Elijah is getting interested in how things grow and we’ve talked about having a garden, so this year we decided to go for it. I thought it would be fun to start plants from seeds inside. We have a great bay window in the front room which would be a perfect spot, but we just had a cardboard box sitting there with one plant on it. It was time for an upgrade.
I bought some mahogany mostly because I had never worked with it before (aside from a cutting board project) and it seemed like a good excuse to try it out. I learned that mahogany creates incredibly fine dust! EVERYWHERE. But overall it wasn’t nice to work with.
My original plan involved using floating tenons for the first time. You cut a mortise into each board and then make a tenon by itself and glue it into each side. It’s kind of like an elongated dowel. But alas, I could never get my test pieces to go very well and I eventually tabled the idea for later use. Since I had already cut the pieces to length for that joinery method, the only real solution was pocket holes. I felt totally ridiculous using pocket holes on a nice hardwood, but oh well, it worked and it was easy.
Once I made that change, everything went together quickly. I used a teak oil finish which was new for me. It wiped on easily and I put a few coats on in hopes of protecting it just a little from spilled water and the sun. I still think that in a few years we’re going have obvious fade marks where the plants sit.
The end result looks nice and aside from my joinery skills fail, I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s plenty big enough to hold lots of plants and it’s short enough that ELijah can easily see it and help out with the watering.
Recycling Fire
One of the afternoons over my Christmas break, I heard a truck idling in the cul-de-sac for 10 minutes or so. That’s usually some kind of delivery truck so I hollered down to Tyla and Elijah that they might want to check it out since Elijah likes that kind of thing.
Elijah ran to the front bay window and could see part of the truck. “Mommy? Why is that truck smoking?” Huh!? Tyla took him outside and saw a recycling truck parked there. It was indeed smoking and a nervous driver was walking around with a fire extinguisher. Tyla said, “Is everything ok?” “Uh… yeah… yeah… everything’s ok.”
It wasn’t.
A few minutes later, our little street was full of firetrucks. They unrolled the hoses and hooked up to the fire hydrant on our street. (Neighbors claimed it’s the first time that hydrant has been used in the 26 years since it was put in.)
The fire was somewhere in the recycling that the truck had picked up. The firemen quickly determined that they would have a hard time putting it out inside the truck. Also, it was a natural gas truck and they were nervous about some of the piping that runs over the bed of the truck. So how do you solve that problem? “DUMP THE LOAD!”
As the driver was dumping it, you could see flames coming out. The firemen dove in with rakes and the water hoses and had the fire out in a matter of minutes.
That whole process probably didn’t take more than 10 minutes. Then it was cleanup mode. The firemen rolled up all their hoses and handed out hats to the kids that had gathered around. Elijah was nervous but loved seeing all the fire trucks so close by.
After the firemen left, they had to leave the pile in place for the inspector. Tyla chatted with him briefly and learned that the root cause was someone who had thrown hot fireplace ashes in the recycling. Smart.
After the inspector was done, a dumpster got dropped off. Then a cleanup crew showed up with a Bobcat and a backpack blower to load everything into the dumpster. The dumpster got picked up and eventually a street cleaner came for the final pass.
I was really impressed with how Waste Management handled the whole thing. I’m sure this isn’t the first time it has happened, but they did a great job. They had someone on site managing the cleanup until the pile was gone and the contractors they used did a good job of cleaning up the street and our yard (about 5% of the garbage ended up in our planter area and yard.) We still pick up some small pieces of trash in the yard every now and then but overall, I’m amazed at how good it looks and little they damaged our yard.