?

Homemade tortilla, slow-simmered black beans, backyard eggs, homegrown avocado, and homemade salsa. I'm just such an overachiever.

The bunnies settled in while I had lunch, then they were ready for their closeup.

I haven't held a bunny since 3rd grade.

Like good little urban rabbits, Güera and Boyfriend snuggle up together in a King Cobra box.

I think they'll fit in just fine around here.

Idiocracy and the Animal Farm

Last night we watched Idiocracy, lying on the floor with the movie projected on the grand room ceiling. The cats were very enthusiastic about this entertainment. Silly, but fun.

In the corner of the backyard I like to think of as the Animal Farm, some animals are definitely more equal than others. Like these girls, who wish I would stop taking pictures and give them their damn scratch already.

I want to add a couple of rabbits to the scene, because bunnies are cute (and tasty) and rabbit poo is great for the garden. Chicken manure is really hot, so it has to be aged for a while before you can put it on plants. Before I brought home any bunnies, I had to have a place to keep them, and I wanted to do it while spending as little money as possible.

The hutch on the right was a Craigslist freebie. It needed a lot of work, but nothing I couldn't fix. On the left, a hutch built out of wood and materials I had lying around. I'd like to have one more, but the gods of free stuff haven't coughed that up for me.

Last but not least, I needed a grow pen - for young chickens who are out of the brooder but not big enough to join the big girls, or for young rabbits if I decide to breed them. This pen was made all out of leftovers from other projects and salvaged hardware, though I may have to break down and buy a little more hardware cloth to finish it.

Window restoration is proceeding, sloooooooooooooooooooowly. I am thoroughly sick of painting window frames already, and I only have about 3 dozen more windows to go!

Ashtanga Gardening

I felt so awesome from yoga last week that I did it again today! What is it they say, three weeks to make it a habit? We'll see...I'll be like this in no time, for sure.

I'm gonna stick that in my head and think of it next time I'm tempted to stop for chinese fast food after yoga.

A few days ago, some awesome doula friends and I got together at Olympic Spa to soak and enjoy each others' company for a while. I was trying to explain to my friend that though I love my martial arts and have no plans to give them up, I have to be careful what I'm doing with my body in the long term too. Old style martial arts are about warriors fighting for their survival in the short term, not about being in good shape in your old age, because you probably weren't going to live that long anyway. I think the yoga is going to help a lot with balancing that out. The pinched feeling in my sacrum is going away already, and that's worth a lot.

All right, enough ninja yoga talk. Gardening!

The front of the house used to look like this:

Though the poinsettias were pretty in December, it was a nasty snarl of things with thorns, things that dripped awful sticky sap when you tried to prune them, aggressive vines, and more things with thorns. Plus, we wanted to stucco the cinderblock wall and repair some damage to the house.

Plants removed. That's my Ford Explorer, for scale.

Our space, cleared. The husband hadn't realized that those trees were on our property, or that we had a gate there...that's how bad the bramble was.

And finally, some cute new plants to fill in the space. My focus is on mediterranean plants, herbs, edibles, low maintenence, and low water use. All of this centers around a bareroot pomegranate that looks like a bundle of sticks right now, but someday will bring us glorious fruit. Someday...