Tarden

While all of us that live in the TH are known for being electronic minded, none of us are known for having a green thumb. We're still in the early stages of the Tarden but Ollie has gotten little green plants to sprout form the ground in a semi ordered fashion. We'll have to wait and see if things continue to go well as the summer progresses.

Busy Day

Lots going on at the TH today. We had Hydrogen Rockets, which ended when the rocket ended up on the roof of the garage. Building a bare bones computer system, sill in process with that, see the "green screen of death" picture below. Lastly there was the cooking of fried dough in the fryer thingie. Sweet pics below.

Ok, so I just realized I don't have any photo editing software on my lappy yet. Minion tried to get me to use Paint to resize and crop my pictures. While he is correct that it can be done, he left out some steps when relying how it was done, so I ended up with a giant white background and a little picture. I'll update the pictures tomorrow.

Its tomorrow and I finished loading some real photo editing software onto my lappy. Makes things much easier. Speaking of making things easier theres gotta be a better way to create/edit these blog posts. This "compose" view blows, and the HTML isn't much better. Partly cause the window is so darn small. . Here are the pictures.

Tards making cookies

What do you do when you have a 72 oz bag of chocolate chips? You make one giant batch of cookies. The giant batch is actually the recipe on the back of the bag x4. Making four batches of cookies sounds like a great idea cause you end up with tons of cookies. What we didn't realize was how long it would take to bake them. You might ask yourself what does a giant batch of chocolate chip cookies look like. Well it looks our sweet Kitchen Aid mixer overflowing with cookie dough. We were astonished at how much the bowl weighed so we went and measured it. Yea, 16lbs of cookie dough. How many cookies does that make? For us it made 188 cookies, there is a ginormous pile of them on our table. So if you want some cookies stop on by.

New Tards!

Aaron (aka "Minion") has come to Tardhaus. He had so much stuff to bring down from VTC that I brought the dump truck up to pick him up.

Yardwork, Tardwork

This weekend we continued the removal of brush and converting the yard for summer. We've lost more bank behind the garage, but we cut some ugly leaner trees and removed deadwood. Instead of burning the brush, we have piled it in gorges forming along the bank to provide a base of fill. The new toy (backhoe) ought to help speed the process once it is up and running. Sumac and wild chervil are trying to take over. It's war.

New Toy! New Toy!

I just purchased a 1973 Michigan bucketloader/backhoe. It needs a little bit of work (although not as much as I was expecting), but I think a weekend or two at the Tardhaus should have it in tip-top shape. If there's anything we can't fix ourselves, there is a place about a mile down the road called Farm-All-Fix that works on such equipment for reasonable rates. I bought it today, but it would't fit in the car to bring it back to Tardhaus, and we don't have a low-boy trailer (yet), so we're probably going to get a trucking company to pick it up and deliver it for us sometime this week.

Dryer Fixin's

Our dryer, a Maytag Neptune, has been drying clothes more and more slowly, and has needed multiple cycles to get clothes all the way dry. I had previously cleaned out the metal hose from the dryer to the outside of the house, but that didn't fix it. This, of course, means that it needs to be taken apart to be fixed. In my usual style, I didn't think about this until I was loading wet clothes into the dryer and decided I would fix it. With the wet clothes in the drum, I googled how to take apart this particular dryer, located the needed tools, and was off.


The culprit was a ton of lint that had made it past the lint trap and gathered up right in front of the blower motor that blows the air out the back of the unit. With this being clogged, the dryer just made steam in the dryer, but never blew much of it outside the house. With this problem resolved, I reassembled the dryer and ran my load of clothes, which dried nicely in a single cycle. Yay!