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Fairfield rec room furniture

After landscaping the Fairfield, I finished up the fiddly trim bits inside, so the house is officially “move-in ready.” I posted a gallery on Greenleaf’s forum that shows all of the empty rooms. I’m especially happy with how well the trim I added to the edges of the plywood hides the massive warping on the second floor.

Now comes the fun part: decorating. I’ve been collecting furniture for this house for almost as long as I’ve been building it, but some of it’s still in kit form. This week I put together furniture for the attic, which is intended to be a family / rec room.

The couches, tables, and ping pong table are SDK Miniatures kits. The bookcase behind the chimney is part of the Cassidy Creations campaign bedroom. I’m using the rest of that bedroom set in the teenager’s bedroom, on the other side of the attic wall, but the bookcase wouldn’t fit on top of the desk due to the sloped ceiling, so I decided to use it here instead.

I ran into a few problems (read: a chain reaction of disasters set off by my own frustration) while putting the couches together, but overall they were fun kits and I’m happy with the result. I bought the kits directly from SDK, but plans for these couches and tables appear in the July 2004 issue of Dollhouse Miniatures, too. I’m planning to clutter up this area of the room with pizza and takeout cartons and maybe a Wii and some games.

The desk and computer were purchased from Miniatures.com several years ago. They look a little small compared to the rest of the furniture. I might swap out the desk with something else that’s more to scale.

I’ll post some more pics as I work through the rooms.

Stranger than fiction

This morning Rosy the Wonder Greyhuahua and I returned from our walk to find this at the bottom of the street.

It took me a moment to realize that’s an arrow at the bottom of the sign. And a moment more to realize that it’s pointing at a used condom. (Or, at least, a condom that has been removed from its foil wrapping. I didn’t check it out that closely.)

Now, we live in a nice neighborhood. It’s generally quiet. Children play in the street. The biggest commotion we experience is when the ice cream truck loops around the cul-de-sac playing “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” So I have to wonder who was ticked off enough that—rather than throwing away the condom, or sweeping it into the gutter with their feet, or simply ignoring it—they were compelled to call attention to it with a bright orange traffic cone and a sign in big red letters.

Who is “me”? Who is “me” talking to? And how does the wine bottle tie in to all this? My writer self can’t help but see the potential…

The mystery of the Blue-Tailed Squiggle

Anyone know what this is?* We keep spotting this guy (maybe more than one of them) in the back yard. When it moves it looks like a snake, but it has legs.

In other backyard news, the vegetables have grown quite a bit since they were planted a month ago…

The biggest tomato plant (back left planter) is the Juliet grape, which was already larger than the others when I planted them. The rest are doing well too, though, with flowers showing up on several of them this past week. I hate to prune them because it’s so exciting to see them grow, but I’ve been removing some of the lower branches to encourage them to get nice and tall.

The bok choi continues to grow ridiculously tall. I actually pulled out three of the six plants and we ate the leaves and stems as part of a stir fry. I decided to leave the others for a while to see what happened. I keep plucking off the buds before the flowers start to bloom. I planted some new Swiss chard plants in the holes left behind by the pulled-out bok choi, so all in all there are now ten Swiss chard plants (possibly too many for that planter). The original four have some nice hearty leaves but we haven’t sampled them yet.

Last week, after a lot of searching at various nurseries, I finally found a habanero plant. (It was the last one, too!) Apparently this is a hard year for habaneros. The nursery was having a buy one, get one free sale, so I selected a Caribbean hot pepper that is supposedly even hotter than a habanero. Some of the pepper plants seem to be thriving more than others—in particular, the Hungarian wax and the sweet peppers are getting larger and growing flowers—but last year my peppers had a slow start, and didn’t really come into their own until August, so I’m trying not to read too much into it!

The mint is doing well, too. This week I had my first mojito of the summer. Let’s just say that planting mint in the backyard was a very good idea.

*While I was writing this blog, Geoff did a Google search and discovered that the lizard is most likely a Western skink. Exotic.

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