Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

As you might expect, this post is about installing a vanity. The previous owners really liked pedestal sinks, which are OK except that they are ugly. Also you can't store stuff in them and they make plumbing a pain. So we picked up a new-to-us bathroom vanity off Craigslist.

The vanity sat around for a while until the bathroom sink got a clog, and we decided, as long as we're unclogging the sink, we may as well take the whole darn thing out and replace it. Also, by "we" I mean "L", "J", and "J" respectively.  The result:

The hole in the linoleum has been reclassified as an "accent patch"

And it looks even nicer under the hood:

Things I learned: the curved piece of piping is called the "P-trap", not, as I thought, the "You-tube"

And best of all, it only took a day and I only had to make three visits to the hardware store.

Visit 1: (morning): Get snake to clean out drain (fits on power drill). Get materials.
Visit 2: Discover that pipe coming down from new sink is 1/2" too short. Get pipe extender.
Visit 3: (5 minutes before hardware store closing time): Discover that seal between P trap and piping downstream, which we did not change, no longer holds. Hardware store man explains that the pipe had the wrong elastomeric seal - we needed a slip ring, while they had some sort of square o-ring in there. So apparently our sink was being held together by years of accumulated crud.

It does look rather nice, and it's even nicer knowing that with this job done, I'll never have to do plumbing in this house ever again.

And in case you need a before (we ever moved in), during, and after:

Accent patch be gone!

No leaks!  But we still have a phone jack next to the toilet.

In other news: Chestnuts! and what to do with them

Hurricane Joaquin brought us some chestnuts!

The weather here has been gray and miserable (as I suppose it is all along the east coast) and our house has been, well, a bit more needy than usual (as evidenced by its desperate attempts to lock us in bathrooms and other things we might tell you about someday).  So it was some consolation when we went out to check the garden last night and found the ground scattered with chestnuts, freshly burst from their spiny husks.

We took about fifteen minutes to pick up 4.5 lbs (we should  really find a small child somewhere to do these things for us, right?) and then about 45 minutes quadruple checking that we hadn't accidentally harvested something poisonous and finding recipes.

 

It turns out that we have a Chinese chestnut tree and that roasting chestnuts is hardly any work at all.

 The Recipe:

Take chestnut, make sure it came out of a spiky husk and that the tip is pointed and tasseled.

Cut a small X in the shell with a sharp knife

Put in a pan with some water sprinkled on it

Chuck in oven (400F, 30-40 minutes)

Poke chestnut with your finger until you can touch it without burning yourself

Finish peeling

Eat

We weighed a few of our chestnuts at various stages so that we'll know how many we need for recipes later on (there wasn't much weight difference between shelled and unshelled).
12 chestnuts = 100 g, or 200 kcal and 48% of your daily dietary requirement of vitamin C! (so saith Wikipedia)

100g of cooked chestnuts

We have some eggs piling up, despite the cold weather and a new bout of broodiness, so next up will probably be an attempt at chestnut pasta, where the ground chestnut is used to partially substitute for flour.  I didn't know that such a thing existed, but this (fresh chestnut pasta with Brussels sprouts)  looks delicious. It doesn't hurt that we have a freezer full of Brussels sprouts from our garden as well.

To be cont.?

Fall Fest! And lessons in retail

Two weeks ago, the Elkton Fall Fest took place. We learned about it a little late, but we managed to sign up for it anyway. Since I have, shall we say, an unexpectedly large amount of free time lately, I've been baking bread. We'd also both been toying around with the idea of selling stuff at farmer's markets. So when we heard about the Fall Fest, we thought we'd give it a go.

The Fall Fest involves closing down two streets (ie, all of downtown Elkton); there are vendors of various kinds, and food trucks. But to really draw the crowds, the city of Elkton brings in its ace in the hole: the pretty baby contest (0-6 months, 6-12 months, and 1-3 years old divisions, boys and girls). A panel of dignitaries solemnly determined first, second, and third place as an emcee directed parents onto the stage with their little ones. As a side note: a handgun tattoo on your thigh with cutoff shorts looks badass when you're 18, not so much a couple years later when you're trying to have your little munchkin take the ribbon at a beauty contest. (The munchkin in question won anyway).

(Note: I did not take any pictures of this event)

And in case there were any people so hard-hearted as not to be moved by a pretty baby contest, there were DockDogs! This did not involve eating sausages by the water. Instead, a swimming pool, with a dock of sorts, was set up in a parking lot. The contestant dogs had to jump in the pool, fetch a baton at the other end of the pool, and swim back to return it to their owner. Everyone involved really had fun, especially the dogs.

Did you know they made swimsuits for dogs?

Not surprisingly, the Labrador Retrievers all did well, with one getting a time of under 6 seconds. But the best part of the contest for me was watching a mutt jump in, swim halfway to the baton, get confused, eventually make his way to the baton, take the baton, only to deposit the baton at the side of the pool and joyfully swim around in circles until his master could finally persuade him to leave.

In all this commotion L and I had our humble table of bread and cork crafts. We'd stayed up late the night before baking. Ultimately, we had ciabatta, baguettes, whole-wheat boules, foccaccia, bagels, italian loaf, and as a last-minute addition by L, cookies. L also had made earrings, fishing lures, and floating keychains using her near-infinite supply of wine corks.

Buy our bread! We had to wrap the bread and add ingredient labels to be able to sell it.

Did you know that cork comes from the bark of the cork oak, native to Portugal? While it is best known for sealing wine bottles, cork can also be used an excellent thermal insulator. 

What a bust that was. Over some nine hours we made twenty-seven dollars in sales. Half of that was in cookies, which we hadn't even planned to make. Three or four people asked if we had anything gluten-free. (We did not - I've never found a gluten-free bread or cookie that was at all tolerable, so why make a terrible version of something that's good?). A few more people, clutching sodas, refused to eat the bread samples we'd laid out because they were on a low-carb diet. Some senior citizens came by, nosed the yellow ciabatta samples we'd laid out, and asked what kind of cheese we had. We did sell a few loaves and bagels here and there.

The booth next to us did quite well throughout the day. The woman running it sold natural cleaning products, soaps, and honey, in elegant packaging; the booth looked like a small shop. She was kind enough to give us some advice:

- Use shelves to display your product, as customers won't notice your goods as much lying flat on a table

- Never lower your price. It suggests that your merchandise is, well, cheap.

- Make signs to say what you're selling, with the pricing (we just had a table with bread on it)

She actually lent us a shelf, which L used to display cork items. We immediately noticed more people coming to the table to check it out. Granted, nobody bought any cork items - we saw a lot of people inspect the crafts and then get a look on their face that said "hey, I have wine corks at home too". But we at least went from zero interest to some interest.

We also raised our prices back up to where we had them at the beginning of the day. The few people who wanted to buy bread didn't seem put off by paying a premium for it, and the lower price we'd had for a few hours certainly didn't spark interest in bread in people who weren't interested to begin with.

So, we didn't make money, but we learned some lessons. For me, it was not so much learning a few retail "tricks" as coming to the understanding that buyers are looking for an experience as well as the product. We'd have done better to spend most of our effort doing up our booth like a French bakery, with shelves of bread, and maybe with us wearing aprons. This consideration in itself is sad, since it means that people focus on a simulacrum of the bakery experience, on the idea of what a bakery should look like, rather than on the concrete items ("bread") produced. This explains the mystery of why we see gluten-free items in bakeries: it doesn't matter that gluten-free bread tastes terrible, because the taste is secondary to the experience of buying bread in a bakery. Though I suppose another way of looking at it is that people seek out bakeries because they like making eye contact with the baker, they like being taken care of and exchanging a few words with another human being; that bakeries are an oasis in a world too dreadfully sterile to bear thinking about. So the game is about building human connections. People love the baker more than they love the bread. And that thought brings me comfort and hope.

The Biggest Gainer

Four weeks to go...chickens are molting & J has been working on his sympathy belly.

In which Adam Delved is questioned by the authorities

On my way back to Soggy Bottom, I stopped in Toronto to attend a conference that happened to be taking place, in hopes of lining up some job prospects. Uncle F and aunt B generously allowed me to stay in their house in Burlington, although they would not be home. I, being somewhat inpecunious due to an unfortunate hiccup in cash flow, as well as being Dutch cheap of a naturally thrifty disposition, accepted the offer.

I took the train from Toronto, which trundled gently along a landscape of factories and housing developments before finally depositing me at the station in Burlington. A short cab ride brought me to F&B's house. I got the key from the neighbor, dropped my bags inside, and went out to stroll to the local strip mall for some sustenance. Along the way, I took a snapshot of the picture-perfect neighborhood:

It's election season in Canada, and I saw a yard sign promoting a candidate with an extremely long name. I thought it was funny that they had to make a special, extra-long yard sign for this candidate, so I took a picture of that, too. Sorry for the poor resolution on this one. (Note: I saw only Conservative yard signs on my walk).

A half-hour later, I was walking back from dinner at the strip mall, when a policeman in a black SUV pulled up next to me and asked me to stop. He took my ID, and spoke into his radio that he had found someone "matching the description". Then some questions. Was I eating in that restaurant, over by the window? Where did I live? Where was I staying? What did I do for a living? Did I once live in Ontario? Did I have a phone? Could he see the pictures on my phone? Well, no, but yes, here you are, officer, as you can see, nothing of any concern here. In the meantime, I saw a second police SUV cruising the parking lot where we stood.

At length the officer gave me back my phone and my ID and said, "the reason I stopped you is that somebody saw you taking pictures with your phone and was concerned you were taking pictures of children in that neighborhood. And, out of an excess of caution, they notified the police."

I decided it wasn't the time to expatiate on why members of the Upright Citizens Brigade needed to call in the cops and waste everyone's time every time they see a shadow, so I just walked home. But here's the thing: this all happened more than a half hour after I took the picture. So were the police in full alert for that whole time, scouring the streets for a vagrant photographer? Or did the Upright Citizen see me sitting at the restaurant window and call in the police? And given that there were no children (or indeed, anyone) on the street, why did anyone care?

Uncle F reports that he's seen a lot more police cruisers than usual in his neighborhood - maybe it's all because of me? In any case he also told me that the
police there is famous for having nothing to do.

Anyway, I leave you with this message for the election: be afraid. Be very afraid.

- Adam Delved, vagrant photographer

In which Adam Delved escapes through a window, again

A while back, I may have regaled you with the tale of my daring escape from a bathroom into the Canadian winter, without shoes. That particular event had ultimately been caused by the curious geometry of our apartment, and immediately precipitated by an oven door popping open by just a few millimeters. I am now happy to report that my daring exploits continue.

The handle on our bathroom door had been slowly falling apart for a week or two, and I'd made a mental note to fix it at some point. That point had not yet arrived when I went in to take a shower one hot day. I pulled the door shut behind me. The door latched, and I found that the inside handle would not turn the tongue. I was trapped.

L was at work and would not be back for several hours. And a further problem: I had just come in from weeding the garden. I was sweaty, dirty, and I stank. And so I'd stripped off my clothes before going into the bathroom. I was stark naked.

As Bertrand Russell would say, this left me in a logical cleft stick from which there was only one recourse. A recourse I had practiced once before, in a different place and at a different season. It was out the window for me.
 

The road to freedom

It seems like most windows have some mechanism for removing a sash without tools. In this case, I found I could pivot the sash in and then lift it out at an angle. My pathway to escape was clear.

I spent some time considering whether or not I should take a towel with me. Ultimately I decided not to. I couldn't wear the towel on my way out; it would just get in the way of the maneuvers I had to do. And if I pushed out the towel so I could pick it up once I'd exited, it would just get dirty. And besides, the neighbours would still have seen a naked man climb out of a window. The neighbour's house was a hundred yards away, the door to get back in was close by, and I didn't think anyone would look out at just that instant.

It was time to turn plans into action. Get up onto the toilet. One leg over the window sash, and then - very carefully, watch out for splinters! - the other. Mild shock at summer breezes encountering parts of me which had never previously encountered summer breezes. Hop off the ledge onto the crawlspace cover. Very very fast scuttle to the back door, and back inside.

Victory was mine. I took my long-awaited shower - and then I got a screwdriver and took out that bathroom door handle!

We're back!

We're back from holidays! We took about ten days to go to Canada for a family reunion and had a great time picking berries and apples, eating, relaxing with extended family, eating, going to a museum, eating, having a mini-book launch, eating. Afterwards L went directly back home while I made detours to Toronto and Montreal.

And in other news, I am (once again) unemployed - I was let go in early August. I won't go into detail here, but there was quite a lot of politics and information control in my job. Which I'd known for a while, but then I thought, "my managers wouldn't be so bent on covering their own behinds that they would fire the talent, thus scuttling the company's future growth prospects, wouldn't they?" Turns out they would. In any case, for those wondering why I haven't written anything here for several months, the answer is that I was furiously trying to preserve my job.

And in reply to some questions we've gotten, yes, we have got health insurance. We've now had some first-hand experience on the Obamacare health exchange, and while the process of entering all the information was relatively long, it was also straightforward.

Happy Birthday America!

This 4th of July marks almost exactly a year since we moved to the US.  And even though this is technically the landscape I grew up with, I still spent most of last summer taking pictures of things that seemed particularly bizarre to my culture shocked brain.  Welcome to out corner of America:

Glory glory glory glory (its good to be me)

What's on this aisle again?

J bought these for me the day after we moved.  We still have them.

So much sugar...so little time

"Hey, Ma!  We're out of Chunk Cheese!"
"Check the Dairy Bunker!"

"Swag" is a common name  for  Christmas garlands?

New Castle "Farmers" Market = Random Flea Market

Historic building with drive through

The "new" Skid Row

Our local free paper:

Facts!

 I'm waiting to see the movie.

I always get my ammo  at the Friendly Pharmacy

Our particular corner of America has a thriving trade in Amish themed romance novels

Surrounded.

Happy 4th!

Not so bad

Happy birthday sewing machine! and how to make a mattress

In honor of my sewing machine's 21st birthday (and by extension, my 30th), I'm posting the directions for how I made the two twin mattresses in our guest room.  Happy birthday sewing machine!  It seems like I got you only yesterday, and now you're old enough to drink...

100% cotton, chemical free, handmade mattress

WARNING: What follows is a long detailed post about how to actually make a mattress based on the directions in Making a Cotton Mattress: An Aid to Extension and Village Workers in Many Countries created by the USDA in 1966, which I originally found at Root Simple.  The original notion that this was a doable project came from a post at a blog called Butterpies.

For the first mattress I followed the directions in the USDA manual exactly, except in cases where the directions geared towards the developing world in 1966 didn't apply.  For the second mattress I made a few adjustments.  Below is a basic outline of what the USDA manual says with my amendments.

Making a mattress is a lot simpler than you might think.  By far the hardest part was finding the right materials, especially needles.  The rest is just time (about 13 hours if working by yourself).

You will need: 

- 5.5 to 9 yards of fabric, depending on how wide your fabric is (see manual).  The manual recommends that the fabric should be at least 8 oz.  I bought an entire bolt of 10 oz canvas from Big Duck Canvas Warehouse because a) they had a special on it and b) they sent me free samples of canvas in different weights and generally had amazing customer service.  10 oz is heavy, especially after washing.  Most ticking fabric I found (the pretty striped kind you associate with an old fashioned mattress) was 7 oz.  Probably would have been okay, but I figured for the amount of work I was going to put in, I wanted something durable and easy to clean.  No regrets about going with the canvas except that it shrunk more than I expected (in cold water, line dried) and was a pain to iron after washing.  In hindsight, just iron it enough so that you can cut it more or less accurately and the rest of the wrinkles will work themselves out from being pulled so tightly.

- Stuffing.  The USDA manual recommends 35 lbs of dry, loose cotton, because in 1966 Brazil you might have that lying around.  I went with cotton upholstery batting from onlinefabricstore.net.  White Lotus also has a whole array of stuffing materials that I considered, and they were a close runner up in terms of price for cotton.

Environmentally, cotton is a pretty destructive crop to grow.  It requires a lot of pesticides and water and destroys the soil it grows on. Organic cotton (which at least removes the pesticide issue), is incredibly expensive.  "Green" cotton claims to be remnant cotton that is scraped up from the floor of the mill and would supposedly otherwise be thrown out.  White Lotus specifically advertises its cotton as "green", however after a bit of research, it seems like any unpunched batting you buy mostly comes from leftover cotton that can't be used for anything else anyhow, whether its advertised that way or not.  I didn't verify this...I just used it to justify to myself going with the lower cost non-green, non-organic batting.

The cotton bundles from onlinefabricstore.net claim to be 13 lbs each (I did not weigh them).  I used 3.5 bundles per extra-long twin mattress (45.5 lbs).

I considered using a layer of wool.  Organic mattress companies have a lot of good things to say about wool: fire resist, water resistant, temperature regulating, naturally bed bug/ bed mite resistant. I believe the first two claims, and am willing to accept the third one.  As far as bed mite resistance goes, I found some journal articles that suggested the opposite, got frustrated, and then decided I could always make a mattress topper our of wool later.

- Thread.  Get a good, heavy quality.  It's going to be under a lot of pressure from the stuffing.

- Strong cord. I got button twine that was specifically advertised for tufting from Tedco Industries (item TW-TU02 in their 2015 catalog).   DO NOT skimp out on this.  Tufting is the second most time consuming part of the whole mattress making process and if your tufts break, you will cry.

Seriously.  Don't buy cheap needles.

- Spear point tufting needle.  The first mattress I made was almost a disaster because I originally bought what was labeled as a "tufting needle" from Walmart (the only store that carries sewing supplies nearby).  I might as well have been trying to sew with a pipe cleaner or a chopstick.  I bought some needles off Ebay that weren't much better.  In frustration, I consulted Butterpies' blog to see if she had any advice, but all I could find was a picture of a small child easily pushing a needle through a mattress.  Why do you taunt me Butterpies?  Why?  J tried to help, but just snapped my second to last needle in half.  Together we researched how to sharpen needles and learned a lot of fun facts about how to be a safe heroin user.  Educational, but unfortunately nothing described there worked on cheap sewing needles.

I finally ended up on the website of a commercial needle manufacturer that only sold in bulk (unfortunately I don't remember who this was).  I called the number on their website and someone really nice talked me through needle selection and then gave me the names of a few people that they sell to.  One of these was Tedco Industries.  Their customer service and shipping rates were pretty terrible, but they got me what I needed- an 8" single spear point straight needle, part #TL-N08SS.  The USDA manual recommends a 16" needle, but I found the skinnier 8" easier to push through my 5" mattress.

- Curved needle.  The USDA manual recommends 7".  I ended up soldiering through both mattresses with a shorter, skinnier curved needle from Walmart and then the 8" tufting needle.  A spear point, decent quality curved needle will make things go a lot faster.

- Pins, tape measure, scissors, sewing machine.

- Platform for working on.  Ideally you need something where you can pass the needle through the mattress and grab it from the underside without lifting the mattress. I used a pop-up trundle bed frame. The USDA manual recommends wood slats supported on something.

Abbreviated How To 
(see USDA manual for details)

An honest look at the mess you'll make.
If you find yourself reaching for a power drill
and/or hammer, reassess your life.
Note: cotton fluff takes FOREVER to get out
of carpet.  Work on a hard floor if you can.

1. Decide how big you want your mattress to be (length x width) and cut two pieces of cloth to those dimensions plus 1.5 inches for every foot in length and width (so if you want a 6' x 4' mattress, cut your fabric to 6' 9" x 4' 6").  You'll want to round the edges on these.  There is a pattern for round edges in the USDA manual if you want to be exact, otherwise just make the same nice gentle, mattress like curve on all four corners.

2. Decide how thick you want the mattress to be and create a long strip of fabric 1" wider than that.  Calculate the perimeter of your finished mattress. For every foot, add 1.5".  That will be the length of your strip of fabric.

The USDA manual is for a 4" mattress, which seems really thin compared to today's standard foam-core mattresses.  The first mattress I made was 4", the second 5".  If you're going for a firm mattress (I was), I think 4" or 5" is fine.   The comfort will really depend on what sort of bed frame you have. For a softer mattress, you want something thicker so that you don't sink through and feel the bed slats under you.

3. Cut four pieces of cloth for handles that are 5" wide by however thick your final mattress will be plus 1".

4. Follow the directions in the USDA manual to sew this all together.  Basically you are going to make a box, but only sew the top on one side (so a box with a lid).  Be sure to sew the handles into the edge seems.

5.  Make some cotton tufts.  The manual recommends just balling up some cotton (56  pieces for a twin mattress...more for a large mattress or if personal preference dictates.  Luxury mattresses like to advertise more tufts).  I decided to roll my cotton tufts in little squares of cloth and then sew them shut.  It looked nicer and sturdier.  The manual wants you to make marks with a pencil for where to put your tufts on the fabric prior to sewing.  I found this faster: after sewing, lay out your sewn mattress box on the floor with the top and bottom pieces perfectly lined up (the top is the one that you haven't completely sewn shut yet).  Mark where you want the tufts on the top piece with a pin (going through both pieces of fabric) and a pencil mark.  Flip the whole thing over and put a pin through what is now the top piece of fabric wherever there is already a pin.  Flip everything back over and remove the pins that were going through both layers (leaving the pins in the single bottom layer). Your tufts are now marked on the bottom with pins and on the top with pencil.

6. Spread your empty mattress box on your work surface and carefully layer your stuffing inside.  Try to be systematic and make nice even layers, occasionally adding an extra layer going vertically down the middle and varying where the the pieces join in each layer.  Wrap the edges of the batting into the corners when starting a new layer so that the corners are extra stuffed.  If you're using batting, you shouldn't have to beat it into nice even layers like the manual describes, since the batting is already flat.  Note how mounded the middle the mattress looks in the pictures in the USDA manual at this stage. The batting doesn't have to be quite this mounded, but you want some mounding or else you will end up with a mattress that sinks in the middle as it wears.  I used about 45 lbs of cotton for both my 4" and 5" thick, extra long, twin mattresses.  I would sleep on concrete if J would let me, so I'm not a great judge of softness.  I consider the 4" mattress comfortable and the 5" slightly soft, but still comfortable. The half dozen house guests that have slept on them have described them both as very to moderately firm.  Butterpies used 18 lbs of wool for a 2" mattress, the USDA manual recommends 35 lbs of cotton for a standard 4" twin.

7. Sew the remaining three sides of the top shut.  I used the button twine for this.  Hand sewing takes forever.  Get a friend and sew towards each other from opposite sides for both this and step 10. A good needle will save time.  I ended up reverting to my fancy 8" tufting needle because the little needle made my fingers sore and I didn't have anything better.

Hand sewing the edge

8. Don't lie on the mattress!  You're going to really want to.  Don't! Don't do it!

9.  Lace the mattress.  The manual tells you to do this with one piece of thread.  Instead, I pulled individual pieces of button twine down and back up through each place I needed a tuft (where the pencil marks are on the top).  The manual says specifically not to do this...I don't know why.  If you used pins to mark the bottom in step #5, you can just feel for where you need the needle to come through on the bottom rather than looking underneath for a pencil marks.  Make sure the piece of button twine is long enough that it won't accidentally get pulled back through the mattress while you're tightening things up in the next step.  Loosely knot the two ends of twine for each tuft on top of the mattress.

10.  Create a rolled edge to firm up the mattress and make it sturdier.  I used button twine here and didn't attempt to force stuffing into the rolled edge as the manual describes.  This means that I ended up with more of ruffle going around the edges than a roll.  Functionally, I don't think it makes a difference, but it probably would make your mattress look like it has a crisper edge under the sheets (mine is kind of floppy and futon like). First you'll "roll" the edge on the top, then flip the mattress over and roll the edge on the bottom.  The directions in the USDA manual are kind of confusing, basically think of "rolling the edge" as making a ruffle around the entire edge (either with stuffing squeezed into it or not), where the seems for the "ruffle" are 2.25" from the edge of the original edge seem on the top and 0.25" from the original edge seem on the bottom.

11.  While the mattress is flipped bottom side up, insert your cotton tufts under the loop formed by the button twine you pulled through at each marked spot in step #9.  Remember to remove all the pins.  Carefully flip the mattress over again so that it is top side up.

12.  Tie the tufts.  My method for this was a bit funny.  You want them all tied with even tension.  Basically, I decided that the weight of my entire body was the most even pressure I could apply, so for each tuft, I climbed on top of the mattress, centered the knot between my two big toes, inserted a cotton tuft under the button twine, and tied it in place with a plain double knot.

Like it was there all along!  Note random copper pipe still waiting to be repaired from hydronic heating fail 2015

You're done!  You can now lie down on the mattress (assuming you didn't already in step 8).