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Veggie growth, and the dreaded black spots

Haven’t felt much like blogging lately. Case in point: my tomato and pepper plants have gotten much bigger since I last posted pictures a month ago. In late April / early May we had some crazy hot days and the tomato plants shot up. Here they are on May 4, roughly four weeks after planting.

After this we had a few more weeks of crazy hot days and they got even bigger. Then the rain came. Last year, wet days and cold nights triggered the blight that killed off my plants. I pulled the two white pots onto the deck where they’d be covered. The pink pot, which has bamboo sticks attached to the tomato cage for when the plants get big, wouldn’t fit under the deck roof. I pulled it under the eave of the house, where it was drier than out in the open, but not completely protected. And it rained for three days straight.

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Mac woe, followed by Mac wow

It’s easy to bitch about bad customer service experiences and even easier to forget to praise the good ones, so I thought I’d share my recent Apple Store experience. Spoiler: it has a happy ending.

A while back, my MacBook developed a crack in the plastic casing to the right of the track pad. I hadn’t dropped it or manhandled it in any obvious way, so I figured it was a fluke and fixed it with super glue. Several months later, the glue stopped sticking and part of the plastic broke off, leaving a little gap that you could actually see into the computer through. I wasn’t happy about it, but it didn’t occur to me to look into it. The laptop (which turns four years old this week) was well out of warranty and other than looking bad, it wasn’t really an issue.


Crack #1, to the right of the track pad. Gluing the cracked plastic worked for a few months.
Then part of it broke off, leaving a hole.

The Friday before last, I noticed a similar crack developing above the screen, in the upper left corner (not the same side as the first crack). Since I’m relatively careful with my laptop, I couldn’t understand why this was happening. Suspicious, I Googled “MacBook crack” and soon learned that this is a common problem with the 13″ MacBooks of this vintage. I saw pictures of cracks that looked exactly like mine.


Crack #2 developing in the upper left corner.

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Rosedale porch door (and more)

With the front door finished, I moved on to the porch door. This one is a Houseworks door and it’s a totally different style than the other door and the windows.

I’d already cut the pediment off the top, which left the door frame looking kind of plain, especially compared to the fancy front door. To dress it up a bit, I decided to add the bottom porch stoop piece from Kit B as a cap at the top, and the bottom trim pieces from Kit B. (Added bonus: adding trim to the top of the door hides the fact that the hole wasn’t quite square at the top!)

I also popped out two little square pieces that are supposed to go on top of the newel posts to use as trim at the top of the door. But partway through painting all the pieces, I got the idea to cut off the bottoms of Kit B’s front door corner trim instead.

Here are all the pieces painted. The stripes aren’t perfect—especially the one furthest to the right, which I painted first. I tried to get purple paint into the crack between the stripes and it didn’t work out too well, so I was careful not to repeat that mistake for the other stripes. After a few rounds of touch-ups I decided that no amount of repainting was going to make it better and I can live with it. (This is a rare case where it looks worse in the pictures than in person. I hope so anyway!)

The two doors complement each other nicely. You wouldn’t necessarily know that one came with the kit and the other didn’t.

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