Life on the Edge!

I have been doing some garden work lately. Albeit rather slowly since I no longer have a life outside of work!
I went and bought some metal edging. Couldn't buy it in Dayton. I had to drive to Lowes in Springfield, Ohio. None of our local big box retailers carried the stuff. Any way, I have been at this project for at least three weeks. If it would stop raining on the weekend I might finish it.
Here are some pictures of the progress.






The cool thing is that we figured out what to do with all those surplus sign stakes now that the campaign is over.

I didn't have to buy any tomato stakes this year!

The Kitten Saga

The saga of the kittens is both happy and sad. The sad news is that the mother had 6 kittens and only two are left. The mother cat was too young and inexperienced we figure. This was probably her first litter. She divided the litter after we found her in the attic.
At one point all but one kitten had been removed from the attic. We found two on the ground in the fire escape at the back of the house. Both were in poor condition and covered with flies. We managed to save them though and energize them with this



Who would have thought you could by formula for kittens? We removed the one from the attic and had this trio for a day.



Deborah and Elizabeth took it upon themselves to be feeders of kittens. At one point hey had the little black and white one on the grass in the yard and the mother cat came up and swiped it away.

We don't know what happened to the first three kittens of the litter but we found the decapitated body of one of them under a bush about ten feet from the opening of the fire escape. A day later we found the decapitated body the black and white one in the same spot but the former body had disappeared.
We can only assume that the mother or one of the father cats had killed the litter off. I don't understand the ways of cats and don't plan on studying them at this point.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth but Elizabeth got over it. She got her first dose of how cruel life can be.

The two remaining kittens were fed every morning and evening and any time in between if we were able to. They really needed attention every 2 hours but that was impossible. They weren't going to die though. After about a week our mail delivery person rang the doorbell and told us that her neighbor fosters cats for SICSA (Society for the Improvement of Conditions of Stray Animals). After a phone call we were also informed that the neighbor was currently fostering a nursing mother with four kittens. Within a day or so after that our two abandoned kittens were placed in a home where they could learn to be cats. I would like to thank the federal government (via the USPS) for their support in relocating these two orphans. When and if we ever catch the mother we are going to get her fixed and release her. Maybe I should issue a Mayor's Proclamation. I certainly need to cover that hole in the roof of the fire escape before I have a case of Deja vu!

Things That Go Bump in the Night!

We have had a little bit of excitement here in the last two days. It certainly explains some of the nocturnal sounds emanating from our third floor in recent weeks. Yesterday I was up in the attic area because I needed to measure some things relating to our roof (which is an entire series of posts that will be forthcoming) when I heard some unusual ruffling sounds. Walking towards the noise I heard a hiss and found myself looking into the eyes of a black cat that isn't one of ours. Upon a little bit of investigating, in a nearby box standing on its side there were a pile of kittens. They are about a week old. The cat is getting into the house via a hole in the roof of the fire escape. Don't ask me how it gets on my roof. I can only assume it climbs up the fire escape. We left the cat some food and water in the hope that it doesn't abandon the kittens.

Of course Elizabeth is excited. The wife and myself are not.

This morning Elizabeth and I went up to check on the kittens. There was only one in the box. This meant that the mother cat realized the box was not a secure location and was moving her litter. Possibly outside the house.

The wife and I were excited. Elizabeth was not.

A few hours later Elizabeth and I went up to see if the last kitten had been moved. It had. Now I was really excited .... until we heard a ruffling noise on the other side of the room in an area that is pretty inaccessible. Upon closer investigation I could see the mother cat with her kittens in a spot that I don't even want to try to get to right now.

Elizabeth is excited .......

Anybody going to need a kitten in a few weeks?

Selling Dayton

Now I am a tiny bit bias but, I believe Dayton, Ohio has more to offer than many other places and I have been to or through quite a few of them. We have some of the most affordable housing in the nation. Our cost of living is below the national average and we are sitting on the largest aquifer in the United States if not the world, so we will never run out of clean fresh water.
With as few posts as I have been making lately I still average 150 hits a day on this site. So I am using it to make a sales pitch to the world with our Greater Dayton Plan which was unveiled this week.

More Steam Punk Light Fixtures

Click on the image to go to the web site.

I got an email solicitation from www.schoolhouseelectric.com this evening. Guess they thought I might blog about them!

Steampunk Your Light Fixtures

Those wonderful people at Rejuvenation Lighting sent me another catalog on Saturday. I grabbed it and took it with me so that I could look at it in the car as the wife drove us around to the various places we needed to go.

They have some new lighting fixtures! The most interesting to me were these. If you click on the picture it will take you to their pendent fixture page showing this and several other fixtures.



Industrial Victorian caged pendents. I'm thinking one of these might look good in the stairwell to the basement!

Surviving the Winter

It is cold here! For those who have not been following the saga let me remind you that our primary source of heat comes from two wood pellet stove inserts. We have four furnaces from the days when this place was four apartments but none are hooked up because they all vented out of chimneys. They are all 80% efficiency furnaces. The main part of the house has no attic insulation either. We have been struggling with getting the temperature on the first floor above 60 degrees and on the second floor it hovers around 62 degrees. We have had to resort to a few different strategies. One is the traditional method



This raises the temperature as long as there is wood inside the house to fuel the fire. Unfortunately, at night when the fire goes out, so does all the warm air. Right out the chimney. We wake up to 56 degrees on the first floor! We have curtains up between some less used rooms and the main hallway to keep the warm air contained. That hallway is very cold!

We bought a "Heater Fan" for Elizabeth's room.



This is a Reiker brand fan and cost us $269. It was installed by yours truly the day that it arrived. It maintains the temperature in her room between 63 and 65 degrees. It is still not enough so I went out and bought this


50 bags of blow in insulation. I get to borrow the machine for free except that you get it for 24 hours with a 20 bag purchase. I negotiated 2 days since I really didn't have to buy all 50 bags at once. I have to go back to pick up the machine when I have some time because it took 4 hours to make two trips to the big box retailer and haul those 50 bags up three flights of stairs to the third floor!

The plan is to spend New Years Day blowing this stuff into the floor of the "attic." Fortunately we have many floorboards already ripped up so this should be a relatively easy task. When done it should give me an R-value of around 26 between the second and third floors. That will keep some of the heat in and reduce our pellet use - I hope. We bought 4 tons of pellets in September. We have used 3 1/2 tons almost. I have one ton still from last year. Looks like we need to buy another 4 tons. It makes me wonder how they heated this house around 1890. I know it had a coal furnace but one would have to shovel coal in it constantly throughout the day. I have to fill the pellet stoves first thing in the morning and last thing at night or they will run out of pellets causing the temperature to drop.

So now I am running around doing some last minute rewiring of the bathroom before the insulation goes in because it will be much harder to do it after Friday. Stupid stuff like moving a light switch so that it isn't behind the door when it opens. Of course, when I installed the switch the first time we didn't have a door or a toilet for that matter! So now I have to come up with something to hook the original switch to. I'm thinking wall lights but that means more wiring!