Productive garden + new apartment

It's been six weeks (and change) since we moved. We're happily settled into our closet (as I somewhat affectionately refer to our apartment) and brought the last carload when we came back on Monday. It contained, among other things... and also these...

which are the chairs and table that I decided to strip and stain shortly before we moved. Did I neglect to mention this project? Oops.

Though I'm fairly used to things going wrong at this point, pretty much everything possible went wrong with this project. In addition to my stripper chemical not working very well and it (of course) taking longer than I expected, the stain didn't take very nicely to the wood (probably due to the remaining bit of finish I couldn't remove -- refer to picture of chairs above) AND we got stuck in Texas for three extra days, which deleted my margin to finish the project.

So when we went back a month ago, I finished staining and put a first coat of polyurethane on things. (With the dry time, that was all I had time for.) This time, two more coats, then we brought it back. It's sitting on our deck to let things dry thoroughly, and so it doesn't gas us while we're sleeping.

It doesn't look as good as I'd hoped, but I don't think the average person would think it looks horrible. Except for that one chair. I'll put that in the corner where you can't see it. Also...I only did three chairs. I got so fed up that I decided to just skip the fourth. It's in the attic, halfway unfinished...whatever. Stupid project.

We finished a few other things around the house...painting the window that's been primed pink for a year, caulking some seams, painting around the front door...just little stuff. I have a few pictures (mainly flowers) to post...
Dwarf dahlias (above) and morning glories (below)
Giant sunflower + seeds
And here's Todd, holding the first apple from our tiny tree. This is his Red Delicious. I planted a Macintosh.

I also wanted to show you our new apartment. People have been asking, and this is definitely easier than emailing pictures.

So...you come up these stairs
and then turn left. In front of you is the bathroom and on the left of the little hallway is the laundry "room."

If you don't go that way, you make a u-turn and this is what it looks like...From the kitchen looking back the other way...
(That's our little bar counter in the left corner.)

Sorry that's so dark...
This is from the top of the stairs again. We have a nice little deck with a sliding glass door.
Lastly... my "office" which is a definite downgrade from my previous setup, but not that bad...
The pantry, which I LOVE...I've never had a pantry before. It's great to have a place to put stuff. (And stockpile.)
And the kitchen. Nice high windows face northeast and let in light all day. We also have nice views out the slider and to the southeast (respectively):

Updates and other news

While I'm fully aware that a sound shaming is in order for not posting for two months and a week, I do have a good reason (more on that later...no, not pregnant). First, a few garden pictures!

Below is our and our neighbors' enormous cherry tomato plants. Theirs sprawls about five solid feet, and is the thing lying on the ground in the bottom left corner of this picture. Ours is tied up to a bean teepee, and I estimate it's about eight feet tall, and still adding height every day. Needless to say, there are more cherry tomatoes than anyone can eat.

So far, from our basil, I've made and frozen three massive batches of pesto, plus made and eaten lots more than that. Fresh basil is spectacular.
Below is a picture of my still-ripening white pumpkin. Of the six seeds, four sprouted. Of those four sprouts, I kept three. Of the three plants, only one plant produced one pumpkin. Guess I will be saving the seeds and trying again...
We have collected what might be termed an obscene amount of squash. This isn't even one week's worth. I have foisted it on neighbors, visitors, everyone. I also chopped a bunch up and froze it with plans of making red sauce, lasagna and zucchini bread in January.
I also let my artichokes bloom. This picture doesn't even come close to the color of the flower. It's like a neon purple, like no flower I've ever seen before. Absolutely stunning. And the bees are obsessed with it. At any given time, there are usually at least four honeybees jammed all the way in the middle of the bloom, bee-ing around.
Sunflowers along the pool fence are just starting to bloom, and they're awesome. The honeysuckles that got more water and sun also took off, and almost all my second-round transplanted black-eyed susans made it. In the next few years, they'll fill in more and be really big and beautiful. Also planted some random climbing seeds I had lying around, and a few weeks later, morning glories!
This is an Autumn Beauty sunflower. At about eight inches in diameter, they are just lovely as cut flowers.
This is also a variety of Autumn Beauty. I like the yellow in this a little better than the brown above, but I think the first one is more striking.
Anyway, on to this news I alluded to earlier. We are moving to Bend, OR for a few years. Todd got a pretty amazing job, and so we're relocating and renting our house to some friends from church. Ironically, they're moving out of a studio apartment, and we are moving into one. After reviewing pictures, I am still not really sure how we'll be able to fit a bed, couch and media console. It's only 650 square feet (but really nice, especially the kitchen).

I took videos of how things look inside and outside (which are now a few weeks outdated)...they're kind of long.



And outside...

I am really glad that we have friends who can take care of our house while we're gone, so the shrubbies don't die and the pool doesn't turn green. While I will really miss living here, there is a lot to look forward to at our new place, so I've been focusing on that.

Probably more to come before we leave (we move into our new place on September 11), and I suppose the blog will be on hiatus for a while until we come back.

Summertime!

Sooo....lots to discuss in the garden, mainly. Yesterday, I took the afternoon to work on the raised bed I built last year next to the pool. Turned all the dirt, added some rotted manure Betsy brought from the ranch and some grass clippings and even things out. Six hours later, voila!After getting things in order, I planted some dwarf dahlias (below, LOVE the pink-orange bloom)
and some white petunias. I still need to put the drip lines back in place.

The other bed, which is in the background of the picture, is filled with hateful bermudagrass, and I am in the process of poisoning it. Once it's all good and dead, I'm hoping to transplant some of my black-eyed susan seedlings, so I can see them from my office window all summer.

I moved some of the sunflower seedlings yesterday, too. The "tiny" ones, expected to come in at 4.5 feet, are planted along the pool fences. It's a bit touch and go at the moment: two got decimated by earwigs overnight, and several others are looking pretty wilty, despite my heavy watering. It may have been too early to move them.

Also along the pool fence (above) are balloon flower seeds. Nothing's sprouted yet. I planted them a little late in the season. The purple and yellow should be a fun combo, though.

Speaking of a fun combo, how about some pool and sunshine? Thanks to the wind the past few days, there's leaves at the bottom of the pool, but it was looking pretty darn good on Sunday when I floated around for the afternoon. Come a long way since last year. Mom and Dad: please note use of hooks in the background!
Pool shack, also looking super cute with hanging baskets of red petunias (that hopefully won't get eaten by budworms this year).
The baskets hung on the fence (toward the street) are bigger, so there's petunias and blue salvia in those. I'm curious to see how the combination turns out.
I was running back across the street from the neighbors' a few days ago, and I thought to myself for the first time since I've lived here, "Hey, this place doesn't look so bad."

Perhaps you agree? In any case, it doesn't look NEAR as bad as it did a year and a half ago.
I've mastered the Photomerge Panorama option of Photoshop elements to bring you this gem. A nice picture of the back yard, which, again, doesn't look that bad. At this point, I'll take it.

Please, step into my office

Well, it's almost finished! Here's what I did this weekend...

Turns out two coats of blue was mostly enough. There are a few spots that could stand to have a third coat, but since so much of the paint is covered by furniture anyway, I decided it would be ok. I'm also going to be doing a little shuffling when the chair rail goes up, so if I decide that it really needs another coat of Midnight Dream (the paint color), I can do it then.
After painting and reattaching the baseboard (in above and below pics -- quarter round will be installed at some point)...
I swept and scrubbed the floors to clean up any stray wallpaper bits and glue. Fun fact: a little WD-40 will remove dried Kilz2 primer from a wood floor. Painted the door wall white -- it too could probably do with another coat, which I might do this afternoon.
I think the blue looks really sharp. It's very crisp and dark and gives the room a nice weight.
Weight is good, since it gets so much light. Having the walls be almost completely white (if I'd done white wainscot instead of painting) would have been too much, for me anyway. I particularly love the contrast of the blue with the stripes of the curtains and patterning of the wallpaper.
And the three shadowboxes that I made a few years ago for our previous home in Pasadena finally got to come out of storage. They're on the left, and are a PERFECT fit in this room. The top has four shells, the middle is a piece of coral, and the bottom is a sand dollar.
One more...ahhh..love it!!
Ok, enough inside. This morning, I was delighted to discover one of my white pumpkins has sprouted! (Crappy pic...)
This is one of the pots next to our front porch. This flower is called mimulus (aka monkey flower) and I saw it in Boothbay Harbor a few years ago. I took a picture, but thought I'd never be able to identify it and buy some. The Grange had them a few weeks ago, and I was SO excited. The color is unbelievable, and they're just right for the part-sun location in front.
Around back again, two of my dahlia tubers have sprouted. One's picture below...
And my sunflower seeds have also sprouted. I'll give them another week or two in the bed, then transplant to the fence behind the pool and other places they can reach their full FOURTEEN FOOT height.
This is the honeysuckle I brought with from California. I transplanted it last year next to a dead tree so that it'll grow up it and look like a honeysuckle tree eventually (and attract hoards of hummingbirds right outside my office door!). It's doing quite well.
Lastly, I got a great deal on these hanging baskets, which have little red petunia starts and blue salvia starts in them. More to come on those, eventually.