Project du jour

After the 5k, we went over to a friend's new house, which the friends have not moved into yet, so Tim could help the friend move a 400 lb vanity up a huge flight of narrow stairs and down a narrow hallway into a bathroom. And then do it again, with another 400 lb vanity into the other upstairs bathroom. It's times like this that I am glad I am not a man and that my "friends" don't invite me over to do heavy lifting.

After the vanity-move-a-thon we went to lunch. How does one reward oneself for a job well done in a 5k race and a job well done in general on the diet, exercise and healthy living front? By having a gorge fest of fried food for lunch, that's how. A fabulous little hole in the wall cajun deli has opened up in Vancouver and I am making it my mission in life to ensure they do not go out of business. I so love finding authentic New Orleans food that reminds me of home! So I had a shrimp poboy, Tim had a catfish poboy and a side of red beans and rice, and we had two orders of bread pudding to go, which we just devoured for dinner.

After lunch and before the bread pudding binge, we cruised a couple of garage sales on the way home. One sale was at a gorgeous 100+ year old house, and we stopped just to admire their house. Nothing of interest at the sale except for a REALLY old rotary telephone, so old that it had a four-prong phone plug like this, that I would have no idea how to "adapt." And the receiver weighed at least 2 lb. But it was a beauty.

Across the street from this garage sale was another garage sale... the kind of garage sale where you see your neighbor is having a garage sale so you decide to drag some of your crap out to the curb and see what happens. The thing that drew us to the sale was the greenhouse being built in the yard. I love greenhouses and so we walked over to take a closer look at the work in progress.

Upon closer inspection, the greenhouse is being built out of salvaged windows. After chatting with the fabulous old guy who is building this greenhouse, we learned that the windows were salvaged from the old hospital and barracks at Ft. Vancouver, right down the road from our home, and he has, like, 200 more of them in the yard, a few of which he dragged out to the curb when he saw his neighbor was having a garage sale.

I looked at my husband and said, "I need a greenhouse like this! Build me one! Build me one!" as I usually do whenever I see something cool.

And miracle of all miracles, Tim said, "OK," which is NOT his usual response, and bought 25 eight-pane windows (plus the two stained glassed windows in the post below) and spent a LOOOOONG time chatting with Jack, the genius salvaged window greenhouse designer, about how exactly to go about building one.

So we came home, got the trailer, went back and loaded up the windows, and now they're here, still in the trailer, where they'll probably stay for, well, ever, because that's how we roll.... we're REALLY BIG on the starting of stuff but have extremely poor follow through.

But you've got to admit, the idea is stellar!

Photo courtesy of mao_tse_mom over at Garden Web via http://www.robomargo.com/windows.html, and we are so totally going to try to copy this, if we ever unload the windows from the trailer.