Peppers; winter squash; Nibbles the cat

Even with the wet and cool summer we had this year, we still got a pretty decent pepper crop. We grew quite a few varieties -- many of our perennial favorites like gypsy, banana, anaheim, and jalapeno. The hot banana peppers came out pretty spicy, along with the jalapeno. One of our new favorites is a spanish frying pepper called pimiento de padron. It's a medium sized pepper with really good citrus flavor and some heat (cooler than a jalapeno but definitely noticeable).

We also grew bulgarian carrot, which turns a nice orange-yellow color. It's pretty hot but also flavorful. Hungarian black looks like a blue-black jalapeno and has about the same heat. Vietnamese Multicolor is a small pepper that starts out purple and graduates to cream, orange and finally red. It's a hot one, too.

But the hottest one we grew this year is a habanero-style pepper called jamaican hot chocolate. It is reputed to have an 85 day growing season (which is pretty short for a habanero). We didn't get any ripe fruit, but the green ones -- oh, my. I cut up a single small pepper to put in a batch of black bean soup, and it made a soup that is pretty freakin' hot. In addition, I made a big mistake -- I didn't wear gloves. That one pepper literally burned my skin. The worst-hit was my left thumb, which now looks like I got splashed with hot oil there. The oddest thing is that I didn't get a strong burning sensation -- it just felt like the thumb was covered with something stiff, like white glue. Capsaisin has interesting interactions with nerve endings so I figure the ones in my thumb went into hiding when the pepper hit.

We prepped up a bunch of our peppers last night, to make hot pepper jelly. It has a lot of hot peppers in it, but fortunately none of the jamaican hot chocolate went into this batch. We were planning on making a second batch that does use some of the very hottest ones, but are now rethinking that plan. I may just make a hot pepper sauce out of them, by brine-fermenting them and then pureeing them. That's an approach similar to how Tabasco sauce is made.

We also have harvested all of our winter squash. We just grew 3 different kinds this year -- cinderella pumpkin, sweet meat and gold nugget. The cinderella and sweet meat are very rich-tasting squash that we have grown before. The gold nugget is a new one, and we're not all that crazy about it. It tastes pretty "lean" -- not much sugar in it. Maybe it will sweeten up (some do). But so far it doesn't act like a "keeper", even though it supposed to be a winter squash that DOES keep well. Maybe that's because there's not much sugar in it to support mold or other decay mechanisms.

We're still pulling beets out of the garden, and may still get some cauliflower (maybe). We may get some volunteer asian greens to come back, and we have been eating volunteer swiss chard that has been coming up here and there around the house.

Finally, a story about our Siamese cat "Nibbles". About a month ago we noticed she was coughing a lot more than usual. At first we thought she was coughing up hair balls, but she rarely does that. Things developed to the point where she clearly was in severe stress and had a high fever, so we took her down to the emergency Vet. They initially thought she had some kind of viral/bacterial infection. So they gave her some antibiotics, kept her overnight on an IV to replace some fluids and her fever went down. We then took her home, for about 1 day. We kept an eye on her and saw that she was not improving -- in fact, even worse, acting distressed and having a lot of difficulty breathing. So we went back in to the emergency vet. We had to call on one of our neighbors to help out, because we had wine for dinner before we decided to take her in & didn't want to drive. Good neighbors are a great thing to have. Anyway, she went back in and they x-rayed her, found lots of fluid around (not in) her lungs. They say she had some kind of penetration from her lung into the lining, and it was full of nasty stuff. They drained out about a cup's worth of bloody serum, and put her in a high-oxygen environment to help her breathe. And did IV antibiotics.

After several weeks' worth of antibiotics (administered by mouth), she is pretty much back to normal, but we figure that we almost lost her that weekend -- twice. A lucky (and now even more expensive) cat.

Radon Update: success!

We have achieved Radon mitigation, according to the EPA guidelines. Last night the first readings showed up (it takes the Radon detector about 2 days to come up with a fresh reading, then it starts a rolling average). It was 2.0. I then plugged a rather substantial hole around one of the pipes coming up thru the slab, and this morning the measurement had dropped to 1.7. Since our target was 4 or less, we have done it! However, the hole-plugging job I did was a temporary fix (I jammed plastic food wrap between the pipe & concrete). I think I can improve things a bit more by using something a little more permanent, like mortar. Thing is, mortar can crack, so I may have to come in later and caulk it. We shall see....

We may try using some "smoke in a can" to find more leaks, now that we have a decent pressure differential under the slab (or maybe light a few incense sticks), but now I feel more comfortable working in the basement. We will start doing things like putting in storage shelves, work benches and experimenting with concrete stains.

Birthday trip; Mushroom hunt; home items

A long-standing birthday tradition has been to celebrate those "significant" birthdays (like the noughts: 40th, 50th, and now 60th) in Bend, eating dinner at the Pine Tavern. The Pine Tavern is a good restaurant with great views of the Deschutes, flowing through the town. This year we stayed with our friends Percy and Joan (Percy also happens to be my old boss. ) The above photo shows Mt Bachelor, taken across the Deschutes not far from Joan and Percy's house in Sunriver.

A foggy morning by the river.

The footbridge crossing the Deschutes. The bridge was originally built for vehicles but now has been closed to all but foot traffic, bicycles and horses.

On to something different. This is a photo of an Amanita (species?). We were on an early Chanterelle hunt, not really expecting to find much, when we started seeing a large quantity of these. It was pretty clear that they were Amanitas. Pantherina? That's a WAG (wild-ass guess), since I haven't checked to see if that variety is a spring or fall 'schroom.

Some bounty from the garden -- the first batch of Marinara. Mmm, was it tasty. We used some of the left-over sauce to make a home-made pizza.

And lastly, an excerpt from the Radon Saga. We had suspected (rightly) that we would have elevated Radon levels in the basement. So our specifications for the house included a Radon mitigation system -- plastic under the concrete slab, and a ventilation system in the gravel base, connected to a vent pipe that goes up to the rooftop. We started making measurements before any of the joints were sealed. Initially the Radon was measuring around 50 pico-curies. The EPA recommends Radon mitigation if you have 4 pico-curies or more.

Here's a factoid: 4 pico-curies equates to ONE radioactive decay event every 10 seconds, in a cubic liter of air.

I then sealed all the joints -- the one between the floor and walls, and also the expansion joints that had been cut in the floor. That got the Radon down to about 9. We had hoped that simply sealing the basement would get us below 4, since that would give us a totally passive mitigation system.

Since that didn't work out, I started working on installing a fan in the system. Fans are specially-built for this application, since they have to be totally sealed to prevent Radon from getting into the house, and run quietly 24/7 for years on end. I bought one from an online store, along with the installation hardware and a manometer to test the pressure in the pipe (it also serves as an easy way to check that the fan is working, since it is in a location that's a lot easier to get to). The whole idea behind the fan is to create a low-pressure region under the concrete slab so the Radon goes there, instead of inside the house. Since the fan was designed to work with 4" pipe, and we have 3" pipe, I had to make some adapters. The photo above shows my makeshift "miter box" I used to cut some scrap 4" pipe to stuff inside the 3"-4" adapters.

I then waited for a reasonably cool day to install the fan -- the fan goes in the attic and I didn't want to cook myself up there. I cut some plywood to fit through the attic entry and used it as planking to make sure I didn't step or fall through the ceiling. It compressed the insulation some but our online search indicated that it would not affect the R-value much, if at all.

The fan is now installed and running. I reset our Radon detector and should know in a day or so if the mitigation was successful or not. It should be -- we're pulling about 1" of vacuum on the system. But it may take a week or two for the residual Radon to decay down to less than 4 pico-curies (the half-life of Radon is about 3.8 days).

Garden; house project retrospective

Garden shots. Above: cucumbers in the background, climbing the trellis; peppers (about 20 different kinds from scorchingly hot to mild); and in the foreground some herbs.
Here's an overhead shot of the tomato forest. They're so tall & deep that I raised the camera above my head and took a series of shots. This is the best one.

Mark out standing in his field. Heh Heh.

Lettuces.

Radishes, beets and broccoli. In the far back: broccolini going to seed. It's all volunteer stuff.

4 different kinds of basil: lemon, purple (opal), Thai and Genovese; and, in the background, Zucchini plants. We put some of the Genovese in a Fritatta this morning. I was encouraged to _not_ use sweet potatoes in the Fritta again .

And finally, a quick retrospective. This time last year we were witnessing the discovery of humongous rocks lurking below ground, and also celebrating the garden produce. We're still dealing with rocks (in fact, I'm going to be moving some around today) and of course celebrating this year's garden. We have gotten about three ripe tomatoes out of the garden, and all of them are cherry tomatoes. Let's pray for a nice long Indian Summer....

Of Misconnections

We bought a new TV to go into our house. It's a Vizio 32", can do 1080p and has gotten good/bad reviews -- the good: it has good picture quality for the price. The bad: it has a rep for poor reliability. Knowing that, we bought it from Costco because they take stuff back.

We're not really interested in paying a lot for cable/satellite TV so we're viewing OTA (over the air) transmissions and need an antenna. I had a small indoor one that appears to not have survived the move, or it has acquired a special kind of Maxwell's demon: it can only pick up Christian TV stations (really). That's all well and good (pun intended) but I wanted my PBS, too.

We had an old Radio Shack outdoor antenna I had in the attic of our old house, so I set it up in the family room and aimed it about where I thought the transmitting towers were, and suddenly we had 33 channels -- PBS included. Now that we had some variety, I needed to get that huge antenna out of the way. Our new attic is filled with heater and ventilation ducts, plus it's just plain HOT up there right now, so for temporary I thought I would use one of the upstairs bedrooms for the antenna. They all have a UHF cable as part of the low-voltage house wiring, so I had this bright idea of connecting the antenna there, then going to our distribution box and connecting the family room cable to the bedroom cable (thru a splitter, because I also needed a male/female adapter). So I made the connections and -- no signal to the TV. What's this all about??? So I put on my Failure Analysis hat, got my ohmmeter out, and started checking connections. Fortunately for me, the TV, splitter and antenna all have transformer inputs or outputs, so cables that are connected to them look like a low resistance. Check this one, check that one....no connection. Hmm. So I started randomly checking the other cables and quickly discovered that they were (mostly) mislabeled. I made a guess that the installers thought the area next to the Kitchen was the Living Room (not the Family room) and connected that to one of the outputs of the splitter. The input came from the other cable that ohmed out (it was the other bedroom). And suddenly the TV came alive again.

Now, in cases where everything is used in the expected fashion -- all cables connected to a distribution box and a known "live" input to it-- this wouldn't matter, because the signals don't care what the labels on the cable are. And I figure that the phone/ethernet labels probably are screwed up, too: but the same argument applies, so who would know. It's when you use something in an unexpected way that interesting discoveries are sometimes made.

Even so, I thing I will let our builder know, in order to provide feedback regarding the quality of the install.

First Week

There are boxes scattered everywhere, but we are (mostly) moved into our new house! We're in the process of figuring out how our new stuff works. Here are a few discoveries so far....

The wood floors are dark enough that they show dirt pretty quickly. We're in the process of figuring out how to clean them without scratching them. Any dirt embedded in the brooms will leave scratch marks.

The stove, a 30" DCS gas top/oven works very well. I'm surprised just how differently the gas cooktop works compared to our electric (in a good way). Pans heat up much faster, and the heat is very even. The simmer setting is perfect for cooking hot cereal, and Low is just right for cooking up a batch of chicken stock.

Our phone/internet took (is taking) some time to set up. We wanted to keep our old phone number, which worked out when we moved from the old house to our temporary digs; but trying to go back apparently wouldn't work out. We found the reason was that our phone company was trying to set us up with Fiber, not copper-based phone/internet....and the Fiber comes from a different exchange. Even though they're the "same" company, for some reason they couldn't give us our old copper-based phone number??!!! So we told them we wanted copper, not fiber. After a lot of phone calls, they showed up, ready to put in a copper line for the phone and fiber for the internet...pretty strange. The installers were scratching their heads, wondering why the heck we would want to do that (we didn't). But in the process of setting up the account for copper, we got our old phone number back. And then we told the phone company to just install the fiber line (it actually costs a little less than the copper phone service). So now we have our old phone number and fiber phone/internet. The games you gotta play sometimes.

A new set of tasks

Here it is, our permit to live in the house we built. It's been a long time coming. But now we have a new set of tasks -- moving in, decorating, working on the landscaping. The next set of photos start to show the canvas we have to work with....

The view from the front.

Our pile of rocks (one of several). We will use a lot of these for the bones of the landscaping we will do.

Moving on to the interior. This is sort of a self-portrait, along with showing the master bath.

The cook top. If you look closely you can see that the center burner is on. According to the user manual, each burner should be turned on for 20-30 minutes to burn off all the manufacturing oils prior to using it to cook with. The same goes for the oven and broiler.

The two gas fireplaces have a similar "break in", so I fired both of them up. They surprised us by making quite a stink. We had opened the house up anyway to air it out so it wasn't a big deal. We were outside working on the garden.

A viewpoint that has been used any number of times, to show the kitchen...

..and family room...

...and our bright upstairs bathroom.

Occupancy permit

Our contractor gave us a faxed copy of the occupancy permit for our new house today.

Not everything is done yet, but she said that we can probably start moving into our new (completed) house by midweek next week.

Yeah.

Driveway, sidewalk, hardwood floor

The window well covers are completed, as well. They ended up costing us about $500 apiece.

The infamous sidewalk is in. The County really didn't want us to put a sidewalk in: they just wanted the money to spend elsewhere. Given our situation (likely to be pulled into the City), we knew that money was just going to be gone -- so we put in a sidewalk, for less than what the County was going to extort from us anyway.

Oh, yes, here's some more time-reversal. Above: the completed driveway. Below: in progress.


Our Ipe' flooring is done. It looks pretty nice! Our floor-finishing sub was taking photos of it as well -- I think he likes how it turned out, too...


This Friday we will be doing a walk-thru with our contractors, so we really are nearing the end of this part of the project. Then will come the move-in, landscaping, etc. The grounds around the place are a disaster so it will take some work there. We probably will hire some help for assistance on that end.

House update (what else is new?)

The upstairs fireplace surround and mantel. We went with more of a minimalist approach here. The rainforest brown marble looks pretty good!

This is the powder bath, showing the lights and just a little bit of the shower stall on the right. The mirror has not been put in yet.

This shows the master bath shower. Oh, by the way, we have learned that the shower doors have been installed. More photos on that later this week or weekend.

Our kitchen backsplash above the range. The range and hood are functional!

Finally, a photo of our 2-tier dining room lamp. It's up and wired in.

The final inspections for the electrical, plumbing and HVAC have been completed, with no problems.

Coming up: the last of the exterior concrete work, driveway/sidewalk paving, finishing the hardwood (Ipe'). We have decided on the bathroom accessories (towel bars etc) and are going with Kohler "Devonshire" stuff, in oil rubbed bronze. The best prices we have found for this kind of thing are from FaucetDirect.com (no $$ for this plug, oh well ;).

Resources

I thought it would be good to list some of our favorite places we have shopped at for various parts of our house project. We're not getting any endorsement $$ for this, just want to give credit for some good businesses that excel in customer service and in many cases are just good people. In no particular order:

Wood/ceramic/stone flooring and accessories: Stone-Wood Outlet. We bought our Ipe' flooring there, for $2.99/SF, and paid the same price for the 12x12 glass mosaic stuff we used for the upstairs bathroom vanity top; and also bought our Baltic Brown mini-slabs there for a good price.

Good products, very helpful/knowledgeable: Emser Tile. Natural and ceramic/glass tiles and accessories.

Lots of natural/ceramic surface material, helpful: Portland Direct

Used/surplus building materials and antique/funky items. Great folks: Building Material Recycling This is where we got our fir doors! They also sell new doors with manufacturer warranties for about 75% off list, and can get the doors pre-hung for a pretty good price too.

Lighting: the Globe outlet store in Portland. That's where we found our nice art-glass lights for a very deep discount. They were very helpful, despite the fact that they weren't making much money on that part of the job.

Metal fabricator for the window well covers: Alameda Metalworks

Stone for the exterior and fireplace: Avison. They are now owned by Weyerhauser. Maybe they were amused by our toiling over the "pit run" for our rock, or just took pity on us, but in any event they would often bring up some good stuff to make it easier for us.

I'm sure I will think of more but these folks really stand out. YMMV but that's always the case.

House progress report

Here's a photo showing the wet bar upstairs. The Baltic Brown granite is installed, along with the sink, faucet and backsplash. The under-cabinet lights are there, waiting to be installed. We bought the granite in 18" x 26" "mini-slabs" from our favorite local flooring surplus store here, for a little over $10/square foot.

Another photo of the upstairs shower-bath surround. The Marmoleum flooring has been installed, and you can see the toilet has, too.

Upstairs vanity, plumbing and backsplash completed.

This shows a bit of our Rainforest Brown marble we got for the upstairs fireplace surround. Some of the pieces turned out to be book-matched and we will take good advantage of that.

Here's another shot of one of our nice ceiling lights. This is over the Nook.

Finally, here's a photo showing the state of the kitchen backsplash. The area behind the range is being worked on at the moment. The vent over the range has been installed, too.

Lisa took all these photos.

Things they be a happenin' !

Yet to be done: More concrete work. That includes the front steps, a set of steps from the master bath rear door, the steps from the garage up to the utility room, and a small 3 X 3 pad for the side garage door. Grouting the floor slate. Installing the stair steps and risers. Finishing the floors/stairs and sealing the slate. Paving the driveway and sidewalk. Moving in (?)...maybe in early June...party!

We did run into a small "gotcha" regarding the downstairs Fir doors. Lisa and I hunted those down and got them hung; but apparently that didn't include routing out all the recesses for the door hardware. So that needs to be done before the door hardware can be installed. We definitely revealed our "newbie" status there when it comes to housebuilding....

Family; house details

Our mother, age 83, died a about 1 week ago. Her passing was very quiet and easy. Breast cancer had spread too far in her body and precluded any remedy. She won't see the house in person, but we did make a video walk-through of the place and were able to show it to her before she died. My wife told me not to give up my day job, but I thought the video came out OK for an unscripted piece. It won't go on YouTube though.

This photo shows our wet bar countertop and backsplash in progress. The tile backsplash is Pratt & Larsen handmade tiles we bought at their outlet store for $1.50/lb. We had thought we would use a nice brown and white marble called "rainforest brown", but it didn't work well with the Baltic Brown granite we are using for the countertop. However....

The rainforest brown marble does work well with the Ipe' floor. So we're going to use it around the upstairs fireplace and trim it with a rust-colored 1/2" X 12" ceramic tile we got from Emser tile.

This is a photo of the marble and a dark glass tile. Taken at the Emser show room.

And last in this series, a photo of one of the chandeliers we purchased. This is a very nice art-glass and bronze piece. It may not be obvious from this photo, but the piece has oak leaf details. We got this, and a matching ceiling fixture for the master bed room, at the Globe outlet store in Portland. The chandelier originally sold for about $500 but was marked down to $160 because it's on closeout. We also got a 2-tier version for the dining room with a similarly great discount.

Surfaces; fireplace revisited

Here's a nicer photo of the family room fireplace. I used the flash to fill the shadows a little bit. It looks pretty nice!

Here is a photo showing some slate we may use for the kitchen backsplash. It's the same type of slate we used for the floor, but it's not honed.

The photo above and the one below are showing some tiles we are interested in for the master vanity top. We had to give up our granite top because the sinks didn't line up properly with the base cabinet. Oh, well -- I guess it goes on Craigslist...


Above I'm showing an interesting detail with the glass tiles. We may do something like this for the master shower stall. We're planning on using "Ivory" Travertine in the shower & it's a little plain so we're looking at adding some other kinds of visual interest

Our front hall, with the slate. It's been stuck down but no grout yet. We decided on the grout color yesterday. It will be a light gray -- the slate has so many different colors going on that we went with a very neutral color.

The front door will be going in soon, replacing the construction door. We have decided on a light stain color -- "fruitwood" -- to complement the fir.

Fireplace, with attitude

Here is our hard-won stone on the wall. It happens to be near a fireplace. Odd. Anyway, it's good fireproofing . We collected the stone from the same quarry we used for the exterior, but we chose stone that was thinner and more uniform, for a slightly more refined look. It still is kinda rustic, but that's OK. Oh, we "only" got about 1500 lbs this time. It cost $30, not counting our time and gasoline.


And for scale, here's Lisa in front of the new fireplace. There's the attitude ;). We decided to forgo a mantel, because we will have built-in shelves on either side. Plus, due to current code requirements, a wood mantel would have to be 5 feet above the fireplace. Maybe that's to keep those highly flammable Christmas stockings away from the fire....but that height would not be very convenient for Lisa.

Note:
We got the rock on Monday, unloaded it, washed it, and sorted it into piles on the back patio (then went home and collapsed). By the end of Tuesday, a lot of it was up around the fireplace. But do the math -- 1500 lbs *4 (the number of times we moved each stone).....6000 pounds, or 3 tonnes worth of work.

These photos were taken by our contractor with his cell phone.