Seasons of 2011

Ecclesiastes 3:1- "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven..."


A time to be born...

This guy is due to come December 15th (and is the impetus for the blog Christmas greeting as opposed to paper)

...and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;...
Another spring, another gardening attempt.


A time to break down...

Paul, weilding chainsaw after our giant sahuaro dropped its two largest arms on a whim.

...and a time to build up;

Story here

A time to mourn...

Our stillborn nephew

...and a time to dance...

Alan and Kaity, Oakland temple, June 25

...A time to keep, and a time to cast away...

We got to watch over 100 plecostamus (little catfish) go from eggs to independent little crawlers in our tank, but eventually had to find a better (bigger) home for 90% of them at an aquarium shop.

Other events of this year:

A's baptism in April

Bryce Canyon expedition with cousins in August (Paul's twin brother Scott shown with the kids)

Pismo Beach, a side jaunt before the wedding in June



 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

From the Christiansens

Weeklong pool party

I could do a whole blog post on the multiple skills of my husband. He's a hard-core do-it-yourself-er, and I am too, only without the muscle power or endurance.

I could also do two different blog posts on owning a pool- one extolling its good points, and one on what a pain it is. Maybe sometime in the future.

We regularly attempt projects that most people pay other people to do. Usually we learn why most people pay someone else to do the work, but in the meantime, we learn a lot and save a bundle. I wonder how our kids will remember weeks like this last one.

We had to drain our pool. The water was so old it wouldn't hold chemicals anymore, which makes for a hassle of a swim season- balancing the water every single time we wanted to use the pool. Most pool owners drain their pools more often than we do (not difficult, since we've never done it) but I can't fathom doing it more often than is totally necessary. Do you know how much water these things take?! Our pool is 12,000 gallons, and that, come to think of it, is the smallest out of anyone we compare notes with. I'm sure there are smaller pools out there, but most are bigger. I would be happy never to have a bigger pool than this one. This project only made that sentiment stronger.

Before beginning- the pool cover got stuck in this almost-open position, so we decided to start draining a day early. Below is most of the worst of the staining the pool had. Since we were draining the water anyway, we decided to do an acid wash. This picture serves as "before." The brown stains come from the minerals in the water. They don't harm anything; they just sit there and look crummy.

Below: starting to drain on day one:

As the water level fell, it was such a novelty to be able to step into the pool without getting wet! Except with temperatures still in the 90s, the water was nice, so there was plenty of getting wet.

Eventually, I let the kids just get into swimming suits. You know what a big deal it is for kids to be able to stand in the deep end- they all got to do it! This was day two. The draining was slower going than we anticipated, partly due to a malfunctioning pump. You can see above how badly stained the pool steps were.

Day three- wading depth. I put a bucket in the deep end to attempt to gauge the draining speed of the pump so we could get an estimate of when it might finish.

End of day three- all gone!

Day four: Paul cleaned up the pool for the acid wash. The kids found the pool a fun hangout for a few minutes, and Paul got artistic with the camera and the Grand Canyon of the Backyard.

 Then the fun part: Acid washing and scrubbing the entire surface of the pool. Paul decked himself out in clothes destined for the dumpster, chemical-resistant gloves, and a pro-grade aspirator because muriatic acid is nasty business.

 Don't be jealous of how we spend our Saturdays.

Probably the most dramatic example of before and after- the top step of the pool. Eesh.

Paul worked all day and evening, finishing up with the floor of the shallow end. He was a MACHINE. I was little help, and maybe you can tell why from my picture...

Then it was time to fix chipped plaster. This took several evenings and a high tolerance of fine white dust on everything. This was taken a week ago, before we left for the evening of Halloween festivities.

Then it was time to refill. Away we go...

Once we were able to turn both hoses on, the refill was more than twice as fast as the draining. After running the water all through the night, we had this:

 By about ten a.m., the pool was full and the equipment was turned on. Since it was still warm outside (in November!) and the pool was much improved after all the hard work, we went in that evening!

Above: The evening we finished up work and started the rest of the fill-up (this initial amount came a few days before the rest while we were still doing repairs). Below: Less than 24 hours later.

This is about as close to side-by side comparison as I can manage.

November 3rd is our new record for the latest swim in the season. Now the pool is closed (covered with a safety cover) for the winter, but it's nice to know that the chlorine will stay in it and we'll have a nicer pool in the spring.

Why I don't 'coupon'

I find that many of the blog posts I read are about people over-achieving in various ways. This is not one of those posts. I may make new enemies here. This is an explanation of my under-achievement as a "couponer."

(Anyone else feel sorry for English teachers these days, with nouns becoming verbs just because society wishes it?)

It never used to be so hip to clip coupons. There's a whole show about it (so I hear- never seen it- don't want to pay for cable) and every so often I'll see an article about it in the paper or in a magazine. When I do, sometimes it makes me think I should try harder if there are so many people out there saving so much money. But then one of two things happens: Either I get put off by the extreme measures these people take (dumpster diving, anyone?), or I give coupons another shot, only to learn the same lessons over and over again. This last Sunday, there was an article in our paper about the winner of the newspaper's couponing contest. It gave an example of how her system works.

The article described how some of us average Joes might go about saving money with coupons. The example was a coupon for $8 off two cosmetic products of a certain brand. Someone might buy two products with a combined price of about $14, pay around $6, and "feel pretty good about it." The winner of this couponing contest, however, approaches this deal differently. She gets FORTY of these coupons and buys EIGHTY cosmetic products. Only she gets them on sale for $2.55 each. If you do the math, the store owes her around $3 for each pair of products she buys. The article stated that with just this one deal, she is "$116 ahead."

Intriguing, but I have several problems with this.

-Where do you get forty copies of such a coupon? In the paper? Lots of serious couponers get multiple Sunday papers so they can have the coupons. I don't consider myself an environmentalist, but where do the rest of those newspapers go? And the Sunday paper costs $2 a copy. I think it's more likely that this lady gets her multiple copies online. Anyone out there buy printer ink recently? That's not free either.

-What store would have any stock left if someone came in to buy eighty of something? This lady  admits that she herself considers it in bad taste to clean out the inventory, leaving nothing for anyone else to buy. She only did it for the contest.

-Who needs eighty cosmetic products? And who has room to store this stuff?

-I haven't seen many, if any, coupons like this that don't have fine print restricting the value of the coupon to the purchase price of the item. It's uncommon to come across such a valuable coupon at all.

-It looked as if it was necessary to do multiple transactions in order to buy all this stuff. And not two or three transactions. A bunch. You would need to go to the store at 3 a.m. in order to avoid incurring the wrath of your fellow customers. And what about the poor cashier? I got in line behind someone at Wal-Mart who was ad-matching. I switched lines because she haggled over everything she was buying. When I got done waiting and then paying for my stuff, she was still in the middle of her transaction. Sometimes time and the consideration of others is more important than saving a few cents.

-I am very aware of the power of using a coupon for something that's on sale, but WHEN was the last time you saw products that average $7-8 on sale for $2.55? It used to happen. I used to capitalize. I used to get cereal, for example, for less than a dollar a box. I watch the ads. I used to watch the coupons, too, but both the sales and the coupons have really dried up recently.
Like I said, these kinds of articles make me think that maybe I should do more. It's not that we have more money than we know what to do with, making coupons not worth the time. We, like most people, could use lower prices on the things we buy. So I used to clip coupons, with varying amounts of success. But more and more, the coupons I see are either for products I don't use or for brands that are overpriced. A quick perusal of one coupon insert in the same paper as the article I've mentioned yielded the following:

-A $5-off coupon for vitamins intended for people age 50 or older. Useless.
-Good coupons for Triaminic. I have kids who get sick, so I would use this product. However, store brands are just as effective and cost way less, coupon or not. Moving on.
-Dog food- don't have a dog. Cat food- Have cats, but one of ours requires a different kind of food.
-50 cents off pasta sauce. We use that, and I could double the coupon. But it's for a brand that costs more than twice as much as what we usually buy. Plus, the coupon is for 50 cents off of TWO jars. That's what gets me. Especially with cereal coupons (cereal is PRICEY) where you have to buy three or four of something to get the (small) discount. So you wait for a sale on cereal, which may or may not come before the coupon expires. These days, it usually doesn't. I do watch.
-More drugs I either don't use or could get cheaper with a store brand
-$5 whitening toothpaste- Useless. Plain old peroxide works better and is dirt cheap.
-$2 off laundry detergent- Okay, I was planning to buy laundry soap that very day, so from the entire insert, there was one coupon that was potentially useful.

And that's how it is. So many weeks went by when I didn't see anything useful that I stopped looking. The same is true online. Even if I did find a few good ones, I'd forget to bring them to the store. Or if I did remember, I found cheaper alternatives than using the coupon. Or the coupon was for a product that was so new, the store didn't have it yet. OR! I'd successfully match coupons to products, pay the cashier, and walk out with the coupons still in my purse. There's a limit to how much I'm willing to beat myself up over these things. Especially with cranky kids in tow who need lunch NOW.

So we pack up and go on our planned shopping trip. I nearly forget my one useful coupon, but I go back in to get it. At the store, someone is totally rude to me in the parking lot, and I forget to bring the coupon into the store (I KNOW, I should put the coupon in my purse, for crying out loud, but we're in survival mode these days and efficiency is not my strong suit). We go look at the detergent. The brand on the coupon is even on sale, and I can get a 70-load bottle for $8, if I go back out to the car and get the coupon (in 100-degree heat, with a young kid, and not feeling all that great). Or I can buy our usual brand and get 80 loads for $8.

Guess where the coupon is now. Starts with recycling and ends with bin.

An Improbable Find

This is one of those times when I look back on what I was doing a week ago and how little I knew about what the next few days would bring.

 

 

Last Wednesday, I was considering calling my mom to tell her how something we'd previously discussed had turned out. I saw that she was on Facebook, so I knew she would answer the phone. She told me she had just found something rather interesting at the Goodwill.

My mom has serious thrift-store skills. She knows how to distinguish quality from junk. She seems to be able to locate anything any of us mention we need, given the time. She knows which stores yield great finds regularly and which have the best furniture, best toys, etc. She was prowling a Goodwill store in Tucson last week, and there it was- a grand piano.

 

WHAT is a grand piano doing at the thrift store???

 

That was what we had to figure out, because nice pianos are not found in thrift stores, generally speaking. My mom had never seen a piano of any kind at any thrift store. She wasn't interested in it herself, but wondered if any of her kids would want it.

 

 

We have never been in the market for a grand piano. For one thing, they cost WAY too much. For another, they're rather large and don't fit just anywhere. This is not to say I haven't drooled (not literally, that's bad for pianos!) over the grand pianos at the music store. But I had long ago accepted that such a purchase would be decades away, if it ever happened at all.

 

 

But now, there was this grand piano without the grand price tag. At first, I just assumed the piano wouldn't even fit in the house. But we already had a piano, the removal of which would free up some wall and floor space and offset the cost of a replacement.

 

 

But there was still the issue of the piano's condition, which is not a small thing. We are all well aware of the liability something can become if there are serious problems. Owning a crummy piano could be likened to owning a car that's a lemon. My dad, who has an eye for both musical instruments and woodwork, went to see the piano to give it an objective evaluation. The brand and serial number were easily visible. Using those, my husband and my parents were able to determine a few things: The piano was made by a company (Starr) that produced well-regarded instruments in Indiana in the 1800s and the first part of the 1900s. This particular piano was built in 1913, which means in about 15 months, it will officially be an antique. Of course, "antique" makes something sound valuable when all it should be called is "really, really old." With musical instruments, the designation can be very good or very bad. This piano has obviously been restored and maintained for most of its existence, because nothing about its appearance indicates its age. There are no keys missing and the keys are all level. A few key tops are chipped, but only slightly. There are no major cracks to render the soundboard useless, as determined by a friend of ours who used to service pianos.

 

 

Is it out of tune? Heck, yes. Any piano would be after being moved anyway. Is the interior immaculately clean? No way. Is the finish flawless? No. There is exterior damage in a couple of places and some small dings here and there, but I will say that its exterior looks way better than a few grand pianos I've played on stages over the years- pianos at schools and universities that get moved around a lot, but are well-maintained otherwise. So, yes, there is work to be done, but its most sour notes are on the low and high ends (the keys that don't get used as much) and it is playable as it is. Plus, we're not shy about a project! So why was the piano at Goodwill? We'll never know exactly, but the theory is that someone got stuck with someone else's estate and didn't want to bother with the necessary steps to make the piano marketable.

 

 

We thought hard about this one and decided to take a chance on it. Logistically, getting the piano from Tucson to Phoenix was a puzzle. A lot of people contributed to the effort on both ends and it turned into almost an all-day job last Saturday after all the planning. It was well after 10 p.m. when the job was finished. I didn't see how the loading went in Tucson, but I got a few pictures once the piano was taken off the truck at our house.

The front door was a big challenge.

These guys had to lift the piano once it had its legs re-attached. If you ever move a grand piano, get at LEAST five people to do it, unless you keep the company of Olympic weightlifters, in which case you MIGHT get away with three.

It's a bit surreal to walk into our living room and see it sitting there!

So that's how we came to own a grand piano.

The definition of insanity

I didn't always have a brown thumb (opposite of green thumb). I planted stuff all the time when I lived in Tucson and harvested plenty of stuff that ended up actually being edible. I don't know why I'm so compelled to even try to garden anymore after what's happened since we moved to this house.

2005
This was a "bye" season for us. We'd just moved in, I was pregnant, and we were still making sense of our rocky yard that was forested by weeds taller than our kids.

2006
Time to get serious about the garden! I cleared out a space under the fig tree, where there weren't many rocks. I bordered it with bigger rocks and got some soil amendments to mix into the native "soil." When I dumped out the store-bought dirt, I realized how huge the contrast was between the store-bought dirt and the native dirt. The black bagged dirt made the stuff in the ground look like beach sand. But I had to plant! I put the seeds into the ground, watered, etc. Stuff sprouted. It grew pretty slowly, though, that is, if a bird didn't come along and nip off the fresh leaves. I re-planted a time or two. Nothing got any bigger than a seedling, though. I figured out later that "soil" was a bit strong of a word to describe the native stuff. It was more like a fine dust, hardened into "ground" by the years of rain and not growing anything. I chalked up the wasted time and resources from the in-ground garden to experience that would lead me to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

2007-8
I visited my aunt and uncle in Davis, California. They have a HUGE garden that takes up about a third of their backyard. If our garden was that successful, I wouldn't mind the square footage myself. They seriously don't need to buy produce certain times of the year because they can grow anything they want. In 2007, I learned why. My uncle mentioned that his neighbor had dug a swimming pool that year, and even though the hole had to be six-feet-plus deep, the rich, black soil went down all the way as far as they dug. This would explain why everything that grows in Davis is twice as tall as trees elsewhere. They're so danged HAPPY in their perfect soil. Somewhere in there I realized that Phoenix soil was the opposite and I needed to use NONE of it if I wanted to grow anything. This was in the middle of my YW-leader-zealot stage, and I built a raised-bed garden as part of a personal progress project. In 2008, I even screened off the freshly planted bed with a plastic mesh to keep birds off the plants until they were big enough to tolerate leaves being bitten off.
Stuff grew, but it was an ongoing competition between us and the other creatures who inhabit our yard to see who could get to the produce first. I couldn't figure out why tomatoes were disappearing from the plants until I saw a squirrel running past the back door with something small, round, and green in its mouth. Squirrels: 1 Humans: 0
You know how some seeds say to plant in full sun? If you live in Phoenix, whenever you see that, you should think to yourself: "Full sun = Full shade." After seeking guidance on the internet about raised beds, I had read several times to make sure the garden got about six hours of sunlight a day. THEY LIE. Six minutes is plenty. As soon as the 100+ temperatures showed up, all the plants in the garden seemed to say, "I didn't sign up for this. I'm leaving." I don't think we ate anything from that particular raised bed. Except maybe some radishes. (?)

2009
OKAY, since raised beds in the sunlight don't work, how about raised beds in the shade? We moved the walls I'd constructed and most of the store-bought dirt from the first raised bed and even put a second garden together. We put them in the shade of the fig tree, right over where I first started planting. I was so sure this was going to work! We planted all kinds of things. I got little miniature sprinklers from the irrigation aisle at Home Depot and rigged up a watering system for the garden. That was kind of fun to put together. 2009 ended up being the best growing season. The plants grew quickly and we got an extra month of reasonable weather before the heat wave hit. Plenty of tomatoes started out, but I think we only got enough to mature that we used them once for hamburgers. We also had cucumbers at dinner one time, using two at once since they were small. Two cukes and a handful of small tomatoes. Don't ask me how much those were per pound. It's best not to think too hard about some things.

2010
We continued with the raised beds, since they sort of worked. But this time, stuff would sprout and not get very big. I don't think we harvested anything. That year, I finally decided that I would plant early, since "spring" could be construed as early as February in these parts, and then when the heat got too bad, gardening was over for the year. I wasn't going to fight the heat and I certainly didn't want to be out gardening in the summer. But by the time the heat set in, the garden hadn't gotten anywhere. The growing season was such a flop I thought I would try again when it cooled off in the fall for a winter garden.
I was getting the raised beds cleaned up for another feeble attempt when I realized that I couldn't even draw the bow rake through the soil. It would get caught on something. I pulled hard, and a hundred tiny, hairlike roots came with the rake. I found that the soil was completely bound up in both gardens by the roots of the fig tree. Figs are survivors. We read in the scriptures about figs growing in the Middle East where Christ lived. The Mideast is no rain forest. It's a desert, much like Phoenix. Our fig tree flourishes with no effort from us. But that means it takes what it can find. In this case, the rich, regularly-watered soil of the gardens right above the main roots was a gold mine for the tree, but the thousands of roots in the garden stole water from the vegetables and pretty much constricted the growing space. Since I didn't feel much like shoveling out both gardens and almost re-constructing them, I left them alone and the following year, the raised beds sat empty.

2011
I've come to the conclusion that there isn't an ideal spot in our yard to grow a garden. It needs to be mobile to catch some rays while the rays are friendly, and then move into the shade when it gets too hot. Enter the Potted Garden. It's been two months since we planted it. The tomato plant was the only thing that didn't grow from seed, and it started producing almost right away. We had three small green tomatoes. Then one day I noticed one tomato was turning brown from the bottom up. It also had a hole in the bottom, indicating some intrusive creature. Another tomato was also browning from the bottom. I looked at the third and largest tomato to see if it was doing the same. It wasn't, but looking under it caused the stem to snap off. The other dozens of tomato blossoms are blooming, but no fruit is coming on. (time to quit?)

It's not that Phoenix is an agricultural black hole. Our backyard neighbor grows all KINDS of stuff, IN THE GROUND, on the west (REALLY REALLY HOT) side of the yard. Over at the school, I can't help feeling inferior as I walk past the huge, happy plants, putting out veggies like crazy, when those plants are YOUNGER than ours, which are not even thinking about producing yet. And I'm not the problem either. I grew stuff at our old house, a mile and a half north of here.

I know the definition of insanity is repeating an action and expecting a different result. What if you repeatedly change what you're doing and still get the same result?