CarpetRipping, pt 2

Earlier in the year we ripped the carpet out of the front room (living room?). The Dear Wife and I finally had the "simultaneous days off" and "motivation" lines on our biorythyms line up so we did the hallway. The beige at the top is the carpet, the blue is the top of the carpet padding, and the brown-yellow is the underside of the carpet padding. Note the bits of padding that stuck to the floor when the padding was pulled up; those are where the floor is stained below.



This one went a lot faster as there was no furniture to move. You can see the stains where the stuck-on bits had to be scraped off. No mopping or washing done yet; only swept. Luckily there was no physical damage to the wood as was found in the front room.

hummingbirds

Found a hummingbird feeder at a garage sale for 50c. Cleaned it up, read up on making the nectar, and hung it up in the back yard. Saw the first bird (a brown female?) later that day. Just now a green one was at the feeder.

Here's a page on identification of hummingbirds in Texas.

Open house

Last week it finally got cool enough to open the house up and blow out some of the pent-up dog/human funk. The weekend was too warm for it but the windows are open now.

There are few screens on the house so we built one for a front window. This allows us to get serious airflow going through the couple of screens on the back of the house. Mmmmm.

I don't know why having the house opened up gives me so much pleasure, but it really lifts my mood. And I needed a mood lift. I'm still signing into about 40 school/isd sites a day to check for jobs but it's a desert. I feel better after my flu quarantine mid-month but I am still a bit washed out.

On the upside, I had three kids tell me I "ought to be a real teacher." :-) I told them I was trying.

Fence repair

At some point our wooden fence will need to replaced, probably with chainlink. For now we knocked out the rotted slats and replaced them with slats from Lowes.

It's not particularly pretty, but it's much sturdier and there is no danger of the dog busting out. Plus the COR aggressively issues code violations around here and I wanted to stay ahead of that.