Kitchen War... Hiatus

The first weekend in May, Robyn and I took a short hiatus from working on the kitchen to visit my sons in Nebraska; that's why there hasn't been a post in a couple of weeks. My oldest two, Kory and Kyle, live in Nebraska with their wives while the youngest, Kris, who is in the Marines lives in North Caroline.

It didn't take them long to get back to old times.

They've grown quite a bit in the last 20 years:

At least no furniture was broken this time.

Thursday night before we got out on the road, I was able to get part of the kitchen floor painted.

And I finally got the icemaker hooked up.

And had it hooked up long enough to make a batch of ice:

I was planning on leaving it hooked up while we were in Nebraska and then throw away all of the ice so I was sure the water line was thoroughly flushed.

Unfortunately, plans didn't work out that way. When I pushed the refrigerator back against the wall, I bent the tubing right where it connected to the valve. I couldn't find my tubing cutter to trim the bad piece off so I had to turn it off while we were gone. I don't like using plastic lines and copper tubing for ice makers is such a pain to work with. While I was in Nebraska, I ran into Menard's and found a braided stainless steel ice maker line. Worked great.

Before we left Friday morning, I got our garden plot marked out:

I was hoping for a plot 40' x 60' foot but the lilac bushes encroached on the area so the plot size was cut down to about 32' x 62'. Robyn looked at it and said it was too big. I agreed to cut back to where the old buried sidewalk which brought it down to about 32' x 35'. I didn't think it would be big enough... but we'll see if we can fit everything we want.

While we were in Nebraska over the weekend, I got to see my 2 grandkids, Maverick and Madelyn:

I believe that is Kory under there.

Kris also gave me a couple of gifts for my birthday:

A United State Marine NCO dress sword:

And a flag that flew over Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan. Both will go on our wall in the dining room.

It was a great weekend that flew by way too quickly.

This past weekend got off to an earlier start as I took a day of vacation to go to the Friends School plant sale at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. At 6:30 I was in line with Mary and Tino waiting to get a wrist band to get in later in the morning. Fortunately we were in the second group so we were able to get off to an early start when the shopping started. I'd already been refining my list for a couple of weeks.

In between getting a wrist band and returning, I got the final coat of paint on the kitchen floor:

Now I just have to get the four coats of polyurethane.

The Plant Sale line was already queued up when I got there about 8:30.

You could easily identify those who had done this before... many times. They brought their own carts or wagons including this neat homemade buggy made out of sleds, PVC pipe and a furniture dolly;

But in about 30 minutes, I had all of my plants loaded up and was ready to check out:

Too bad my garden was as ready as I was. It still needed to be tilled and I didn't have a tiller. I thought about renting one or having someone till it for me.

But I ended up getting this front-tined Southland rototiller from Mill's Fleet Farm. It's gonna get a workout.

Friday evening, I was able to make till the perimeter of the area north of the old sidewalk and an additional couple of rows:

And started to encounter some of the challenges...

Old lawn edging...

Rocks...

Old coax cable and tv antenna wire which I end up wrapping around the hitch of my truck to pull out of the ground.

All were buriend six to eight inches under that surface and I wondered if that was how much the ground had built up over the last 30 to 50 years.

Saturday morning, Robyn gave rototilling a shot.

While I uncovered the old sidewalk between our house and the house next door.

I had planned on leaving it in place and letting it serve as a walkway between the two portions of the garden, but it was in bad shape, either decomposing, very thin, broken or non-existent, so I removed it.

It was a long hard day as Robyn can tell you...

Here she's "watching" a stray dog that came up. Because she was licensed, animal control was able to return her to her owner.

The rest of the day, my rock collection continued to grow...

I may have found a good portion of Grace Iverson's rock garden as all of the rocks were pretty much in the same general area. There are probably just as many that I didn't toss over to the pile that are still in the garden.

Sunday morning, we made a run to Gerten's to pick up seeds for the garden. And then it was time to celebrate Mother's Day with Brunch at the M Street Cafe in the St. Paul Hotel.