Yard bouquet #20: Lantana

Here in North Carolina, lantana is often sold as an annual but there is at least one variety, called Miss Huff, that survives our winters and comes back year after year. We have two of these ‘Miss Huff’ lantana outside our front door. Lantana is a great bloomer, starting in early summer and continuing, on and off, until frost.

I took lots of photos of our lantana in early August when I first intended to use its flowers as a yard bouquet.

I didn’t choose lantana as a yard bouquet this summer though because when I went out to clip some flowers, I found this:

And this:

In fact, there were about half a dozen butterflies on the lantana and they were very busy with the flowers. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to cut some flowers when the butterflies were enjoying them so much. Instead, I just went back inside and thought I’d try to figure out what kind of butterfly was in our front yard. I did a little search to see if I could identify the butterflies. I think they’re Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (which you can read about here and see if you agree with my assessment).

The butterflies departed weeks and weeks ago, but the lantana continues to bloom so I figured it was about time to clip some of the flowers before a frost comes and they’re gone until next summer.

I’ve created a lot of yard bouquets this year, but this lantana is certainly one of my favorites. I think my fondness for it has something to do with Charlie’s love of the color orange. I have a new appreciation for the color and now I often look for ways to incorporate orange into the house. The different colors of the lantana play off perfectly with Charlie’s orange mug and the whole thing just seems happy.

You can check out my 19 other free bouquets of flowers I’ve clipped from my yard by clicking on the Yard Bouquets link below.

What’s in a name?

This past weekend I pledged to tackle one of the tasks on my daunting To Do list. I’ve been meaning to paint the porch ceiling blue for quite some time. Blue porch ceilings are a bit of a Southern tradition that reportedly comes with benefits – they’re said to keep wasps and spiders from taking up residence in the corners of the porch (which would be awfully nice given the wildlife that seems to be attracted to our porch) and blue porch ceilings are also said to keep away evil spirits. I don’t know how much time I spend worrying about evil spirits, but if a blue porch ceiling keeps them away, then I suppose that’s an added bonus. (This is totally off topic, but not long after we moved into our house one of our neighbors asked us how we were settling in and then asked if the house was haunted. Say what?! I replied no and then asked why she had asked. She said, “No reason.” Uh, yeah, right. I’m still trying to find out what she knows about this house that we don’t.) Anyhow, the porch. I decided to paint it blue simply because I thought it would be fun and different.

I did a lot of online research trying to find recommendations for exactly which blue paint to use. I was hoping to see pictures of blue porch ceilings with accompanying notes like, “The ceiling is painted in Sherwin Williams’ Ice Blue.” Or, “I painted my porch ceiling in Olympic’s Lotsa Blue and it is stunning.” Or ideally something like, “Never use anything but Benjamin Moore’s Blue Porch Ceiling for your porch.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any guidance so I was pretty much on my own. As I mentioned in Friday’s post, to help me decide on a color, I gathered a heck of a lot of Behr paint chips and taped them up on the porch near the ceiling.

Lined up in this way, I quickly eliminated colors that looked too light or too dark. I also eliminated ones that looked too green or too gray. Mark’s input on the subject was that he really didn’t want a blue that “looked like the bottom of a pool.” Hmm, that would eliminate most of the paint options. Ultimately, I settled on this color called Serene Sky:

I’d really like to say that I wasn’t heavily influenced by the name of the paint, but I was. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t want their blue porch ceiling to appear like a serene sky?

So off I went to Home Depot to get a quart of Serene Sky in exterior paint (with primer built-in) in satin finish. Several weeks passed, and I decided that this weekend would offer the fantastic weather to paint the porch ceiling. We had a glorious weekend, perfect for outdoor projects.

On Saturday morning, I gave the entire ceiling a good scrubbing with a sponge dipped in warm soapy water. I let it dry for several hours. Then I put up some painter’s tape around the edges of the porch and broke out the paint and paintbrush. It didn’t take me more than a few brushes of the paint to know I didn’t like the color. I asked Mark for his opinion and he was equally unenthusiastic about it. We decided to paint a big chunk of the ceiling in two coats of the Serene Sky just to give it a good chance to grow on us. But it was obvious that Serene Sky was just a bit too, well, cheery for us. I’m not sure how to describe it other than too cheery. It’s not that it was a bad color, it’s just that it looked completely out of place on our house.

So we gathered all the other paint chips I’d collected and sorted through them again. This time, we were drawn to the grayer blues since Serene Sky had taught us that we’re not really cheery blue people (and our house turns out not to be cheery either). We narrowed it down to two alternatives: Cool Sky and, good grief, a color called Cloudy Day.

Cool Sky was nice, but it seemed pretty darn close to Serene Sky. Over and over, our eyes kept being drawn to Cloudy Day. But could we really trade Serene Sky for Cloudy Day? Really? I am endeavoring to reform my pessimistic tendencies, but choosing Cloudy Day over Serene Sky just seemed like throwing in the towel.

In the end, I just had to admit that I’m more a Cloudy Day kinda gal than I am Serene Sky. So yesterday morning we headed back to Home Depot and bought a quart of Cloudy Day. Holding my breath, I painted a big block of Cloudy Day on the porch ceiling right next to the Serene Sky block to see how we liked it. The result: it was so much better (although I fully realize that the picture below doesn’t do justice to the incessant cheeriness of Serene Sky versus the subtle warmth of Cloudy Day).

But by the time I had painted just the test block of Cloudy Day, most of the afternoon was shot so I still haven’t finished painting the front porch ceiling. While I’d like to finish painting as soon as possible because it really looks awful at the moment with two big blotches of blue (and one of them is the way too cheery Serene Sky), I am not sure when I’ll be able to get to it. Hopefully next weekend’s weather will be as nice as this weekend’s, filled with a serene sky and not a glimpse of a cloudy day. Oh, wait.

*Photo of Serene Sky paint chip taken from Home Depot’s website, found here.

Feeling blue

Several weeks ago, I made The List — 20 tasks that I’ve been meaning to get to around the house. So far, I’ve pretty much done a lousy job getting to any of the items on The List. But there is one task that I really, really want to do: paint the porch ceiling blue.

Thus far, I have done a meticulous job selecting the paint color. I gathered a bunch of paint swatch possibilities and taped them onto the porch right near the ceiling.

Then I stared at them a long time. Then I asked Mark his advice. Then I ignored his advice. Then I selected a color and purchased the paint. That’s right, one of these lucky paint colors has been declared the winner.

But then I lost steam and the weather got cold. However, I am writing this post to make a commitment to the Internet and all my many, many readers (Hi, Mom and Dad!): This weekend I am painting the porch.

I figure if I publicly declare that the painting will happen this weekend then I’ll surely do it, right? Uh, right?

What we’re eating: Napa cabbage slaw with mango

I could have titled this post, “How I used up the rest of our CSA vegetables,” but that didn’t sound nearly as sophisticated as the cabbage slaw with mango. Our CSA recently ended for the season (so sad) and the final week’s delivery had the usual odd assortment of vegetables. I decided to get creative and see how many I could use in one dish. I did pretty well; the only two veggies that didn’t make it from the fridge into my cabbage slaw were eggplant and bok choy.

Napa Cabbage Slaw with Mango

• 1/4 head of Napa cabbage
• 1/2 orange pepper (or grated carrot)
• 1/2 cup diced mango
• 1/4 cup diced onion (red or green onions would be great, but I only had a yellow onion)
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
• 1 chopped radish
• 1 very small jalapeno pepper, minced
• equal parts mayonnaise and sour cream (I used about 1-2 Tbsp of each)
• 1/2 ounce of lime juice (mine was actually Key lime juice, left over from the Key lime pie)
• salt and pepper, to taste

For the dressing, whisk the mayonnaise, sour cream and lime juice. Taste and adjust quantities until you’re happy with it. For the slaw, remove the outer leaves of the Napa cabbage and slice the remaining cabbage thinly. Mix all the vegetables and the mango in a large bowl and pour the dressing on top. Stir to combine and add salt and pepper. I liked our slaw very lightly dressed, but if you want more dressing, just make up a bit more and add it to the veggie/mango mixture.

I happily ate the slaw as is, but when I was cooking fish sticks for Charlie for dinner, it occurred to me that the slaw would make a yummy impromptu topping for a fish taco. So I grabbed a flour tortilla and put a couple of fish sticks on it.

Then I topped the fish sticks with a large spoonful of the slaw and some more cilantro.

Then I just wrapped it up and chowed down.

In the words of one Miss Dora the Explorer and her talking backpack, “Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Delicioso!”

It’s a slam dunk!

A heartfelt congratulations to dear Mark who this weekend won PlaySlam, a local playwriting competition. PlaySlam consists of short plays which are put on the stage by actors for one night only. The audience votes on their favorite plays. You can read all about the evening here.

And, Mark even won a cash prize for his victory. Wahoo!

UPDATE 11-12-10

This is Mark.  Thanks to all for the congrats.  It was a wonderful experience doing the Play Slam, and winning ain’t bad.  Details?  Well, Play Slam involves 14 writers and at least that many actors.  We all met three hours before the show and the actors were assigned to 28 plays (two from each playwright).  All the plays are designed to be three minutes.  We rehearsed each play for 10 minutes, took a break, and did the show.  The show is a two act affair.  The first act features one play from each of the writers.  The audience then votes (using a pre-printed sheet) for their top five plays, scoring them 1-10.  The scores are tallied at intermission, and act two features five new plays from the writers of the five winning plays of act one.  With me?  After those five plays are done, the audience votes (on a new sheet) for the best play.  The play takes the bounty.  We had over 150 people come, and that doesn’t include the cast, crew, and writers.  Nice turnout.  There was a Q&A while the final votes were being counted.  I generally defer to the others in answering questions.  I may have said one or two pithy remarks.  My plays were – in the first round, TIME AWAY, which was an altered version of the play I wrote at Ghost Ranch about the three screenwriters who recap the film they are writing about a nutty family on their way to Ghost Ranch.  I changed it to Carrboro and the Arts Center.  I figured I’d placate.  It worked.  The second play – the one that won – was called ONE LIFE, which is the story of one man from birth to death told from the perspective of a chorus of characters called Action, Thought, and Feeling.  The man mimes the events, and thoughts, and feelings as they are described.  All told in three minutes.

Yard bouquet #19: ‘Single Apricot Korean’ Chrysanthemum

A couple of years ago, our dear friend Fred gave us this chrysanthemum.

We don’t have a lot of fall blooming plants, so the pale salmon-colored flowers are a very welcome addition. And they make for a pretty little bouquet to bring inside. Here they are kindly deflecting attention away from my dusty desk.

I actually clipped these mums for the yard bouquet a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to identify their variety before I posted them. Then I never got around to figuring out how to identify them. Fortunately for my lazy and procrastinating ways, I regularly read Swarthmore College’s Scott Arboretum blog, and just last week they profiled Chrysanthemum x ‘Single Apricot Korean’ and the picture they posted looks an awful lot like my formerly unidentified mum (although their chrysanthemum appears much more impressive than mine). Thanks, Scott Arboretum!

Fun for kids: Creating a picture schedule

Charlie started his second year of preschool in early September. He loved the first day, tolerated the second day, and threw a fit on the morning of the third. For about three to four weeks after that, he started whimpering just about every time we mentioned school and cried endlessly on the mornings he had to go to school. His teacher assured us that Charlie always quickly recovered after Mark dropped him off at school, but it was still gut-wrenching to leave him there when he was so upset. Gradually, things have gotten a bit better. Some days he still cries before going to school, but it happens less and less.

During the midst of those first few weeks, Mark and I were desperate to come up with ways to make Charlie’s transition to preschool less painful for all three of us. We decided to create a picture schedule for him. We wanted him to easily see when he was going to go to school (and when he’d stay home) as well as see that even on the days he goes to school in the mornings, he still has a lot of time in the afternoon that are free for him to choose what to do. So we wrote down all of Charlie’s favorite activities, such as reading, riding his bike, and going to the park, and then we started taking photographs to represent each activity.  Some of the images of the activities were of just the activity, like this one of books to represent reading:

Or this one of his bike:

We quickly realized however, that Charlie would much prefer to look at pictures of himself doing his favorite activities (it appeals to the narcissism that’s probably found in every four-year-old). So we added lots of photos of him doing the things he loves like going for a walk with the dogs (no, we don’t let him hold the leashes outside):

Or vacuuming (yes, he is crazy about vacuuming):

After downloading the photos, we pasted the images into Microsoft Word where Mark typed the name of each activity over the photo image. Once we compiled all of our activity photos, we printed them on our color printer. We tried printing them on photo paper, but we actually found that the color looked better printed on plain paper.

We decided we wanted this to be a learning picture schedule too, so we also typed in large font all the days of the week and days of the month (we just typed numbers from 1 to 31). Just as for the activity photos, we printed out the days and the numbers on our color printer. Then we took all of our picture schedule images and cut them into pieces so that each image had just a small border around it.

Mark took all the images over to Staples and had them laminated in big sheets. Then we cut out each image and attached a small strip of Velcro to the back of each one.

Finally, we had a large sheet of poster board leftover from another project, so we grabbed that (you know I’m all for using what you have!), and attached several strips of Velcro in lines on the poster board. (Did you ever wonder how to know which end of Velcro to attach where? Several years ago our friend Shannon told us this ridiculously sexist way to remember: the “soft” side of the Velcro is the “female” side. It is placed on the item that stays put while the bristly side, the “male” side, is placed on the item that moves – yup, the female is soft and stays at home while the bristly male roams. Terrible, right? But to this day I remember. )

The final step was just to write a little on the poster board and Charlie’s personalized picture schedule was officially born:

Charlie loves his picture schedule. We try to remember each night to prepare the schedule for the next day. Charlie finds the correct day and date and then constructs his desired schedule.

This project, though fairly time-intensive, was inexpensive.

The tally:

• Poster board: free
• Taking the photos and printing them out: free
• Laminating the images: I can’t remember exactly, but it was about $10
• Velcro: about $2

Grand total: roughly $12

For less than $15 we have a custom picture schedule and we can add to it as Charlie’s interests change.

I should note that though the picture schedule has really helped Charlie, what has helped Charlie’s transition to preschool even more has been Mark’s decision to stay with Charlie for about 15 minutes after they arrive at school. Charlie adores that and seems to be really comforted by it.

Gimme a light

Color me impressed. Eight days ago I signed up for free compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) from Duke Energy. It was quick and easy to sign up, and I qualified for an impressive 15 CFLs. The only downside was that Duke Energy said it would take 4-6 weeks for the light bulbs to arrive. Instead, they arrived in Saturday’s mail. Yup, that’s right, they arrived in less than a week.

Right here is where I intended to insert a nice little photo showing all my new light bulbs lined up. But, once again, I’ve misplaced the cord which connects my digital camera to the computer, so no photos on blog posts until I find it. (I also wanted to post what I hope are great Halloween photos, but that also won’t be happening until the cord shows up. You’ll just have to trust me that Charlie was the cutest little pumpkin around).

Anyhow, if you’re a Duke Energy customer, don’t forget to sign up for your free CFLs here.

Soon I’ll be hugging trees

My front yard is littered with pine trees.

I’ve never liked them; they make the front yard feel almost claustrophobic. When Mark and I first moved to this house, we talked about removing the pine trees, but then we found out how much it costs to remove just a single tree and that dreamed quickly faded. Also, somehow it seems wrong to remove a bunch of trees (all of which are probably older than either of us and have certainly lived on this property longer) simply because they don’t suit our tastes. Regardless of the reason, the pine trees are here to stay.

I have noticed one small financial benefit of the pine trees: they drop their needles periodically all over our driveway which makes them easy to sweep up. Then I can use them as mulch.

Pine straw is actually a fantastic mulch: it breaks down slowly so you don’t have to replace it frequently; it’s lightweight and easy to apply; it doesn’t attract termites the way wood mulch can; and it provides nutrients to the soil. In fact, many people pay good money for what we’re getting for free.

It seems to me that between collecting my own mulch and making my own compost, pretty soon I’m going to be – to quote my dear friend’s brother – “the kind of girl you could hook a plow up to and be proud of.”

Now I have to go find my Birkenstocks.

Graco stroller recall

Our stroller has been recalled due to risk of strangulation and entrapment.

Four infants have slid underneath the tray and been strangled. Though we don’t use our stroller much anymore, and Charlie is certainly well beyond the age where he’d even fit between the seat and the tray, I’ll still contact Graco so that they can send a free repair kit.

You can read more about the recall and how to request your free repair kit here.

Image is from the CPSC website.