Successes All Over The Place

What a weekend it's been here on Mars. I somehow found a giant burst of energy & got all this accomplished:

Saturday -- Beer!

First brew on Mars: a Belgian Saison that I'm planning to bring with us on vacation in July.

3 kinds of malt + 3 kinds of hops + a sock full of crushed grains = hooray!

We don't have a tub here like we did at the apartment, so some of the steps got a little dicey, but overall there is just so much more space here that it's much, much easier to brew overall. Success!

While the beer was boiling away happily, I tried making a heated bed for Zoey, using the bed warmer we put on our mattress when it gets chilly (i.e. 11 out of 12 months). She gets so relaxed in the sun & loves being under a blanket so much, that we thought we would experiment & see if she would choose a heated bed over her regular bed for the evening. She is from the desert, after all.

Sleeping dog! Success!

Feeling ambitious, I thought it was high time to bottle the Oud Bruin I brewed last May & have been letting age quietly in a corner all this time.

So old! So sour!

This is a six gallon glass jar. I kind of can't believe that it survived the move. 

After all was said & done, it was around 11pm. Adrienne came home with Amanda in tow a little earlier, & they celebrated the historic bottling with me. Meanwhile, Zoey patiently waited for me to finish & stop making such a racket.

"I will punish you later by barking at 3am."

Sunday -- Peas & Paint!


The planters in the back porch from a couple weeks ago are almost ready to move outdoors. That means the Pea Tangle, with its contagious Powdery Mildew, must go.

A last look at the pea plants:

We will all miss you...

A view of how big they are, compared to me:

I wasn't sure how I was going to harvest the peas 3 feet above my head anyway.

Two paper grocery store bags later, this is what remains:

Goodbye, peas

Most of the pods are too blighted to eat, so I shelled as many as there were ready for shelling:

This is about 2 cups. Success!

Then I set to painting the wood paneling in the hallway, dining room, & kitchen! A long day's labor, but at 7pm, this is what I had to show for it:

Much brighter! Success!

I mentioned the other day that the walls in the bathroom were off-white. Well, next to the mauve trim, they definitely look like a dirty, old off-white. Next to the white trim I just painted, however, you can see that they actually are a lemony butter cream kind of color. The yellow tiles, yellow walls, & white trim make me feel like I'm standing in the middle of a lemon cake. The white walls & mauve trim in the dining room & hallway now make me feel like I'm standing in the middle of a strawberry cake. Adrienne said the same thing to me when I finished. 

I'm glad I don't have much of a sweet tooth.

A "before" photo, for comparison:

The painted-over wood paneling reminds me of New England beach cottages I've been in. Now I know that that's not a quaint New England style -- it just means the owners of these cottages didn't want to pay to renovate. 

I'm beginning to doubt whether the mauve trim is Jackie's doing, by the way. It just seems too fresh a coat of paint. I suspect the listing agent had some painters come in to "spruce up" the place, & he just told them to put on whatever was cheap. Or, he likes mauve.

Here's the kitchen, after:

Success!

Here is a "before" photo, for comparison:

No trees were harmed in the construction of this kitchen.

There is a large gap between the wall & the set of cabinets that I thought would be even more obvious once the wall were painted white:

On a windy day, you can feel the breeze blow through here.

Well, it so happens that while I was cleaning out the Haunted Garden Shed, I found a length of the plastic faux-wood trim that is capping the wood paneling in the kitchen.  

Voila!

Success!

Meanwhile, Adrienne had a wonderful time rampaging throughout the city's Pride festivities with friends, enjoying a gorgeous San Francisco weekend. Very well-deserved rest & recuperation after a long week of being stuck at home with the dog, patiently training her through her nervousness about being left alone, & playing Florence Nightingale, trying to get drops in the dog's ear for a worrisome ear infection that seemed to come out of nowhere on Wednesday.

Lastly, one more success for this weekend: we've been waiting for a clean bill of health from the vet on Zoey's knees before we let her up on the couch with us. I mean, she tries & tries when we're there, & she sneaks up on there when we're in another room, but strictly speaking, it's still off limits. We got the greenlight from the vet a few weeks ago, but then out of the blue (please, dog, no more surprises) the following week, she started limping around from some mystery injury, so we put it off. Finally, she seems to be in good shape, so much to her surprise (seriously, she didn't respond to the invitation right away -- I'm not sure she believed her eyes at first), today was the day that she was finally allowed up for evening snuggling.

An excellent weekend was had by all!