Accidents: Both Happy & Fixed

So we were unintentionally growing sunflowers in our yard. It's mostly because Szechaun really likes to watch birds. See, we thought if we sprinkled some sunflower seeds on the back patio, it would make for a more interesting show.

It didn't work. Stupid birds.

Anyway, in the progression of this experiment, some of the seeds inadvertantly got into the yard (see also: swept there out of laziness) and, soon, began to sprout like crazy. We scooped some sprouts up back in March and stuck them in a pot and waited.

A couple of months later, we got this:

Hooray! Hopefully they don't get burnt to a crisp by the Arizona sun. Mike's dad tried planting some while he was here and they, well, they're no longer with us. But if these go south, it's really okay:

They just keep on sprouting in the yard randomly. We keep the seeds in the birdbath now. Szechaun's got good eyes. She can handle it.

Oh! And as for the "Fixed Accident": You can now comment. Apparently, when we were setting this thing up, we accidentally put on a privacy setting.

Sorry about that.

What's Old is New Again.

At long last all of the bedroom furniture has been refinished and stained to match. It took 3 days but the dresser is finally finished.

This is a part of a bedroom set that has belonged to Mary's great-gandmother, grandmother, aunt & mother. Because of the finish it was considered pretty poor quality and because of many generations of chain-smokers with unruly children it was in pretty poor shape. But we dug under the surface to find something great.

I sanded off all of the old yellowed varnish, polished and sealed the old brass pulls, stained the wood a nice dark cherry red, and polyurethaned it all for a satin finish.

Here is the dresser at the start of this project. It's not as dusty as it looks.

Under the first piece I took off I found fingerprints in the dust from the past.


I then continued to take all of the pieces apart until I was just left with the skeleton of the dresser.

Underneath all that yellowing lay a nice reddish piece of wood. See below for a piece before and after sanding.

Once all the pieces had been sanded it was time to line up all the pieces in the garage to begin staining.

And then the final product.

The 7 Year Swivel Chair Project

About seven years ago, Mary spotted an old beaten up swivel chair near one of the dumpsters at K-State. The chair's seat was torn up, one of its wheels had come off, and it was generally worn but Mary saw potential in it. We took the chair home. We then broke the chair down and placed it in a box. In that box it sat for years and years until I finally decided to do something with it this past Memorial Day weekend.

I forgot to take photos of the chair before I started but you can see some of the original pieces in the photo below.

I repainted the brown metal parts, sanded and stained all the wood pieces, re-upholstered the chair and shined up all the shiny metal pieces. Now here's a bunch of it all coming together:

Who needs a rubber mallet?

Szechaun likes it!

Solar Power!!

Ah. The signs of a Desert Summer are everywhere: the over-watered green grass turning to a stiff, sickly beige. The first of the gigantic black widow spider webs. The searing, cancerous streams of sunlight onto your skin. The corpses of homeless people found rotting away under their not-so-protective blue tarps. And the constant urge for a nice, crisp glass of Sun Tea.


So began the usual and completely unfruitful search for one of those awesome glass sun tea jars with a spout that we remembered from yesteryear...And by "yesteryear" we mean "the '80's". Sadly, however, the super-icky plastic market has kidnapped the sun tea jar business and so we went home in hysterical tears.


Then! Huzzah! Like some sort of brilliant smack to the face we realized: We can make Tea in any old jar!! Duh, right? So we set about our experiment using a sun-dried tomato jar and about 4 bags of chamomile.

We left it out for about 4 hours, where it went from beige water to EXTREMELY weak iced tea.

Still delicious, but it lacked that kick that you hope for.

So the next experiment was with a little less water and 5 bags of pomegranate white tea. Mmmmm. The picture you see below is after it had been steeping for about 2 nano-seconds. We left out for a little longer (5 hours) and it was pretty awesome.

The next morning, we put out a jar of 6 bags of green tea and left it out while we were at work all day. We came home to veeeery strong, veeery bitter green tea. So we pretty much hit every level of the Sun Tea strength spectrum. Good thing we didn't have a giant glass jar of the stuff afterall, huh? Lesson learned.

Update: We discovered that the peeeerfect blend is 4 bags Chamomile, 1 bag Green and a random handful of the Peppermint Tea Leaves that Melissa got us for Christmas.

God we're dull.

Next, we're going to try steeping with fruit and herbs in there. And one with Szechaun.

She will be delicious.

But Why? WHY? WHYYYYY?!?!?!?

We originally thought to start this weblog as a way to share with our family all of the super fun projects on which we spend our time. Sort of a, "Hey, Mom! Look What I Did!!!" in electronic format. It's a way to compare beer-brewing techniques with the father-in-law or show Mom your latest experiment in horticulture...which is great, since, by the time she visits, the cat will probably have killed a large fraction of the house plants.

And, frankly, we have waaaay too many projects and hobbies and experiments and adventures. And we have waaaaaaay not enough attention span. So this is also a unique way, for our own sakes, to log and keep track of all of our burning irons. And maybe the ones that got a little too cooled down. And probably the ones that got all rusty because we left them out in the rain.

Let's face it: we may not even keep up with this weblog.

But we're sure excited about trying!!!