The Stay Awake Room

We decided that one of the bedrooms needed to be an office, since Mikey will be working a lot more from home when we finally move down to The New Place. Since I had carte blanche on the wall color, I decided a nice bright yellow would be cheery. We have enjoyed the pale blue ceilings in the house in town, so I also wanted to paint the ceilings blue in the DWT for that 'I'm-still-outdoors' vibe. The road to a really, really bright hell is paved with good intentions.

Lessons learned:
1. Unsealed popcorn ceilings slurp up a lot of paint. Two gallons for this 10' x 12' room, to be exact. $40+  for one ceiling.
2. It is not possible for a normal person to paint a nice straight, clean line where a wall and a popcorn ceiling meet. Be prepared to accept less than perfection when using two different paint colors.
3. Resist that urge to go with a yellow with a tiny little bit of green in it. It will be brighter and greener than you think.
4. Bright blue ceiling + bright yellow walls = weirdly greenish room
5. Even a cow spotted window shade cannot help.

Redneck Pond Rakes and Piles of Algae

Last weekend, we decided to take a break from priming, painting and installing carpet tiles, and do somethin' fun. We started raking algae off of the big pond surface.

Here is the Chief Pond Raker Dude with his fine Redneck Pond Rake. (A regular leaf rake with a block of pink Styrofoam Velcro-ed to the fan part, and a floating rope duct taped to the handle. Mucho cheaper than a real pond rake.)

This is the pile we pulled off before our shoulders said, "No More". That stuff is surprisingly heavy.

I guess this is why it's called string algae.

We definitely gotta git us some hip waders at The Wal-Mart.

I Thought the Wind aLways Blew From the North

All my life I have visualized the nasty winter wind blowing from the north. That's just how it is in all the books I've read. So I was very surprised to find in Westcliffe, and now in Cañon City as well, that the wind seems to mostly blow from the south. This is just not right.

 

In these photos, the trees are leaning to the northeast.

OK, so maybe on this Cañon land it blows from the southwest, but still, this is not right. And judging from the degree of lean, I'd say it blows pretty stinkin' hard. This makes me think that maybe we should plant the fruit trees in the "bowls".

The "bowls" are 2 large dirtwork water runoff catchments that the state put in when they expanded the roadways in the area. In a downpour, the runoff initially created some pretty deep crevices on the land. I guess somebody complained, and the state put in these earthworks.

The bottoms of bowls are below the level of the wind, so it's protected down in there. This might be a good place to plant. The only downside is that cold winter air will sink to the bottom and have no way to get out. Those trees could freeze their little tucheses off.

 

Decisions, decisions.

Just For Fun

Maeva, William, Silva, Nuno and Simon always cheer me up and on.

Green Pond Water

Our little ponds are covered in some green yuck. I think it is string algae, but I'm not sure. The ponds are fed by a spring whose Entrance Into The Light Of Day is hidden. A crack in the large rock wall, perhaps? We were told that it runs at about 25 gallons per minute, but I have trouble believing that. At that rate of flow, I'm confused as to why the water is still enough for algae growth. Anyway, we want to harvest the algae for compost. Now, how to get it?

 This thing is a pond rake. It has a removable Styrofoam float to keep it on the surface of the water. The float can be removed if you want to drag the bottom of the pond. I have no idea what lives on the bottom of our pond, as we've never been able to see through the water. I like the rake pictured below because it has a cool name and a cool shape.

I don't know if it would work very well - I just like its sharp, pointy teeth. And even though these are small ponds, you can't just reach across the surface and get it all. I can't see buying a little boat - even a buddy boat - to get it all, so there is more thunking to be done.

No Herd of Dachshunds For Us

We took all 3 dogs with us to the double wide spread (DWS) last weekend, mostly because Hoopa and Bubba were pouting because only Mollie got to go the weekend before that. We all went for an early SniffFest Saturday morning, and many piles of flash flood debris were examined. A poorly observed trek through a dense section of cactus left Bubba with some of those tiny, fine cactus spines in his doggie armpit area, and he was scratching like a fiend with his fearsome hind claws.. At first we thought it was poison ivy, but after some thought, the cactus explanation makes the most sense. Here he is with his cool wrap when we thought it was something itchy.

Our brilliant vet, Dr. Friedly, said to take a piece of duct tape and wrap it sticky side out around your hand, and gently pull it across the affected area, with the direction of the fur. That should remove those little invisible spines. Seems to have worked - no more scratching! And no herd of short legged dogs for us.

Me and My Big Mouth

I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't NOT look at the Craig's List real estate listings for land in Colorado's  Banana Belt. I so desperately wanted to get out of town that even after we bought two 35 acre parcels of land in Westcliffe, I couldn't stop looking.

In Westcliffe, the view sucked us in initially. Well, that and the price. We thought $23,000 for 35 acres was too good to pass up. Lots of flat-ish choices for a house spot, and a nice hill to the east, and views of the Sangre De Christo Mountains that just blow your socks off. We were lucky enough to have generous friends who lent us their fifth wheel to camp in. After three years of doing nothing with the land, we decided to put up a fence around about an acre of land for the doggies to run around in, and to keep the solar panels sort of safe.

To be fair, last summer's fence experience pretty much showed us that I can't do hard physical work at 8400 feet.  We had sort of agreed that we needed to find our Escape From City Life somewhere else, but the plan was to sell the house in town and THEN start looking, not buy something else and have two mortgages.

But I found this listing for 35 acres and a house WITH PONDS. Maybe you live someplace where it rains on a regular basis, so you don't understand how enticing surface water is to us out here in the Great Dry West. Generally, you have to pay a lot of money for land with water out here, and since one of our Big Goals is to be debt free, it never occurred to us that maybe we could have water. We just weren't willing to spend that kind of money.

Listed for $240,000, this piece was WAY out of our budget, but I noticed that it wasn't selling. 500 and some days on the market. The photo of the house was terrible - shadowed and dismal looking. Still, there was water. And rocks. Really big rocks. Like having your own personal park kind of rocks. I had to keep wiping the drool off my chin.

After much hunting for money in our existing budget, Mikey declared it was possible to buy it, if they'd come down on the price. They had already lowered the price to $175,000, but that wasn't low enough for our budget. Amazingly enough, they agreed to our offer, we suspect because the bank was making repossessing noises. And so we were the proud owners of yet another 35 acre piece of land, only this one had a double wide on it that we had been in exactly once.

The owner insisted on being there for each showing - it is very difficult to properly poke around in someone's house whilst they are standing right there. Snarky comments are not fair game, and we are too polite to say, "Hey, would you mind getting the f*** out of here while we have a really good look around?"  So we bought a house neither one of us would spend the night in without a hazmat suit. And so it began...