Boston Flee Party is GO!

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RIP Zippy (2004-2009)

We had to put down Zippy this afternoon.

She had another stone in her urethra, and the doctor said that when they come back that quickly, it will likely be an ongoing issue. She was in a lot of pain, so we decided to let her go.

They gave her an anesthetic so she would go to sleep, and let me pet her until she fell asleep. Then they took her in the back for the final part, where she would actually die.

Zippy was one of our "surprise" pigs from Pitter Pat, who we had not realized was pregnant when we brought her home. She's also one of the first pigs we were able to name. She zoomed around the cage so much that we just had to name her "Zippy!" She zipped.

We are glad that we were with her the day she was born, and we were sad to let her go on today. She was a good pig.

Boston Flee Party

We're heading to Boston this Friday, and we'll be blogging about our adventure here. We hope to see you there! :)

The Great Siding Project: Phase One

We started our siding project on Saturday. We got pretty far into it, but we're not done yet. Here's Scott (Kirk's coworker who is helping/teaching us) taking off the first board.

Scott was impressed with the stuff underneath our boards. He said it was high quality and whoever had put up our original stuff did it right. We did not have to replace the stuff underneath, which was a relief.

Kirk and Jeremy have the whole bottom off. Scott is watching from the background.

Kirk and Scott pulled off almost all of the top themselves! (We only had two ladders.)

Go Kirk Go!

Everything's off!

Scott helps Kirk saw the new boards.

Kirk and Scott putting on the new boards. (Jeremy and I were pulling off the stuff from the other side, with breaks for Cathy to run take pictures!)

Lunchtime! Papa John's was having a $5 pizza day. Score!

Side One Done! We still need to paint, of course, but the boards are up! Even unpainted it looks a million times better.

Sarah insisted on supervising.

The old siding.

A view of the unpainted but fabulous anyway siding.

Jeremy and Cathy had been pulling off siding over here, but it was slow going due to all the plants (including a rosebush) and...

The gas leak! Our meter smelled STRONGLY of gas, so Cathy called the gas people to have a look. They told us to stop working in that area until they could check it out. Good thing...

We did have a leak. Here's our old IRON meter. They replaced it with a much lighter and less leak prone one. (no picture, sorry!) Our old one looked pretty cruddy, so it's nice to have a new shiny meter to go with our new siding!

We only went partway up- we'll go back and do the rest next weekend. Everything is covered up, so it should be fine.

Sarah got tuckered out from all the supervising.

We're thinking this will be a Three Phase operation. Hopefully everything will be done next weekend so we can start painting!

The Siding Project

Our $900 pile of boards

For those of you who don't know, we're residing our house. After getting some quotes ranging from $16,000 to $31,000, we decided to do it ourselves. We estimate that we'll be saving $13,500-$29,500, One of Kirk's coworkers used to do siding as a side job, and he's coming over to help us get started.

We start tomorrow at the crack 'o dawn, and hope to be done with the hanging the siding part of our project by the end of the weekend. We lucked out- it's only going to be in the '80's this weekend! Yay!

Happy 29th Birthday to Cathy!

We started the day by getting Sarah groomed for her second (and last) haircut of the season. She got such rave reviews by her groomers that I used my $4 PetSmart Birthday Club card on a little treat for her.

It's an eco-friendly toy made of hemp- supposedly super strong. Since Sarah usually destroys her soft toys in a day or so, I'm eager to see if this toy lives up to its claims.

We'd already celebrated with my parents this past weekend, but still had a birthday dinner today. The steaks, sweet corn, fruit salad, and zucchini were delicious- followed by "dirt cups" for dessert. Yum!

Garden 2009

I know, I know, it's been awhile. I'll make up for it with some garden pictures! We're growing lettuce, zucchini, yellow squash, watermelon, tomatoes, Tabasco peppers, jalapenos, basil, mint, and onions this year. We'll see how it turns out. The Tabasco peppers and the watermelon are my "experimental" crops this year.

The whole garden. The hose/sprinkler is set up with our automatic sprinkler system. There's a dedicated water line in the garden- whoever set this up did us a major favor.
I was unsure of the watermelon. It cost $1.50 and consisted of two tiny leaves. It's doing fine now!
Our lettuce finally looks like lettuce.
We've planted a ton of tomatoes, but I'm really excited about our upside down tomatoes. Thanks for the planter, Uncle Don!
Mint. It's coming back just fine from last year. We mostly put it in our tea, but I'm looking for other uses this year.
The basil has been very successful as well. So far I've just added it to tomato sauce, and plan to have a lot of tomato basil salads when the tomatoes come in. Any other ideas would be appreciated!
Our front- I just planted the flowers in the boxes today.
A close up of the pretty flower thing I picked up at yard sale two years ago.
My newest yard sale find- the birdhouse was on the pole, but Kirk took it off so it will be easier for me to paint. I was going to paint it today, but it was WAY too hot. Tomorrow it will be painted, and this weekend I will fill it with geraniums.

This is not the garden, but it's still pretty neat. That's Kirk holding Charlotte. Her mother Amber is by him, and she's petting Snapple, her new mini-horse. He's pretty funny and likes to be brushed.