Rabitat

Finally, after a long delay...the rabbits get their new habitat.

A couple of weeks ago I lost one bunny - she had cut her foot on something, and though I cleaned it up and doctored her well, she died a couple of days later - maybe tetanus, or some other infection? I felt really bad about it, and it upped my motivation to get the bunnies out of their slumlord hovels and into a better place.

The cage wire was the most expensive part - 20 feet of strong galvanized 1/2" x 1" wire cost about $100. The wood struts - all the blue in the photo - are furring strips, so that was about $20. Everything else was salvage - the roofing is made out of cabinet doors from dismantled built ins (have I mentioned the previous owners' extreme fondness for badly designed built in furniture?) and the sides and inner shelves from old pine 1x12" boards.

The doors were the fun part - they are also salvaged cabinet fronts, and I decided at 10pm that night that they should be fun, so I drew designs freehand and cut them out with a jigsaw. The trees are my favorite, though they took the longest. It kinda makes me want to buy a scroll saw, so that I can do better versions for the house.

Serendipitously, I was given another girl bunny a few days ago. A woman nearby who gardens in an empty lot found this rabbit hopping around in the yard of the house next door after the owners moved out and left her. So far she and Marta the flemish giant mix seem to be getting along well - they have two big sections of the rabitat with a connecting door. Charlie Boyfriend has a section to himself at the other end.

Still to build is the automatic watering system, but that will have to be another post for another day! I'm working in the midwives' office 3 days a week now, so I have a lot less time for building crazy stuff in the backyard and finding new and creative ways to injure myself.

Merry Mead

Good mead takes time. It isn't a lot of work, but you have to start with good ingredients (simple: honey, water, yeast) and find it a cool, relatively stable place to spend a few months. This is the first place I have had in LA that could meet that last requirement. My study/laboratory, on the first floor of the Northeast corner of the house, is sort of like a drafty wine cellar...so last fall I brewed up a 3 gallon batch of mead and left it sitting there until last weekend.

Honey quality definitely matters - I haven't made friends with any local beekeepers here yet, and our local health food store got bought by Lassen's and stopped carrying bulk honey, so I used Trader Joe's Mesquite honey for this batch, along with White Labs sweet mead yeast.

My mead recipe comes from my SCA days. Purists only here - no spices, fruits, or additives. Those all help if your honey isn't great, but if you've got good honey, let it shine. 3-4 pounds of honey per gallon of water for a sweet mead.

Bottling is the fun part (in addition to drinking, of course). My bottle corker was one of the first big purchases I made when I got a "real job"...hated that job, but I still have the corker. It's 3 feet tall and definitely a commitment to make space for in the kitchen, but you have to have priorities, right?

Corks go here:

Then you pull the giant lever to squeeze the cork and push it in:

And celebrate!

I ran out of bottles with a little mead left in the carboy, so I filled up a couple of mason jars to stash in the fridge for later, then had a little taste to see if it was good yet (sometimes it has to age a while in the bottles before it's really good). Before I knew it I was lying on the floor, drinking directly from the bottle filler and mumbling about Valhalla. Good stuff, that mead.

Come to think of it, that bottle corker was just about the most satisfying $200 I've ever spent. When I think of all the money I frittered away from that high paying job, because I didn't have a clue about money, I really wish I had bought the cider press too...

No Bonfire, please.

It is hard to take sexy pictures of bathrooms, so I'm not sure if these pictures express how awesomely happy I am with this project.

Vanity, now with open base that makes the bathroom feel much bigger.

Floor, all clean and shiny and cute, with zero linoleum.

And of course, awesome vintage wallpaper. The photo can't even capture the 50's glam of this ridiculous green-floral-on-metallic-silver ridiculousness. The ceiling is pure silver, because of course we wouldn't want to go too far. The husband thinks it's hideous, but I say he's touching that wallpaper over my dead body. I also say that he can't have his disco ball back.

Like that story about the lily...

Last week I replaced the faucet in our front bathroom. The old one was cool and brass and oddly phallic looking, which was a plus, but it was leaking like crazy and not repairable. Cue new faucet, which looks pretty nifty on the (pre-existing) real marble countertop after a good polish:

but then the new faucet and shiny marble made the crummy old water-damaged vanity it was resting on look bad, so I had to rip that out and build a new one. While that was happening, I decided to investigate the peeling linoleum, and found cute little hex tiles underneath:

Turns out those little tiles are also Carrera marble. Who on earth would glue crappy 80's linoleum to marble tile? I like to think it was a time traveller from the future who wanted us to be able to buy the house cheap one day. The husband was away on business trips, so there was no one to stop me from going manic and chipping away all the linoleum and adhesives. There were some friends visiting, so they got Tom Sawyered into helping...or at least one of them, who has my kind of OCD, was helping, while the other one lounged in the bathtub in his jammies drinking cocktails and telling us stories.

Seems like a gameboard for some dystopic future version of Settlers of Catan, doesn't it?

Now the floor has been cleaned, minor earthquake damage repaired, and polished. The new vanity is being stained out in the garage, and the whole thing should be put back together again in a couple of days. As far as costs go, this project was cash cheap and labor spendy, and that's the way I like it. New Delta faucet @ $128 on Amazon, wood for the vanity @ $60 from Home Depot, and about $20 worth of adhesive stripper.

Today

It just got to full dark, and there are firecrackers and sirens going off in the neighborhood. Hard to tell if these are related - we're in such a multicultural place that there's always someone celebrating the independence of somebody from something. The intersection of Thai Town and Little Armenia is a strange conjunction.

Today I babysat a 14 month old for ten hours, as an emergency backup sitter. She was one of my doula babies, and it has been such a pleasure to see her grow (and she still throws herself at the world with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm she was born with). I tried to take a picture, but my camera wasn't fast enough for her and then she started chewing on my phone. I managed to keep her from eating more than a reasonable amount of dirt and we made it through the day with only one major cheerio-flinging meltdown.

Back at home, I'm drinking the results of my first homebrew experience. It was meant to turn out like Fat Tire, but it ended up being darker like a Newcastle, but much more complicated. Definitely a beer-drinker's beer, and I'm loving them. I'm already thinking about the next batch, but trying to take some time off, go easier on myself, and get enough sleep for a change! I signed off caffeine for a few days and I'm hoping that will help me get my groove back, or at least make the coffee start working again when I go back to it.

Termite Farm

Kind of amazing, but mostly creepy. The house was tented before we moved in, so nothing's alive in here. The wood is so gone that I was able to pull it out with my hands.

Lucky for me that they didn't get into the structural supports yet, so I'm replacing the framing around this basement/storage area and building new doors for it.

Cute baby animals you won't see around here

My friends keep asking me what animals I'm going to bring home next, since I seem to have this whole farm thing going on in the backyard. Other than chickens who come and go, and rabbits who should soon be multiplying like rabbits, I think I'm done.

There aren't really any other animals I'm interested in that are suited to city life and can tolerate the kind of schedule I keep! As a doula, I go to about two births a month that can last 24 hours or more, and when I start attending births as an apprentice midwife, I'll be doing that once or twice a week.

It will be hard enough to keep up with the ones I've got, along with a cat who is crying for love all the time and would like to spend several hours a day snuggled in a baby sling, and a husband who thinks if there's nothing to eat if there isn't a big haunch of meat in the fridge, and a pesky mailman who keeps dropping off little pieces of paper that demand my attention every day...

Along with remembering to water the tomatoes and veggies, keep the weeds at bay, and taking time to take care of myself at least as well as I care for my clients and livestock...as well as making time to brew beer and drink beer...how do people do it?