New Room

In the short timespan of 3 days, we have now expanded our upstairs by at least 25%! Yes, indeed. 25%!! Amazing, you say. How can this be?, you ask. How does one expand their upper story in 3 days? If not by magic, then what?

By finally finishing the install of the new oak flooring. That is how. We now have 3 of 4 bedrooms actually usable for beds and such items as are generally found in bedrooms. (The fourth is currently acting as office storage space.)

This has been a long time in coming. It took over 3 years to get the floor laid, and this past weekend we got the last floorboard nailed down, the floor sanded, and the finish put on. All that's left to do is to install the toekick on the baseboards once the finish dries on the quarter-round. So nice and shiny it looks. See for yourself:













We also installed the new clothes poles in the closet, giving me 10 linear feet of hanging space, and six shelves. Woohoo! I can now consolidate my clothes, shoes,
and bags from the 2 closets, 1.5 dressers, random boxes, and one of the spare beds into a single wonderfully large space. It will make getting dressed in the morning that much easier. No more wandering up and down the hall trying to find the bits of my outfit.

Of course, there are still some cosmetic items to finish, such as actually installing the light fixture, rather than leave it hanging by wires, as it has been. And installing the pleated shades while I roam in search of draperies. And eventually moving the guest room furniture into that room to coordinate all.

But all in all, it was a very satisfying project to have finished. I can now open the door to that room, and let the light spill through the windows and into the hall, rather than trying to sneak past the door and not acknowledge what lurked behind it.

Although, as we will soon embark on a remodel of the upstairs bathroom and master bedroom closet, I now have to incorporate that 10ft of hanging space and the shelving into the sketch. Else, what is a girl to do with all her clothes?

Harvest Time

As I have mentioned before, there is a lot of farming and cultivation going on around and in my Small Town. Some have planted crops, some have planted flowers, and some are just feeding animals. At our house, we have flowers that were planted by a previous occupant, so this summer I mostly just planted veggies.

I planted tomatoes (regular round variety), peppers (sweet and hot varieties), pole beans, chives, basil, and a new-to-me item: ground cherries. All are maturing in abundance. We have so many tomatoes on the plants, that they actually bent the metal of the cages, and are now leaning over drunkenly whilst being propped up by the neighbor's fence.

Luckily for us, the neighbors on the other side of the fence are friendly neighbors. They are the kind of neighbors that do not complain when one's pole beans try to become the tallest bean plants in the history of mankind by eschewing their 6-foot poles in favor of the neighbor's tree branches. I did not know that bean plants could get so tall. They are so tall that we now have beans hanging over 10ft in the air! So far up that the only possible way to harvest them (at least from our own side of the fence) is to get out the ladder and climb.

The ground cherries are strange looking plants. They started out small, and only had 1 or 2 cherries each on the plant. They were tasty though. This is a plant that likes surprising you. For months we only had 1 or 2 cherries on each plant. Now we have tons. One day when pulling weeds, I happened to glance at the plants to see what was what, and to my surprise, there were cherries in glorious abundance.

The plants are enormous and have grown long branches. Even with regular harvesting, they don't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. These cherries are not like the red cherries you are used to. They come in little greenish yellow wrappers, ala tomatillos. They are yellowish, and kind of sweet and tart all at once.

When they are ripe, they fall off the plant and onto the ground - hence the name. I just started picking them up and keeping them in a bowl on the counter until I had enough to do something with. What, I didn't know exactly, but figured I could peruse the internet and my cookbooks until I found something. I did even better than that - I found someone at the local Farmer's Market who grows them in abundance. Here I learned that as long as the outer husk is not peeled off, they can be kept on the counter until you have enough for a pie.

The tomatoes, however, cannot be kept as such. They must be used fairly quickly. As all of our tomatoes are of the normal variety, I have been making salsa of those. To make pasta sauce, I visited a local Pick-Your-Own farm where I ended up picking almost 40lb of tomatoes in under 3omin! I was having such fun, I didn't even notice how much I'd gathered until the buckets were weighed. I got mostly red paste tomatoes, but the farm had something I'd never seen before - yellow paste tomatoes. I am going to try and make those into sauce as well for something different.

Go Warriors!

This past Friday evening, I encountered a Small Town phenomenon that I had rather forgot about. Or at least only really seen in the movies. I decided to head out for a run a bit before 7pm. As I left the house and ran towards the high school (my usual route), I realized that all cars were heading in the same direction. They came in off of side streets and drove towards the school. What was going on??

I could hear some sort of announcements coming from the direction of the school. Everyone in the cars was wearing purple. Of course! It was Friday night, and that means High School Football. Everyone goes to the football game to cheer on their Warriors.

Well, as my normal route takes me around the football stadium and past the soccer fields, I got several mighty strange looks as I ran by. Why on earth was I running away from the school? When there was a football game? I could hear the cheerleaders and the band start to get the crowd going. Then the starting lineups began to be announced.

At this point I was about a block or so on the other side of the school, but I could still hear the announcer. I ran around my normal route along the edge of town, and still I could hear the football game, play-by-play, even though I was at least 1/2 mile away. I pretty much heard the entire first half of the game on my run. A nice way to hear the game and get something accomplished. I could listen to the second half from the comfort of my front porch. As long as the windows are open, I can hear the announcer just as if I was sitting in the stands. This is a bonus for the football and soccer games, but not so much for marching band practice.

On a tangent, I ended up running about 4.7 miles that night. Not on purpose, I was planning on only about 3. But the Small Town conspired against me. I tried a new way home. I could SEE the water tower just off of Main Street, but no matter which road I tried that pointed towards Main Street it went off in a random direction. I ended up a good ways down the highway and had to run back into town. Lucky for me at least I knew which way I had to go on the highway. Who knew I could even make myself run that far. I guess if you know you have to get home, you can manage it.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Part of this move from Big City to Small Town has resulted in trying to find one's way around on streets that have small signs, streets with no signs, streets that suddenly become highways, and streets that end as the sidewalk does, in corn fields. These roads often do not run North South East or West, but in a Northerly Southerly Easterly or Westerly direction. You will get to where you are going eventually, but it can take some time to get there, as you probably have to skirt fields of corn, pasture lands, and detour through a few tiny towns.

I am also learning to appreciate the change in traffic types that I am encountering. I still have the usual cars, trucks, semis and bicycles. However, now I also have to contend with tractors (of a normal type), tractors that are set up on wheels with axles 10ft above the road to allow for travel amongst the corn, tractors that pull trailers of all sorts of stuff (lots of it smelly), and random ATVs. There are also vehicles that pull out into the road from where there is not a road, so you must be on high alert, as these vehicles tend to move slowly and be rather large, similar to elephants. If they do not see you, they will drive right over you.

Additionally, I have also to pay attention to trains. These are not the trains that I am used to, that carry people to and fro for work and play, but they are working trains that carry carloads of grains, oil, and other products from our part of the country to the coasts. These trains are large, and move fast. These trains have very loud whistles that blow many many times as they approach the Small Town. They must blow their whistles, as much of the time the tracks are laid right thru the middle of the Small Town. In mine, they cut directly across Main Street. If you happen to be out and about and encounter the train, you must wait for it to get all the way thru the town, as most of the possible alternate routes also have the train tracks crossing them. You must also be on alert while driving around the countryside, as often there is very little warning that the road that you are on will be crossing the tracks of the train.

In order to get a sense of where I am and where things are located, I often try to take a new road to discover new parts of the land, and to find out where a road goes exactly. I have been lucky so far, as I have only gotten lost once or twice, and after driving around randomly for some minutes managed to get myself unlost, or at least to a road I recognized. These types of traffic encounters make sense. They are what you would expect in a Small Town and the parts nearby.

A recent traffic encounter, however, gave me quite some thinking to do. In this Small Town, not only do you need to watch out for automobiles, trucks, tractors, and trains, but apparently you also need to be on the lookout for Airplanes. Yep, that's right. Airplanes.

Here I was, driving down a nice street for the first time, looking at the houses and people and such - exactly what you'd expect to see in a Small Town.


When all of a sudden, I come upon the following sign:


Now, you may be wondering, what exactly is an Airplane Crossing? Indeed, I was wondering also. What it is, to satisfy curiosity, is exactly what it says. A place for Airplanes to cross. As in cross the street. On their wheels. Not in the air. Apparently the Airplanes do not need to obey normal stop signs like other vehicles. They are allowed to randomly cross the street without any warning.

Who knew? My Small Town has its own airport right in town. And I do mean right in town. As in the middle of the block. If you drive a bit farther down this road, you come across the sign that you'd expect to see near an airport:


This makes sense. Planes should cross roads while flying, not while rolling, taxiing, taking off or landing. This is what I expect to see. Well, almost anyways. I didn't expect to see this in the middle of town, with houses all along the airstrip. If you have lots of money, or maybe a plane and some money, you can buy a house right on the airport landing strip. They include an extra-large garage for you to store the plane in. Kind of convenient for those folks who have such items.

I will have to be extra careful from now on, to make sure that my observation of traffic includes that from above, and not just that on the street.