Yes, Nancy, they certainly do flower just like that, mine has a very delicate scent, and you are right, the less you fuss over cuttings the better they like it. I like to cut lemonade bottles in half and pierce holes in the bottom for drainage, then like your butter jars, I can see any root developement.. The snow has gone, the sun is out, so I think I'll go and tinker about outside. Happy gardening.
(3/13/23) Sunday The tin can tied on top of the outdoor light fixture in the country slipped off to the side. The bird has built a nest there again. It makes a real mess on the porch. No bird in sight all afternoon. The nest is about 8 inches from the ceiling. Stuck the phone camera up there on top of it. The nest will stay put now. A wren is now ruled out—the eggs are not the same. The bird that built a similar nest in the barn rafters looked like an Eastern kingbird. It could have been an Easter phoebe. They look similar. Kingbird (left); Phoebe (right) Phoebe fits in all the categories. It migrates and nests earlier than most other birds (March). Eastern phoebe from an internet VIDEO. Looks like the same cheap light fixture from Lowes. I will have to make a shelf for this one, because they never give up on that light fixture. The tin can was my mom's idea, only she filled it with sand, and the weight eventually broke the old plastic light.
(3/14/23) Tuesday Monday's reply from door salesman: "... the height (I'm sending you) is 1/16 of an inch larger than the dimensions you gave me. This is the case because if I put in the exact size you gave me, there was an error in sizing due to size limitations with the cut of glass. I know this because I just spoke with customer service and they told me to change the nominal height of the door to 85 11/16" instead of 85 5/8". This extra 1/16" in height should be totally fine when it comes to installation after speaking with Tyler." I'm glad Tyler knows this will be "totally fine.".. The man is psychic. ... Me? . I had to go measure. Again. One-sixteenth of an inch is almost nothing, but it will have to come from sanding down the floor under the threshold 1/16" more than planned (to level it). There is no extra room at the top because of the casings (long story). So I asked him to tell the factory to leave the casings UN-attached to the unit, to be safe. Their installers prefer that anyway. Where are the hinge locations? Reply: "The slab (actual door) height is 82 5/16” and the hinge locations coming down from the top are 8.906”, 41.906”, and 74.906”. I hope those locations are helpful." The 82 5/16" cannot possibly be correct (I get 83 7/16). But close enough for what I need to know. I think the salesman cannot handle fractions but seems confident with decimals. Still waiting on email instructions from the secretary how to make the downpayment by electronic check. It's normally easy. I do it all the time. They must have some special software to avoid giving out an account number. A paper check dropped in the USPS mail Monday would have been there by now. I want to get this part over with, so I can start worrying about the preparation instead.
An all-nighter... Income tax never seems to get easier. It was time to try something different this year:. start earlier, set one small goal every day, instead of one long session. Works well for yard work. It was Thursday, the night before the forum went down. I downloaded all the forms, worksheets, and instructions about 10 pm. Too early to go to bed. Started searching for some software (besides TurboTax), and stumbled upon Cash App Taxes (CAT) around midnight. It used to be Credit Karma Tax. Credit Karma software was "acquired" by the company that owns Cash App (similar to PayPal) in 2020. Modified for use on a desktop in 2021. Still free, including e-filing both federal and state returns. Accepts more complicated returns than Federal free e-file. Recommended by CNET for those who already know how to do their taxes. Seemed perfect. I didn't expect or want much, just do the arithmetic. To get started (theoretically) you have to download an app and create an account on the phone. They send you a passcode by text message. I got the app installed fine, but no passcodes ever came. Troubleshooting came up with nothing. I gave up and started searching for something else. Around 4:00 am the phone starts beeping. A flood of passcodes arrived in text messages. The last one to arrive had expired. "Too many tries. Try again later." About an hour later everything worked. I was now on a roll! To kill time while all this was going on I kept setting new little tax goals. By 6:00 am all the information necessary for completing taxes had been assembled. Didn't want to lose momentum by sleeping, so I entered all the information. By 7:00 am it created a beautiful pdf file with colored pages identical to the Federal forms, all filled in, including all the worksheets. Ready to print out. Who cares whether e-file works or not. continued later...
continued... Next morning up at 10:30, checked everything by hand, and tried the State taxes. The only problem was that pesky oil/gas royalty check. There were two forms you could use. One makes it taxable for the state (which it should be) and the other excludes it. I just had to figure out how to describe it differently to make it choose the right one. Btw, the software discovered a new Federal tax that I was supposed to pay and wasn't aware of. On the third day... I purchased a desktop copy of TurboTax. Crazy? Probably. to be continued...
continued... I wanted to see what's the big deal about TurboTax. For my returns it does the same things as CAT, except it forces you to use the 1040-SR form for seniors if you're over 65. It had the same problem with the royalty check. The go-it-alone option was very confusing. The walk-you-through-it option was about the same difficulty, but very long and drawn out. It was complicated to figure out how to print out a paper copy suitable for filing. TurboTax Ads have always been sneaky and confusing, imo. Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free (2019). LINK "The success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens. For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it.” Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes. LINK "Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. For a decade, proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped. "As part of an agreement with the IRS Free File program, TurboTax allowed individuals making less than $39,000 a year to use a free version of TurboTax; a 2019 ProPublica investigation revealed that TurboTax deliberately made this version hard to find, even using search engines, and that it deceptively steered individuals who search for the free version to TurboTax versions that cost money to use. " Intuit will probably offer to buy Cash App Tax in order to Deep-Six it. I don't usually say never, but I will never use TurboTax.
My wife used to work for H&R Block, and the only computerized tax prep she even complained about correcting their mistakes was TurboTax. She said they were frequently faced with correcting mistakes that TurboTax made, especially when the IRS found the errors several years after the fact.
Interesting. Intuit (owner of TurboTax) bought out Credit Karma in December 2020, but Cash Apps bought Credit Karma's software in 2020. I wondered why Intuit didn't retain both. Turns out... Justice Department Requires Divestiture of Credit Karma Tax for Intuit to Proceed with Acquisition of Credit Karma (November 25, 2020) "The Department of Justice announced it is requiring Credit Karma to divest its tax business, Credit Karma Tax, to Square Inc. (owner of Cash Apps) in order for Intuit, the creator of TurboTax, to proceed with its $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma. The department said that without this divestiture, the proposed transaction would substantially lessen competition for digital do-it-yourself (DDIY) tax preparation products, which are software programs used by American taxpayers to prepare and file their federal and state returns."
(3/20/23) Right after the "smoke incident" in the kitchen in December, I bought 2 spray cans of Zinsser stain-covering paint made specially for ceilings. It sprays upward. Tried it right over the stove. The stuff drifts through the air like fuzzy dust all over the kitchen. Fortunately it cleans up easily. It would have taken a whole can for each 2'x2' tile, to put it on thick enough to cover. Then the texture would look different. I quit after one can. Yesterday the job was moved back to the front burner. There are 20 tiles left over in the basement, all carefully wrapped in plastic. I'm hoping if I strategically replace enough tiles it won't be so noticeable. This morning I put up 2 new full panels to see how they compared. The effects of the spray are visible on the far left panel. Of course the color would be whiter, even if there never was any smoke in the kitchen. I could always burn more bacon grease and even it out. I could also buy all new panels and start over, but that's a huge job. I think I'll just keep the step ladder in the kitchen and replace a few at a time, like the income taxes. Save a complete replacement for the next incident.
Could you remove a couple panels and spray them on the floor or on saw horses, then put them back up? It would be a pain, but it might save a few bucks. Just use regular sealer in a spray or roller.
Thanks, Don. It shouldn't cost anything to replace some of those panels with the unused ones. They've just been sitting in the basement taking up space. Taking them down and putting them back is half the work. There are enough to replace one full row next to the windows. In the daytime it will look like the sun is hitting the ones closest to the windows and making them whiter. By the way, the original panels on the ceiling were cheap, made of some kind of pressed cellulose board. I took them all down one time and painted them, and they all warped. I think because one side was wet with water-based paint and the other dry. These new ones seem to be a little better quality.
Good morning! It started with Madonna, which led to Peggy Lee. Then this sweet little song. How come I never heard it before? — lyrics by Carolyn Leigh Obligato Pizzicato Guy Lombardo It's the craziest When you noodle With a doodlin' song Little softer Perry Como Even softer Pianissimo Say you love me With a doodlin' song Here we go now Bet your boodle Like the apples In the strudel do When we noodle With a doodlin' song A Doodlin' Song (Doop Doo-Dee-Oop) - Peggy Lee Written by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh -1958
Kitchen ceiling progress The mini-goal Wednesday was just to remove all the panels that are definitely going to be replaced, and save them for patterns to cut the new ones. The next to last panel in the first full row seemed to escape the smoke. There was caulking on the channels along the walls. (Why did I do that?) The edge panels had to be cut out and the caulking scraped off. There are 19 unused panels in the basement, 4 of which have one damaged corner. There should be just enough to replace two full rows, if I don't make any mistakes, but a different arrangement might be better. We'll see. Yesterday I started washing down the walls at the ceiling with a step ladder. My mother used to make me help her wash walls when I was a kid. I thought it was silly to wash walls, but turns out washing semi-gloss paint is easier than repainting it. The mini-goal today is to finish the walls. Scrub-Free works really well on these stains, but leaves a film that has to be rinsed. Today I'll try Dawn. This picture is from 2016 on the day new flooring went in. The stove now sits in front of the window. Previous carpenters used a lot of caulking to hide mistakes. The smoke stained the caulking permanently, even under paint. You can see every place caulking was used. Fortunately the kitchen divides abruptly into two parts with a breakfast nook on one end. The wall next to the stove is separated from the nook by a beam that extends from the floor across the ceiling and down the other side. I'll probably repaint that wall segment and the beam. Guessing it's no more than 40 sq ft. Even if it doesn't match perfectly no one could tell. New building code requires an exhaust fan above stoves. Wonder why?
Good Morning! I may be close to wearing the squirrels down here. Recap: Bird feeder on 10' high deck off kitchen Surveillance camera streaming to smartphone Feeder covered on 4 sides with wire fencing (picture Fort Knox) When you chase the squirrels away, they mosey off to a safe distance, then return as soon as you go back in the kitchen. It's almost frightening how bold they have become. New Strategy: Make it difficult for the squirrels to get out of the bird feeder, rather than try to keep them from getting in. Starts with a sturdy broom, and a 2'x 25' roll of plastic mesh garden fencing. Lightweight flexible stuff with 2" holes. Squirrels can get through, but it's difficult. Stand the roll on end, unroll and wrap around Fort Knox 2-3 times, leaving a few inches between each row. It's just stiff enough to stand up on end by itself. The birds fly over it. The squirrels can't climb it because their weight pulls it down. They eventually get past to the feeder, but it takes them a while. When a squirrel shows up in the feeder, I burst out the kitchen door with the broom. Squirrel panics, tries to get out the shortest way possible. Runs into the multiple layers of plastic, tries to climb it, it collapses, and squirrel gets tangled up. Meanwhile I'm there swatting at it with the broom. When they finally make it out, some just leap into the air off the deck, hit the ground running, and high-tail it clear off the property. I've tried this 3 days. They came back only 4 or 5 times all day Saturday. If they start getting used to the broom, I'll swat them hard enough they won't forget.
I have a squirrel that is foraging beneath the birdfeeder. He/she can't get up to it as it is designed to keep squirrels out. The little buggers are cute to watch, but they get into things and cause a mess. I have a trap set in my dumpster, as I have to manually empty that into my truck to haul to the dump and if a squirrel gets in, emptying the garbage becomes very difficult. We have to take our birdfeeders down soon (April 1st is recommended) to keep bears away from the house. Anchorage has penalties for leaving the feeders up past April 1st, but out here in the boonies, it is just a recommended for personal and family safety.