Spring and misc.

I got into the spring season mindset last night by planting some pansies for the front porch. I'm pretty good with houseplants, but this is my first real foray into outdoor flowering plants now that we have some space for them.


Since it's still early spring and not many other "ready to plant and flower" plants were available yet, I got some seeds and will attempt to grow some geraniums and delphiniums from scratch. Amy's also being brave and will try once again to grow a tomato plant. Her past attempts at this have not been very successful, but maybe this is the time for success.

Another fun household project last night was painting a birdhouse that a friend got for me. It's this little kid "Paint it yourself!" birdhouse kit that came with paints and a pre-made birdhouse. Simple enough, and I had way too much fun painting it. I thought a racing stripe was just the right touch. Hopefully this weekend will find it set up out behind our house.


I'd put up a bird feeder, too, if I knew it also wouldn't become a huge giant rat feeder at the same time. When I mentioned that to someone else, he asked, "Well how would a rat get up to it if you hang the feeder up high?" He's obviously never seen how birds use a bird feeder. They kick the seeds out all over the place looking for their favorites, and so half the seeds end up on the ground. Instant rat buffet.

Speaking of giant evil rats, I saw my next door neighbor last night and he mentioned that his daughter (who lives with him) recently had rats in her car as well. So they went from my car to hers this winter and did a lot of damage there, too. Damn rats! Thankfully they haven't touched my car in ages, but I know they're still around. One morning a few weeks ago I went out back to put the trash out. There was still snow on the ground and as I walked back toward our back door, noticed some odd markings in the snow near the edge of our driveway and fence. Upon closer inspection, those odd markings were rat footprints. Very large rat footprints, complete with a large tail dragging mark. Yeesh.

Moving on - what's that picture there to the right? Why it's a switch loop that I wired all by myself! I'm taking a basic home wiring course at a local community college here and it's pretty damn cool. The teacher is really funny and has the best Baltimore accent I've ever heard. He tells great stories and teaches us a lot of really helpful stuff. We do all our wiring projects on sheets of 2x2x1/2" sheets of plywood, and here's my first. I wired a light switch to a light fixture with the power source coming in from the light switch to the fixture. If that makes you think, "Where else would the power source come from?" then I'll answer "Sometimes the power source comes through the light fixture and then goes down to the light switch that controls it." I'll be wiring something like that at my next class.

So, anyway, my first wiring project was a success. He gave me a light bulb and then wired up my project to his extension cord and had me flip the switch. No one was electrocuted or killed and I did not burn down the school building. Success!

The class is very enjoyable, but I still feel like a lot of it is going over my head. Electrical work is not always an easy thing to grasp and I hope I can at least get the basics down so I can do some little projects myself in the future instead of having an electrician charge us $400/hour for something simple like rewiring an outlet.