Food Waste Friday--June 29, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here is goes for this week.   

We had no waste this week, but here is some of the good food we ate so we would have no waste.

On another money saving note, I'd thought I would mention that you should check into your state and local government energy rebate programs. There may be a lot of money out there to be had to help with energy saving projects. We just made some energy saving improvements to our house and the state (along with the local electric company) paid for half of it. If you want to see what we did here's a link. Energy Audit.

A Second Look--June 27, 2012

This week I gave a second look to the day lilies in the yard.  Over the years with the encroachment of shade and weeds, the day lilies have been decreasing in numbers. However, I still found several colors of them blooming. Sometimes it was one lone lily and sometimes it was a whole row. I must say they are beautiful flowers.

Here are the lilies and other things I found this week.

The different color day lilies I found blooming this week.

First African daisy to bloom.

Butterfly on marigold

First hibiscus bloom

Yellow trumpet lily

Frank Lloyd Wright House

The Pope-Leighey House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Do you ever pass somewhere on a regular route of yours and think you'd like to stop there? However you don't have time right then, so you think you'll stop next time. But then you don't. Well, that's what I've been doing for a while now when we visit my father-in-law. Five minutes from where he lives is a Frank Lloyd Wright house that piqued my curiosity every time I saw the sign for it. I finally satisfied this curiosity last Saturday when Ward and I visited the Pope-Leighey house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The house was completed in 1941 and was one of Wright's earlier houses built for the middle class. It was named for the two families that lived in it--The Loren Pope family and later, Robert Leighey and his wife. It was relocated to its present site by Mrs. Leighey in 1964 to save it from demolition due to highway expansion.

Screw head slots parallel to wood grain

The house has 1200 sq. ft., and Wright showcased his common theme of connecting to the earth by using natural materials of brick, glass, wood, and concrete.  He repeated rectangular shapes and cantilevering structures throughout the house tying everything together--including the furniture. He used compression (6'8" ceilings) and expansion (11' ceilings) to make rooms seem bigger. But what amazed me the most was the attention to detail. The screw heads were parallel to the grain of the wood they were in and the mortar between the bricks was different depths to emphasize different planes. I could go on and on about his design, but I now understand the hoopla surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture. 

I'm so happy we stopped, and I want to visit more of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses. In the meantime, I am thinking about the next place that I've been meaning to visit.

More info.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Leighey_House
http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/southern-region/pope-leighey.html?gclid=CJKr8ZXh7LACFQIQNAodnmfJxQ

__________________________________________________________________________________
But wait there's more!
Loren Pope is famous in his own right. He was an independent college placement counselor whose most famous book was Colleges that Change Lives. If you have anyone that is considering college, this book is a must read. Even if you aren't going to college anytime soon or already have been, reading about his college philosophies is still very interesting.



_________________________________________________________________________________

Energy Audit

Recently, we improved the insulation in our house and the state paid for half of our expense to do this. Below are the details of the process.

___________________________________________________________________________________

We hired a local energy assessment company to do the audit of our house. This was the first step that the state required.

They checked the insulation in our attic and other places. They also used a heat sensor to see how much heat was escaping along various joints and openings.

They checked the burn efficiency of our furnace.

They did a blow test that measured air exchange levels throughout the house. This told them how air-tight the house was.

Surprisingly, windows are usually not the main leaks in a house. It is usually from normal construction openings (plumbing and wire passes, etc.)

After the audit, another company did the recommended work. Most of this work involved sealing gaps and adding insulation. They did both of these in our attic...

as well as in our basement.

They used blown insulation in both our cantilevered second story and our attic .

We also got 12 new energy efficient light bulbs from the electric company that they installed.

After the work was done, the audit company came back and retested the house to see how things had changed. We had a 40% improvement.

Then the paperwork was filed by the audit company. We didn't have to do anything else except wait for the refund money to show up!

Food Waste Friday--June 22, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here is goes for this week.   

Lost (and found) sandwich on the dirty floor of my car.

This week, somehow a sandwich from work got lost on the floor of my car for a couple of days. I'm usually starving at work, so I don't know why it didn't get eaten. Maybe that was the day that someone brought in brownies and I filled up on those. Boy, were they good!  I hope the birds and chipmunks enjoyed this sandwich as much as I enjoyed those brownies.

Blueberry Picking

Ward and I went blueberry picking in Uncle Billy's patch. Yum!

Dog always hopes that we will toss him a berry.

A Second Look--June 20, 2012

The weather is getting hot, but fortunately we have had some intermixed cooler days. The lilies, both trumpet and day, are really starting to bloom, as are the coneflowers and balloon flowers. Unfortunately, the Japanese beetles have also started to make the rounds. I've only seen a few of them, but I have seen a lot of evidence of where they have been.

The sparrow eggs have hatched, and the bluebird has laid a second clutch of five eggs in its old nest. I am looking forward to watching these new chicks.

See what I found this week during a Second Look.

Day Lily

Trumpet lilies (Lilium regal)

Japanese beetle on coneflower

Coreopsis

Pink day lilies

Yarrow. Our yarrow is now mostly in the shade, so we don't get many blooms anymore.

Pale yellow day lily

Last weeks sparrow eggs and this weeks hatchlings.

Female house finch with sunflower seed.

School Days--Wally

School Days is a reoccurring feature in which I ask people about their early memories of school. Everyone has a story to tell about this and I hope to give them a voice here. 

Here is today's story.

 

Wally started kindergarten at age five in the 1990's in Houston, TX. His school was the neighborhood public elementary school.

Wally at kindergarten field day.

Tell me about starting school.

My kindergarten class was was in a portable building outside of the main school. There were two portable buildings next to each other for all of the kindergarten classes. Beside our buildings was a large grassy field about the size of 2-3 football fields. Now that I think about it, the grounds of the school were quite large. Larger than the high school that I went to.

I remember that there was a flower garden between the two buildings. One day I crumpled up some dry leaves and put them in the flower bed. Another kid told me that was stupid. I told him it wasn't because the leaves would decompose and help the flowers. He didn't believe me and asked the teacher if that was right. She said I was.

Did you go into the main building much?

Not really. We went to music and art in there. Kindergarten was only half a day, so we didn't eat lunch there. However, I went to first grade in the main building. My school wasn't like most schools. The walls didn't go all of the way to the ceiling.

Did that cause a problem with noise?

Not that I remember. The teachers were good at moving us around and coordinating their teaching so we wouldn't disturb each other. Also, the walls were about two inches thick and had good noise canceling properties. 

One day one of the walls fell down on one of the students. I don't think they got hurt, but it caused a lot of excitement.

Did you like school or have a favorite subject?

I was indifferent about most of it. However, I did like field day. All of the school came out for competitions with relay races of various kinds. The best part was the snow cones we had. 

Thanks. Another time I would like to hear more stories about your school days.

BBQ Festival

What do you do when you want to go backpacking and to a barbeque festival at the same time? You backpack at the festival, of course. That's what Ward did today at the State Championship Barbeque Festival complete with barbequed pork nachos.

Food Waste Friday--June 15, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here is goes for this week.  

We had no waste this week again. I think this was partly because we really needed to go to the grocery store and we didn't cook much. However, no waste is no waste. I will take it when I can get it.

Also, below is a picture of something else that had little food waste this week--the pileated woodpecker that has been visiting our feeder. That bird knows how to eat. She almost rivals squirrels when eating suet.

Female pileated woodpecker

A Second Look--June 13, 3012

This week during a Second Look, I investigated the milkweed plants in one of my beds. I have a love/hate relationship with milkweed. Some years I pull it out because it is growing in the middle of everything else and spreading. Other years, I leave it because I want to have more monarch butterflies around. This year I have left it alone. The main goal of my investigation was to find monarch eggs. I think I found them, but it's hard to tell since they are inconspicuous white dots under the leaves. However, I definitely found insect activity of various kinds.

I also discovered a sparrow's nest with eggs in the dogwood tree in front of our garage. I got a picture of it but I'm not sure that that was the smartest thing to do. I had to stand on the top of a ladder and lean to get it, but anything for a Second Look, right?

Here's what I saw this week.

Milkweed among the day lilies

Bumble bee on milkweed bloom

Spider among milkweed leaves

Milkweed bug eggs.

Balloon flower bud

Coreopsis-Moonbeam

Marigold

Begonia

House sparrow nest with eggs.