7 Quick Takes (Vol 263)

Zippety Do Da it’s another Friday here at Chez Knit. You know the rules! When you are done here you need to click on the link above to be whisked, at the speed of the San Antonio Spurs approaching NBA title, over to Team Whitaker who is hosting this week.

Digging in the dirt and unearthing the blather just for you!

1.
I consider myself someone who knows a fair bit about plants and gardening. I come from a gardening tradition that is long….stretching out into the distance.

Grandma and Grandpa Pringle could make anything grow in the garden. From GLP (Grandpa) I learned that raw green beans, picked right off the plant and eaten standing in the garden, is the height of summer luxury. Their summer garden was something to behold.

And as for houseplants…..there isn’t a houseplant that won’t grow for my mother, The Meemster. Seriously, she has the golden houseplant touch. Even when the dog had eaten the plant down to a stalk she can get the thing to resurrect.

And yet, with all this knowledge in my brain and heritage…..

I somehow missed the fact that the beautiful Caladium that I bought and potted up and was faithfully tending even though it wasn’t looking like it should…..was in the wrong place. I went out and talked to it every day on my front porch and asked it why it wasn’t growing. Why was he looking so small and sickly.

Perhaps that is because a Caladium should not be in a place where it gets full sun.

Place Dope Slap here.

Oops. SO, Mr. Caladium is now on the back patio in the area where the sun shines the least.

He already looks happier.

And that just meant that I had to buy another Geranium to take his place on the front porch.

Oh darn.

2.
This will be the first full summer that we have been in Chez Knit, having moved from OCK in the middle of August of last year. And HHBL and I are trying to figure out the “cooling patterns” of the new place.

And by that I mean the ways that we can keep Chez Knit cool without having to use the A/C, which we both despise. Believe me, we will use the A/C if we have to, we are generally not long suffering fools. But if we can find a way to avoid it and have the windows open then we will do it.

But Chez Knit does not yet have some of the things that OCK did. We do not have any ceiling fans and we do not have a whole house fan.

Oh do I miss that whole house fan.

We had been fiddling with opening and closing windows and shades at certain times in the day to bring in whatever cool air that we could.

And then Wednesday we hit on the perfect solution. We happen to have two lovely big fans that were purchased after I inadvertently produced a waterfall. Most of the time I use one of these fans to dry my socks when I have a big sock washing day in the winter. But the rest of the time they were sitting idle in the basement.

I don’t like idle things.

We hit on the trick of putting one of the fans in front of the front door, pulling the cool air into the house and the other fan at the sliding door in the kitchen turned the opposite way to pull air through the house and out.

MAGIC! It even made a difference upstairs in the loft, which is where HHBL has his office.

I feel like a genius. Please don’t burst my bubble.

3.
Our tiny little neighborhood has street lights that put out about 1 million candle watts per light. And there are a bunch of those suckers. Most of our neighbors LOVE those things. Most of our neighbors are, shall we say, on the older side of life.

There is one particular street light that sits right outside the front of Chez Knit. Also in the front part of the house is our bedroom window…..about 30 feet from that 1 million candle watt powered street light.

Have I also mentioned that HHBL and I really like to have a VERY DARK bedroom at night. And have I mentioned that there is a little half moon window way up high in our bedroom that is not able to have a shade on it.

When we first moved into Chez Knit, last August, we were a bit dismayed to find that the street light outside our house lit up like Las Vegas when the sun went down. It is fine as long as you don’t actually want to have your shades and window open at night to let the breeze in. So, we figured out that if we cut a piece of cardboard and put it a certain way in the window we could at least block the light from shining on HHBL all night. It was some consolation.

Then, in October……the street light stopped working. It flickered off and on for several days and then…..blink…..it was gone. Could you hear us rejoicing?

But yesterday…..they fixed it.

Sigh. It may be time to start using the AWESOME eye mask that my SiL sent me.

4.
I am finally getting around to unpacking some of the last boxes. And I was not happy yesterday to find that something very old and very valuable had been broken by the movers. But at this point it is a bit late to try and get them to deal with it and frankly I doubt I could even get them to respond. They were singularly silent when I mentioned to them that one of their moving crew had gotten blood splatter on my walls.

The last boxes to be unpacked are china.

I am hoping for the best…….

5.
Curse my iTunes obsessiveness, which I actually blame on The Shoe Queen. I was fine with my messy, all over the place iTunes library until she said, “Oh, I always like to have album art for all my stuff.” Album artwork? You can add album artwork? You don’t have to have those annoying blank screens?

Nooooooooooooooo!

Now I cannot have any albums that do not have album artwork. Sometimes iTunes gives you that little, “I am sorry but we can’t find album artwork” pop up which then means that I have to search on Amazon. And if I cannot find it on Amazon then I am reduced to taking a picture of the art work on my iPhone and then adding it that way.

And then there are the audiobooks.

I have a subscription to Audible. I will often download the Audible books also to my iTunes library “just in case”, even though I have the Audible app on my iPod and can download them that way anytime I want. I know that Audible tells you that even if you decide to suspend your Audible account permanently that the books that you have already purchased will always be available to you……but I can tell you, because at one point I did put my Audible account on a long hiatus, that it is very hard to get at those books if your Audible account isn’t active. SO, I download to iTunes as well. I am a belt and suspenders kind of girl. Those books go into the “Books” portion of iTunes without a problem. I don’t have to fiddle with any of the settings.

It is when I download audiobooks from other sources that sometimes I have to fiddle with settings so that they are in the Books section and not in the Music section. I want all my audiobooks in the Books section. that is where they belong, with their own people. And sometimes that also means converting the files to the ACC format BEFORE I change any of the settings.

Yeah, obsessive.

Guess what I am doing today.

6.
This is the view from our street, about 50 feet down from our front door

This is not a great picture. I have a much better one…..that I cannot find at the moment much to my frustration. I show you this picture for a reason. We have what General John Reynolds would have called a “commanding view”. Sorry, I have been listening through Shelby Foote’s Civil War series and yesterday it was Gettysburg.

I digress.

Brecksville Home Days are in two weeks. There will be fireworks. And looking at this view had made me wonder if we could see the fireworks from our little hill overlooking town.

Evidently the answer, according to my neighbor Marie, is a resounding yes.

Sweet! Guess where I will be sitting on the night of June 28th. And we don’t even have to get in the car and go anywhere.

I love my little town.

7.
And as usual, Instagram