Don’t go to paint stores that use imported machines to shake up the paint. Foreign agitators are not to be trusted
Blog
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Well, that was an inaccurate button push.
Notification of applicant readyness? I’m not ready. I’m blinkin’ terrified. Excited, yes. Thrilled at the future opening up. But also scared witless.
I can’t imagine how my mum felt travelling 1000s of miles to go from her small tropical island to come to the UK back in the 1960s. And here I am getting collywobbles thinking about upping sticks to move to a country where they speak the same language, use the same alphabet… Such a wuss.
But in terms of readyness, yes, the paperwork is ready. I’m not though. There’s stuff to sell and stuff to do. So I best get on with it.
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Oh oh. That’s a little bit of a scary button that I just pressed. on Flickr.
Oh oh. That’s a little bit of a scary button that I just pressed.
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Absence of skill never prevented me before
I am not a brickie. Not by any means. My first attempts at laying bricks – namely the pillars on which the sink rests are fine. By which I mean, they’re two pillars. Not that they’re fine. They’re more or less upright (but not exactly totally vertical, if I’m honest). I’ve done better since – I spent a lot of time on the pillar that supports the deck, and it’s pretty neat. It actually is vertical, and the joints looked nice when I’d finished. I was quite proud of that. You can’t see it, but I’m quite proud of it.
But it takes me a long time, and I can’t say as I enjoy it. However, there was a need for me to break out the mortar again. See, the sink has spent the last, err, four years, being not quite level. The problem is, it’s a Belfast style ceramic sink that weighs approximately 80 billion tons, and it’s resting on those two brick pillars that I built. But that didn’t take enough account of the fact the floor is vastly unlevel. I’d ignored this problem because it’s got enough of an internal slope that it drains just fine, but it’s bugged me forever that it’s not level with the worksurface. And I thought it looked bad, and therefore should be fixed before we sell the house.
So I’d bought a bag of ready-to-mix mortar (yay, lazyness!) and steeled myself for the task. I lugged my 2 ton car-jack up to the house, along with a big plank to stand it on, and a pile of scrap timber to stack on it to lift the sink up. I mixed the mortar, plunked my spirit level on the back of the sink, jacked the thing up, after some terror of it wobbling I got it settled at only 1mm out across it’s entire length (as opposed to about 5mm).
And then I remembered how much I hate dealing with mortar.
Look. I have quite a few strings to my bow. On a good day I can plaster, I can paint, I can plumb (many depths), I can do basic electronics, I can fix a morris minor. I’m not without skills. Today, for example, I stripped my laptop down to remove the dust bunnies which I’m hoping were the cause of its overheating. But being a brickie is not one of those strings. After a process which involved most of the mortar spending some time on the floor, and ending with me applying it with gloves on and discarding my trowel in disgust (and surprisingly little cursing) I finally ended up with it all ‘sorted’.
I now just need to wait for it to dry and then I can paint the whole thing white. Which might cover up the awfulness a little.
I also need to make the panels to go under the sink to cover up the plumbing and make it less crappy looking. I think. I may not do that. We may just remove all the stuff from under the sink, but I feel it’d look better if I did make something.
Given that things were going so ‘well’, and that I had a big pile of left over mortar (this was sort-of-planned); I decided to tackle the top few bricks on the falling-down wall in the garden. Realistically, the whole thing needs to come down, the mortar’s gone strange and is no longer holding the wall together very well and the bricks have been frost-eaten and are disintegrating.
On top of which, it looks like it was pretty appallingly built to start off with.
Never mind, though, because what I did was remove the completely falling-off-loose bricks, clean it up a little bit, then throw some mortar back in. And now it’s appallingly built and hopefully going to stick together a bit longer. Really it needs so much more. But hopefully it’ll do for the next people for a while.
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How to keep your venus fly trap happy (and alive) – by flora-file
After my post about cutting the flower buds off when a venus fly trap flowers, I got some questions about how to care for this plant, and specifically people asked how I could possibly keep one alive for ten years. Just follow these handy dandy tips to keep your venus fly trap chomping small invertebrates for years to come.
- Sunlight – Unfortunately this plant is not a houseplant. It needs direct sun to survive, hopefully about 8 hours a day. Mine lives on my patio and gets a few hours of direct light in the morning, and then bright indirect light (which is different than shade) for the rest of the day, and it seems to do fine. Plants that don’t get enough light tend to have elongated leaves, stretched out by the plants hopeless attempt to grow toward some source of light. Happy plants have short leaves and lots of traps. They still need light to photosynthesize no matter how many flies or spiders you feed them.
- Distilled or Purified Water – These plants are very sensitive to minerals dissolved in water, especially the fluoride and chloride found in most tap water. Not even spring water is okay, as it contains trace minerals that may be detrimental to the health of the plant. Rainwater will probably work, as long as you don’t live next to a coal burning power plant or some other source of gross air pollution. This may be the most common form of venus fly trap neglect, as people that have killed their fly trap have usually not followed this important rule.
- Peat Moss or Coco Coir substrate – The venus fly trap is a bog plant that naturally grows in mucky, nitrogen deprived soil. The whole bug eating behavior arose from the need for additional nitrogen that was severely lacking in the soil. Both peat moss and coco coir have extremely low nitrogen content, making them suitable for the needs of this plant. I used coco coir when I repotted mine a couple years ago, and it worked great. Coco coir is much cheaper than peat moss, and also a better choice environmentally.
- A steady diet of…nothing! – Don’t give it fertilizers or chemicals, no Dr Shultz or Miracle Grow. And don’t feed it hamburger either, that’s just wrong. If it is healthy it will catch bugs all by itself, almost like its evolved to catch bugs or something. Keep the substrate constantly moist. I keep mine in a container that doesn’t drain and keep it in standing water constantly. Whatever happens, don’t let it dry out.
If you follow these simple steps your fly trap should grow old of the bulb and long in the tooth. I’m not saying this is the only way to take care of your fly trap, but its how I take care of mine. And after 10 years its still working. Good luck, and garden on!
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Meet the Women of Stonewall
Since the trailer of the atrocious Stonewall movie was released, people are rightfully upset that it white-washes and erases the trans women and lesbian who started the Stonewall Riots. Posts are going around reminding us of these women, but usually only mentioned one or two, which I find a little a-historical. We should know who all these women are as they each played a significant role in what happened in June of 1969.
Stormé DeLarverie (December 24, 1920 – May 24, 2014)
Stormé was a biracial butch lesbian, drag king and considered the “Rosa Parks of the Gay Community”. When the police raided the Stonewall Inn, she was one of the women arrested and clubbed on the head by the police. She is credited with yelling
“Why don’t you guys do something?” which sparked the bystanders into action. (x) In her own words:
”[The officer] then yelled, ‘I said, move along, faggot.’ I think he thought I was a boy. When I refused, he raised his nightstick and clubbed me in the face.” It was then that the crowd surged and started attacking the police with whatever they could find, she said.
I asked my last question hesitantly. “Have you heard of the Stonewall Lesbian? The woman who was clubbed outside the bar but was never identified?” DeLarverie nodded, rubbing her chin in the place where she received 14 stitches after the beating. “Yes,” she said quietly. “They were talking about me.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, I asked, “Why did you never come forward to take credit for what you did?”
She thought for a couple of seconds before she answered, “Because it was never anybody’s business.” Stormé DeLarverie(source)
Marsha P. Johnson (June 27, 1944 – July 6, 1992)
Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson was a black trans woman, drag queen and LGBT activist. She, along with Sylvia Rivera, co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and is credited as being the first to fight back at Stonewall Inn. (x) Happy Birthday, Marsha! is a film project in the works to honor life, please consider donating.
“This was started by the street queens of that era, which I was part of, Marsha P. Johnson, and many others that are not here" Sylvia Rivera (Source)
Sylvia Rae Rivera (July 2, 1951 – February 19, 2002)
Sylvia was a Latina trans woman, drag queen and LGBT activist. As mentioned above she co-founded STAR with Marsha P Johnson, as well as a founding member of the
Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. She is also credited with being one of the first women to throw a bottle at the police.
“You’ve been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn!… It was one of the greatest moments in my life.
“ Sylvia Rivera (Source)
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (October 1940)
Also known as Miss Major, is a black trans woman and community leader for transgender rights with a focus on women of color. Miss Major was a leader in the riots who was struck by police and arrested. While in custody an officer broke her jaw. (x) A documentary called Major! is in the works to portray Miss Major’s role in the transgender activist community. (x) (I hope people watch this instead of Stonewall).
Many more people were involved in the riots, but one thing is clear, it was not started by cis white men, it was by these 4 women of color. Don’t let men take away our history.
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