What Are We Doing Now?

All right, what is that Pfundtner Guy up to now???

It was such a beautiful day that he decided that we needed to haul sheets of drywall on the flat trailer. It's unusual to be able to do this in the middle of winter without getting them all full of road slush and salt. But because all of our snow melted, and it's a sunshiny day, we were able to haul back 12 sheets of drywall with no problems whatsoever. Of course, he also added four big rolls of insulation into the back of the Saturn at the same time. 

Want to hear something strange? The last four times we have taken this trailer out to haul things, somebody has hit it! Twice it's been hit in the parking lot --- when it's empty, just sitting there attached to our Saturn --- where it's been parked legally on two long parking spaces end to end. People drive around the rows of parked cars, looking for a spot to cut through and don't see the trailer there and they just hit it. Always in a rush. One guy even hit it so hard he dragged it a couple feet to the side. We came out and couldn't figure out why our trailer was moved over. Till we saw the skid marks and realized the tail light was broken right off from where he hit it!

Twice now we have been waiting at stop lights where people have been stopped behind us. They see us and pull up and are stopped too. But then the light turns green and they jump it and get anxious and they drive right into our trailer before we can even pull forward! This happened once before--  and now AGAIN today! The gal behind us knew the trailer was there. She saw it when she pulled up and stopped behind us to wait for the light. But as soon as the light turned green she evidently forgot there was a length of a trailer between us? She drove her front bumper right into this little metal tab sticking out the back of our trailer. 

That little metal tab is for the cross bracket when we put the ramps on the trailer if we're hauling something on wheels. This crazy lady pulled right up and banged into it. She didn't get out or say she was sorry or anything... she just drove away? Plus she must have just bought the vehicle, because it still had dealer plates on it.   Car dealers are closed in Wisconsin on Sundays, so it's not like she was out for a test drive.

And the last guy that hit it had a big fancy pickup truck. We got out that time and he shrugged his shoulders and said "no harm no foul no big deal let it go". And he left!  Who knows? It's just every single time we take this trailer out and somebody hits it!  Jinxed?

So what did Steve need all of this insulation and drywall for? He decided that he was going to do another section of the garage because the temperatures were up in the 40s today. He has already insulated and drywalled over the entire ceiling of all four stalls worth of the garage. Then he has about 1/3 of the walls done with insulation and drywall. We did that last fall and reorganized a bunch of our gardening tools and his workshop area. So now he wants to get the two walls done on either side of where we park our vehicles.

Right away, he jumped to it and got the insulation all stapled up into place. Then he started lifting up the sheets of drywall before I even knew what he was doing out there. So he got a lot done and there's still more to go. But soon he will have the entire garage insulated and drywalled!

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While he was doing that, I was taking care of my own thing. Remember in my last blog I had a couple little cans of sample paint trying to decide what to do in our kitchen. I finally made my decision and went with the Misty Meadow. 

This was going to be a complete change from the beige mauve color that is there from the previous owners. It's kind of "blah" and I wanted something fresh and clean.  I started taping off around sections of cabinets and along the edge of the countertop to start in one small section of the kitchen. Just to see what it looked like.  

(this is my wine rack and coffee bar

made from a repurposed old cabinet

turned sideways and a countertop added)

Since I had the trim paint out, I touched up some of the areas around the windows where they meet at the southeast corner of our kitchen. That was an area that needed touch-up for quite some time. 

While I was at it, I added a new coat of paint to the windowsill ledges. This is where I line up all of my little blown glass paperweights.  The sun was out and it felt so good to paint with the sunshine streaming in the windows. 

Now the paint was dry over in that test section. It looked pretty darn good! I gave it a second coat and decided to plow on and keep going. Steve was gone with his brother Pete to help their father with a project.  I could do this on my own. Time for a change! 

I taped around some more of the white bead board and trim. I also laid down some drop cloths--- really old towels to protect the hardwood floors. Bit by bit I went around the room, and when Steve got back, he did some of the cutting in along the top for me. He is color blind so it's really hard to see the difference between the brownish mauve and the soft mossy green. So to him it kind of looks like the same color no matter what. LOL

Steve had to pull the cabinet the big pantry cabinet away from the wall so I could get behind that section too. It wouldn't do any good to paint around and not that part of the wall in case someday we ever removed the cabinet?? 

It's pretty heavy, it serves as a pantry to hold all of our additional canned goods, all of our extra appliances that I don't like cluttering up the countertop, and then big serving trays and platters etc. It was a huge old wooden cabinet we bought from somebody off Facebook Marketplace two years ago. We dressed it up with beadboard on the sides and new handles on the front. Now it serves as our pantry.

Here is the blog post about that:  

http://kareninthewoods-kareninthewoods.blogspot.com/2021/07/beadboard-cabinet-pantry-space.html

While I was waiting for that coat to dry, I didn't feel like getting any supper cooking. I had painting supplies all over the island and didn't feel like cooking. We are lucky to have a new Mexican restaurant in our small town.  https://www.losmagueyesgb.com/

Their food is really good! Plus they happened to have a coupon in the local paper $5 off a $40 meal. Of course, to reach $40 we just have to each order a great big Margarita to get started along with our chips and salsa.

Our food came and it was delicious. Steve ordered a chicken chimichanga that was absolutely great and packed full of chicken.  I ordered the shrimp quesadilla and guacamole salad. There was more shrimp than anything inside the quesadilla and very few tomatoes or onions. They were grilled perfectly and soft and tender.

Plus, they LISTENED when I said no cheese. We've been to other Mexican restaurants that put it on or add a cheese sauce, no matter what, and shrug their shoulders when they give it to you. Even when I complain and try to send it back. I just can't handle digesting cheese anymore. That's a bugger when you're from Wisconsin and you can't eat cheese?

We got back to the house and I rolled the second coat of paint before we settled in to watch some TV for the evening. I couldn't wait until this morning when the sun shone in to see how nice it looked...

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Got up this morning and it looked absolutely wonderful. I touched up a little bit here and there. I was able to put everything back into place including all of my little blown glass paperweights

Steve helped me push the pantry cabinet back into place and now this whole section of the kitchen is done.  I really like how it turned out.

Maybe tomorrow we will roll out the refrigerator and do that section of wall behind there? Or maybe we'll take a break. Who knows?

~~~~~~~~~

As for our goofy Wisconsin weather, it's been up to 45 again today. This is the very last snow bank left in our yard. We have absolutely no other snow at all.  We saw a bit in the woods, on the north sides under the pine trees, but that is about it.  We should be about 2 feet deep in snow by this time of year! 

But never fear, we do have some snow forecast for the next 7 days! 

On and off, 

maybe snow 

maybe rain 

maybe sleet 

maybe who knows what. 

But since it was so nice out we did get little Binney out for a walk about the block and stretched our legs. She said no more, she is still in Hibernation Mode.  When spring actually does come, then she will walk again.  

And to continue from my last blog, we are happy to report that after a couple nights on our new Nectar mattress, we are really pleased with it. We filled out the warranty card and registered it and decided we will keep it. There is a trial period that you can actually return it free of charge and they will ship it back for free! 

Steve's Garage Project and End Of The Season Tomatoes

My last few blog posts have been about projects around the house. Well, here's a post with stuff that Steve has been working on out in his garage.

The garage has four stalls, it's two stalls wide by two stalls deep with another garage door out of the back. Steve decided that he would start insulating the entire ceiling and then the walls. Once he got the insulation up in the ceiling, now he started hanging sheets of drywall. 

With the gracious use of our helpful neighbor's drywall lift, it can easily be done by one person lifting up those huge 4 ft wide by 10 ft long sheets! I think they weigh over 75 lbs each, so the lift is extremely helpful.

In typical Steveio fashion, he had the ceiling completely covered in drywall within a matter of days. We did have to make an extra run to haul another batch of sheets so he would have enough. Our little trailer can only haul about 10 sheets at a time. I helped load up the sheets from the lumber yard at Menards, but our wonderful neighbor Ed, came and helped Steve unload them all once we reached the garage.

This will really keep the garage warmer in the winter, but Steve plans to only heat it if he's working on something out there. It also makes the garage lighter and brighter by having the reflective quality of the unfinished drywall as opposed to the wooden rafters. 

Steve bought these really cool LED light socket adapters that you can change one single light fixture into five by using low voltage drawing LED spotlight bulbs. It really helps illuminate the entire garage.

 He found them on Amazon at:

JACKYLED 5 in 1 Light Socket Splitter

It sure makes a difference. 

PS, see how we hang our canoe? We pull it up on a couple pulleys to suspend it near the ceiling. They are pulley kits from Harbor Freight for hanging deer at hunting season.  They came with all the hardware and ropes for only $14 each.  Pretty handy. All of our life jackets and paddles and seat cushions Etc are all stowed away inside of the canoe.  Less clutter in the garage. 

Once he had the ceiling all done, then it's time to start the walls. This is something that I could be more helpful with. First we unrolled the insulation and tacked it all into place on the walls. It means moving around a lot of stuff to get clear wall spaces to work in. 

Then we tacked up these handy sheets of pegboard to arrange all of our gardening tools. Can you imagine somebody was throwing all of this pegboard out in the garbage? We went to a lady's house to pick up a cabinet one day, and out by the road she had stacked five huge sheets of this perfectly good pegboard to get picked up for garbage day. We asked if we could take it with us and she said "sure"! Recycling at its finest. plus keeping it out of the landfill. We filled the wall spaces with insulation and then fastened the peg board over it. We moved all of the gardening tools further back on the wall towards the rear of the garage. It is nice to have each item at arm's reach and not stacked into a corner.  This area had previously been stacked with piles of siding, which is now all done and installed on the house.  More room in the garage! 

The purpose of this reorganization was to move all of the gardening stuff away from the front of the garage where we were always banging into it with the car doors from the Mustang and also more room on the side of our Saturn to get in and out.

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That is enough of Steve's projects, now on to some of the stuff that I've been trying to keep up with the last week or two.

This spring, I planted only SEVEN tomato plants: three Better Boys, three Early Girls, and one Julianne grape tomato. They have been producing over abundantly and we have been enjoying wonderful ripe tomatoes since mid July until now.  This is a pic from early July... I watered them directly from the rainbarrel by moving the hose from plant to plant.  

Now that temps are dropping and frost is coming for the season, we needed to finish picking all of the tomatoes whether they were ripe or not. When the grandkids were over they helped pick everything off of the vines.

Littlest Claire was more than happy to crawl among the plants underneath and grab every green tomato that she could find.

Chelsea helped her pile them into boxes 

so we could cover them up 

and let them ripen indoors.

Once all of the tomatoes were picked, I asked grandson Clayton to please yank out the vines. He sure had fun. Here's a little video clip of him pretending to be a monster and tearing them all apart.

Once they pulled all of the vines out, Chelsea helped him drag them back off into the woods. These kids are so helpful and I am so thankful that they come over and give us a hand. Sometimes projects like this go much quicker when you have help and make it fun.

Now every couple of days I have a pile of ripe tomatoes to take care of. So far I've already canned 27 quart jars of tomatoes this season, and yesterday afternoon I had enough to can another four or five jars.

The rest of the tomatoes are spread out on trays and in buckets waiting for them to ripen. I pluck out the ripest ones and do another batch of canning or making salads.  I hate to think of having to buy those fake pink mushy things at the grocery store all winter.  Ugh. 

I leave the little grape tomatoes out on the island... as we walk by we pop one or two ripe ones into our mouth as a snack.  Slowly they will all turn red. 

There is nothing like the smell and taste of fresh garden tomatoes in the middle of winter. When I pop the lid off a quart jar, ready to dump it in a pot of chili, I always take the first scoop out with a spoon and eat it raw. I eat it fresh right out of the jar and it tastes like SUMMER! 

When I'm ready to start canning the tomatoes, I do it in my big kitchen sink. I never had a farmhouse sink this large in any of my other homes. It's so easy to keep all the mess within the confines of the sink space. When I'm all done, I can rinse it all out and carry the peelings in a bucket out into the woods.

When I can my tomatoes, I add a tablespoon of canning salt and a tablespoon of lemon juice to each sterilized jar. Then I scald the tomatoes to loosen the skins. My Mom always called it "slurping off the skins" ....  I miss my Mom this time of year.  We always canned garden produce together when I was a kid.  I didn't know back then how much it would mean to me now. We would stand back and look at our rows and rows of colorful jars line up on the shelves in the basement. Mom would exclaim:  "OH MY,  we are RICH!"   

Back to my canning, as I wipe off a tear or two.  

I cut out the stems, then peel off the skins, chop the tomato up into chunks and toss it in the jar. That is it. On with the sterilized lid. They go into the hot water bath for 45 minutes and they are done

If I am only doing four or five quarts of tomatoes, I use my tall soup pot and wrap each jar in cotton dinner napkins so they don't rattle against each other. If I'm using my big canning kettle, it holds nine quarts, but it is too large to use on the electric glass topped stove. If you balance a large kettle like that over two burners on the stove it can overheat the glass portion in between the two burners and crack the glass surface. 

When I use that larger nine quart jar canning kettle, it needs to be outdoors on the propane burner stand. This time, I didn't have quite enough tomatoes ripened to do 9 jars outdoors, so instead I just opted to do a smaller batch inside.

Soon they are all done, and pulled out of the kettle.

PING PING PING

 ---and that is music to a canner's ears.

This morning at 8:30 am, the Packers are playing over in London against the Giants. The game is going to start in about 20 minutes. So I will finish up this blog and get it posted. Then I will go join Steve down in the She Shed to watch the Packers on a sunny Sunday morning.

We robbed some fresh raspberries from the kids' garden for our granola and yogurt breakfast. 

Never thought we would be eating our breakfast

 while watching the Packers

 play this early. 

GO PACK GO!