Our dishwasher started leaking last winter.  Since we were planning to remodel the kitchen, we decided to stop using the thing and wash the dishes by hand.  Things don’t happen that quickly around here, though, so after 9 months or so of hand washing the dishes and no concrete plans to remodel the kitchen, we went and bought a cheap dishwasher yesterday at Home Depot.  Okay, so I’m not a professional installer or anything, but I’ve done this before.  Couple hour job, right?

Doing your own home improvement is cost effective only if you don’t take your time into account.  This particular project took almost a full day, what with an electrical problem (bad circuit breaker) and several trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot to get parts.  Among other problems, the supply and drain lines on the new dishwasher didn’t match my plumbing fittings.  Yes, I should have checked that before I went the first time.  You’d think I’d have learned by now that new appliances and fixtures don’t “just work” in my 25-year-old house.  I always have to work around some problem or another.

We have these large windows on the north side of the house that apparently reflect enough of the sky and the overhanging oak tree to fool the occasional bird into trying to fly through them.  This seems to happen much more often if we open the blinds on the inside.  We had another victim today, right after we got back from the movie (Men In Black II—go see it if you liked the original), and Debra went outside to check on it.  It was stunned, but strong enough to sit on Debra’s hand.  She held it for five minutes or so, until it took off and sat in the oak tree for a while.  We came out to check on it about 15 minutes later, and it was gone.  Hopefully none the worse for its experience.  I guess we should hang some crystals or other bird deterrent from the windows in order to prevent future episodes.

I got a pretty good close up of the bird.  If you can identify the species, please let me know.

Update 07/06:  A helpful reader identified the species for me.  It’s a Yellow-billed Cuckoo.  He also provided a number of links, among them the USGS Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter entry.  You just gotta love the Internet.  I posted this entry on Friday evening.  Saturday afternoon I had a message identifying the bird.  Ain’t technology wonderful?

Work on the garden proceeds slowly.  Last week I had time enough to put in the T-posts for the fence, and yesterday I attached the wire on three sides.  Today I spent setting the two wooden gate posts, and constructing the gate.  An interesting little engineering problem, that gate.  I have to wait for the concrete to cure (24 hours) before I can attach the gate and string the rest of the wire.

My real question is whether a 6 foot fence will prevent the deer from hopping in and mowing down the garden.  I’ve seen deer jump a 6 foot fence, but I’ve been assured that they won’t jump into the enclosed garden because the raised beds break up the open space too much.  If the 6 foot fence isn’t enough, we’ll string a wire across the tops of the posts (another 8 inches up), and hang streamers from it.  The combination of the wire and the streamers apparently confuse the deer enough that they won’t attempt it.  We’ll see.

I came home this evening to find a walking stick (click on the picture at left for a larger image) hanging out on the lattice work of the pool house.  The body on this guy (actually, probably a gal) is 4 to 5  inches long.  It looks longer because the two legs at the bottom left in this picture (just below the wide protrusion there) are stretched out rather than to the side like the other four.  I can’t say for sure which end is the insect’s head.  I haven’t yet identified the particular species.  At first I thought it was an American Walking Stick, Anisomorpha bupestroides, but now I’m not so sure.  I haven’t found a picture of anything like this on the ‘net, yet.  Guess I’ll have to look in my Texas Bug Book.

I’ve known about these things for years, of course, ever since I lived in South Texas, although I didn’t realize they lived in the Austin area until we’d been here over a year.  I don’t see them very often because they typically hang out in the trees (they like my oak and pecan trees).  I was particularly surprised to see this one on the lattice work.  Usually I’ll find them stuck to a tree trunk, or walking on the ground among the real sticks.  What a fascinating insect.  Can you believe there are people who keep them as pets?  Very strange.

Seven cubic yards of gardening soil makes a pile about 8 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 4 feet tall when it’s delivered by a dump truck.  It takes about 1.2 cubic yards of soil to fill an 8′ x 4′ x 1′ garden bed.  One bed takes 9 wheelbarrows full of soil, at about 25 shovels full of dirt for each wheelbarrow.  So in filling those 5 beds today, I bent and lifted 1,125 times.  No wonder my legs, back, neck, and shoulders hurt.  Will somebody please remind me why I do this?  The other yard of soil is for some containers.  This week I’ll be putting up a fence around the new garden area, and perhaps Debra can plant next weekend.  We won’t have to worry about the deer getting to the plants this year.

Yes, we’re getting a late start to the garden, but that’s okay.   We now have 7 beds in which to plant stuff.  The fall garden should be terrific, and next spring everything will be ready for an early planting.  This year, Debra planted potatoes and onions in late March, and today we picked our first onion.  I hardly can wait to see how it tastes.

I finally installed all of the cabinets in the laundry room, and have attached the doors and drawer fronts.  I still have to adjust the doors so that they hang plumb and level, but the hinges make short work of that.  The four adjustment screws on the hinge let you move the door on all three axes.  A few minutes with a screwdriver is all I’ll need.  It’ll take a little longer to get the drawer fronts aligned correctly.

Installing cabinets is relatively easy, but you have to pay attention.  The most important part is getting a level reference line.  Once you have that, it’s a simple matter of shimming the cabinets up to the line and attaching them to the wall and to each other.

Been very busy with the remodel project.  Debra and I finally set a schedule and I’m doing whatever I can to maintain it.  All last week I’d come home from work and build cabinets.  This weekend a friend and I installed the wall cabinets and did a few other things.  This evening I started on the base cabinets.  I haven’t had a lot of time to write in the diary recently.  I’ll be back at it soon.

Fire ants like compost.  There’s nothing quite like turning a 4′ x 4′ x 4′ pile of compost that is completely infested with fire ants.  I added a bunch of leaves and grass, some sulfur, and lots of water.  Between the heat of composting and the ill effects of the sulfur, those ants probably won’t outlive the bites they inflicted.

Stain grade door molding costs about 65 cents a foot at Home Depot.  Cheap, until you multiply 65 cents by the number of feet you need to complete the job.  A standard door is about 80 inches high and 30 inches wide.  To trim one side of the door you need two pieces about 83 inches long and one piece about 36 inches long.  Call it 17 feet per side, or 34 feet per door.  Multiply by 7 doors.

I’ve never been much of one for finish work, but it turns out that’s the most expensive kind of labor to hire.  So today I installed trim on 5 doors. I’d done the other two previously.  My back aches, my hands are sore, and I have a few smashed fingers, but the trim’s up, looks good, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m not a complete klutz.  Debra followed behind me with the wood putty to cover up the nail holes.  We can start sanding tomorrow and then we break out the paint.

This garage conversion is taking much longer than we expected, but that’s what you get when you don’t have a schedule.  Just like a software project, if you don’t have a schedule then you’re just fooling around.