Homebrew!

Last year I decided that I was going to learn to make beer, so my lovely supportive husband, who doesn't even drink much of the stuff, bought me a bottle capper for my birthday. It has been sitting around for a few months, but I'm finally getting all the stuff together for my first batch.

Yesterday I was in the vicinity of Eagle Rock Home Brewing Supply, so I picked up a new primary fermenter (a glorified food-grade plastic bucket) and all the ingredients to make a batch of Amber Ale. They have a pretty nice system there; they sell "kits", which means one of the employees measures out all your ingredients and puts them in a shopping bag with your recipe. This one will be a partial grain brew, with three kinds of hops! Fancy. I hear chickens really like the spent grain.

I can't start the batch until I have bottles, though. I could buy new ones, but I hear they come free with beer...

Today

Today's tasks: reglaze four windows, and clear out enough space in the poinsettia bramble to plant a pomegranate tree. Should be easy, right?

Reglazing windows isn't that bad. These are the old style wood windows with multiple panes. I had the glass cut at Orchard Supply on New Year's day, and I have all the little metal points and putty before. I've only done this once before (for a window we broke shortly after moving in here) but this is the kind of job where you and a professional can get the same result...the professional would just get it done a whole lot faster.

Clearing out space for the pomegranate tree should be fun. The poinsettia and blue plumbago have grown into an amazing snarl that fully encompasses several rosebushes, datura, a sago palm, a monkey puzzle tree, and I think there's an Italian Cypress back there too. They are all set in front of a lovely bare cinder-block wall. The plan is to cut everything back hard, paint the wall, then plant one pomegranate and one other small-variety fruit tree. The palm tree is going to be annihilated. The poinsettias will be kept, just not at there current 20' x 30' driveway-eating size. Datura...not sure. They're pretty, but I'd rather be growing food than poison.

We razed a lot of bramble last night, and it was fascinating to see all the creatures we displaced coming out in layers...first the crickets, then the cockroaches, then the spiders, and last of all, one giant alligator lizard who was living in the heart of the bush, feasting on all the above. We cheered him on as he slipped over the wall into the neighbor's shrubs to his new life.

The Old Year and the New

We moved into our current home in December 2010, so 2011 was our first real, whole year here. The house is a sprawling, rambling fixer - every room has problems that need to be taken care of, the whole thing needs painting inside and out, and out of 4.5 bathrooms (really - I never imagined myself having such a ridiculous excess) the only one that has a working shower is as far as possible from my bedroom. I thought I would get a lot more done on the house last year, but I'm always overly optimistic about how fast projects will go (I also haven't really, truly internalized that this house is 4 times the size of our last project house that we fixed up in one year. 4 years is a much more reasonable).

That being said, here's the goal list for this year!

1. Garden
I was a bit disappointed with the backyard when we moved in. It is really, really shady, and small, so there isn't much veggie gardening going on back there. On the plus side, the chickens love the shade, and so will the rabbits, and all that shade is generated by a massive avocado tree that rains avocados on us faster than we can eat them. My hair is getting shiny. We have the fattest, most glossy squirrels I've ever seen. And avocados are expensive, and usually imported from places that use freaky pesticides, so having organic ones falling from the sky is awesome. I also finally built a chicken coop that I'm really happy with, and that holds the right number of birds to keep us in eggs.

Things I want to improve: I need to bust up some concrete on the sunny side of the house, where our driveway is, so I can plant some real tomatoes instead of stunted little things in pots. I want to add hutches for rabbits to the backyard. I want to rip out the ugly, funky plantings in the front yard and replace them with functional and low maintenance things like rosemary and lavendar.


2. Master Bathroom
I'd really like to be able to take a shower in there. The whole bathroom is slated for a redo further down the road to make it sexy, but for now I'll settle for not having it rain downstairs if you turn the taps on. Unclogging the sink would probably be good too.

3. Exterior
This is a big job we started at last year, but still have tons of work left. Previous owners of the house had several coats of spray stucco applied, without prepping the surfaces properly. It is peeling off in big sheets and looks horrible, and all the pretty detailing on the house is lost under the blobby stucco. We are slowly trying to restore it to glory, so that we won't be the ugly house on the street forever.

4. Drive less
I'm doing pretty well on this one. One of the reasons we picked this place was the walkable neighborhood and subway access, and I've been using both a lot. Today on my walk back from a lunch date, I found a huge bag of day-old bread on the sidewalk in front of a shop, so the chickens got free forage too! They seem to be healthy and free of disease now, though after I've dealt with the rooster problem I'll be down to a dozen hens again.

I keep thinking about buying one of those folding shopping carts (all the little old ladies and hobos around here have them) to make grocery shopping on foot easier, but I haven't found one that feels sturdy and is tall enough that I'm not hunching down for the handle.

I'm sure there will be lots of other projects along the way, but those are things on my mind for the moment. Good luck on all your projects, and have a fruitful new year. Watch out for falling avocados, they really hurt.

Poinsettia in their natural habitat...

...my front yard.

This bush is taller than me, and the flowers are wilder and tougher looking than they come at the flower shops, where these probably came from some decades ago. Must be all that tender loving care they get around here from me.

I'm still feeling crappy - having this cold over Christmas when I couldn't relax and get well has kicked my butt. We lost one more chicken, but the others seem to be doing a lot better. And no, I still haven't fixed that shower.

sick day

Somewhere between the husband's company party Friday night, the Yule party at the Green Man on Saturday afternoon and the Penthouse Pet of the Year party on Saturday night, I started to feel that tickle of a cold coming on, but I powered through it all anyway. I mean, come on...someday when I no longer live in LA I'd be kicking myself if I passed stuff like that up. Culture Diving is my favorite sport.

Anyway, the guy playing Father Yule at the pagan party had to leave early for another gig playing Santa at the Playboy Mansion, and I took off to clean up and dress up to look like someone who ought to be on the guest list at the Roxbury
. We sipped some free cocktails, watched the flock of cute little Penthouse models run around for a while, then walked home. I love my neighborhood.

Sunday I stayed in jammies and spent the day reading bad novels and drinking hot toddies, and I feel like doing the same today, but this holiday gift just ain't gonna sew itself, and I'm running out of time. Feeling grateful for small gifts, like happening to have two spools of thread in the right color so that I don't have to leave the house. Wish me speed and luck, and the same to you in whatever giftmaking you are indulging in.

Stormy Weather

The chicken-lighting experiment is on hold for a while. The entire flock has come down with some sort of nasty respiratory illness, and I lost three of them in three days earlier this week. This is what I get for taking in a stray!

I sent one of the deceased off to UC Davis for testing...they have an awesome free service to test backyard poultry and find out what killed them. Betty (one of several production reds who are all named Betty because I can't tell them apart) seems to have died of a bacterial infection, though I'm still waiting on further testing to find out exactly what. A chicken carcass, double bagged with frozen gelpacks and newspaper insulation, has to be the strangest thing I've ever sent via UPS.

The rest of the flock is on antibiotics and extra vitamins, along with an intense coop-cleaning regimen, and I'm hoping they will pull through. Since I won't eat the eggs while they are on medication, I shut off the light timer to get them some extra rest. I'm still getting about one egg a day and boy I hate throwing them in the compost.

On the brighter side, I'm getting ready for the holidays and making a few presents. I love Christmas/Solstice/whatever-mas, with all the parties and singing and decorations. We've got the tree up, stockings hung, and the mannequins who watch over our living room are dressed up like Christmas elves with ornament bandoliers. One of the gifts I made is the feltboard playset above for one of my cousin's children...hopefully they have as much fun with it as I did.

The Rust Age

This is what I found when I opened up the damp, crumbling paneling and plaster (because I'm sure you're all dying to know) -

I think I see where the problem is.