I love the way Amy Lee, lead singer of Evanescence, throws herself into her singing. The combination of her voice and emotions with the male voices and hard instruments in songs like Bring Me To Life on the albums Fallen and Anywhere But Home makes for an awesome sound.
How do you get these &$#@! Christmas icicle lights to hang straight!? A little searching around the net provides some suggestions. Most people seem to think you shouldn’t worry about it because from the road no one will notice. I disagree. Of the people with suggestions, most just say to hang them when it’s warm out. This being late November in New England, the high today was 43 degrees. Some suggest hanging them inside with weights and using a hairdryer to warm them. One person talked about cutting acrylic into strips and using twist ties to connect each icicle to one strip.
What caught my attention though was the guy who used small wire ties to connect each icicle to a large wire tie. That seemed like it would work, but in the end I used stem wires which are 18 gauge wires designed to hold flower stems straight. I found them at A. C. Moore.
I started by putting a 180 degree bend in one end and crimping it to one of the horizontal wires. Then I wrapped the icicle around the stem wire. 
At the bottom I put another 180 degree bend, followed by a 90 degree bend and then closed it around the icicle wire again.
It was a bit of a pain to do this for each icicle, but didn’t take that long and they hang nice and straight now. It looks so much nicer than the random curves and bends. The next trick will be figuring out a way to pack them that does not bend the wires into little random shapes. I’m thinking maybe wrap them around a board.
The stem wires I used started out 18 inches long. When I trimmed them to fit the longest icicles the left over bit was long enough to do the medium length icicles. The shortest icicles were only two lights long and did not need stem wires. Each 24 foot long light strip had 18 of each length of icicle, so I only needed 18 stem wires per 24 feet. At A. C. Moore I found packages of 20 stem wires for about $2 each. I was able to do 120 feet with about $10 worth of stem wires.
I talked my wife into taking a video of me adding a stem wire to one icicle so you could see how I did it. I figured my description above might not be sufficient.
If you store your lights in a shed or unheated attic or anywhere else below room temperature, I recommend bringing your lights into the living area of your house a day before you hang them so they have time to warm up. They will be a lot easier to work with at room temperature because the insulation on the wires will be much more flexible.
The lyrics of Carolina Drama by The Raconteurs on Consolers Of The Lonely are seriously dark, but I enjoy the sound of the song. If you can ignore the meaning of the words or if you enjoy dark stories, maybe you’ll enjoy it as well.
I started more seeds than I needed for the cellar garden experiment. I did that so I’d be sure to get enough strong, healthy plants. I planned to throw the extras in the compost bin, but didn’t do so right away. They were still sitting there on the floor of the cellar near the artificial greenhouse yesterday and they were still green and growing.
Every time I saw them I kept thinking that as long as they were alive, the plants in the greenhouse weren’t really proving anything since these plants weren’t getting anywhere near as much light. However, they also weren’t getting watered and their roots were bunching up in the tiny sprouting pots. I decided to give one of each type a better chance at survival. I filled a pot with potting soil, mixed in some fertilizer, planted one pea plant and one tomato plant, and gave them some water. This pot is sitting outside the greenhouse and does not have any direct light. The only light it gets is whatever manages to get around or through the foil covered tarps. This photograph was taken without a flash, so you can see that there is enough light to see, but not enough to take a decent photo. It’s really hard to convey how much or little light there is in a photo. It is bright enough that I can see just fine, but dark enough that I don’t expect these plants to survive very long and I really don’t expect them to produce any fruit if they do survive.
The instructions say you should place a 1 cup line down each side of a five foot row of plants or in pots use 3 tablespoons for each plant. It also says it should be kept at least three inches away from the plant stems. I’m a little nervous about burning the plant stems and roots, especially in the densely packed pots. So, even though 3 tablespoons per plant rule would work out to one and an eighth cups, I limited myself to one eighth cup per pot today. Also, although I did add some water to start it mixing into the soil, I did not add a lot so most of the fertilizer is still on the surface of the soil.
In the densely packed pots I put the fertilizer in a little pile in the middle as far from the plants as possible. Naturally that wasn’t very far. In the other pots, I made a line down the middle and the watered just the middle of that line.
…may not boil, but a watched pea certainly grows. When I first planted the plants I kept them on a wire shelving unit in front of a window. One day I sat on the couch to watch a three hour football game near that window and just as I sat down I noticed that the tops of the pea plants were close to the shelf above them. I swear as I was watching that game I’d look over from time to time and see them getting closer and closer to that shelf.
This photo shows the same pea plant on two consecutive mornings, 24 hours apart. The yardstick in this photo is a little misleading since the first four inches are buried in the soil to hold it in place. This plant is currently 15 inches tall, not 19. (I know the photo is pretty bad, I had to manipulate it a lot to get the plant to stand out from the reflector behind it. Ah well. I guess you can’t expect much from an iPhone camera in a dark basement aimed at a side lit subject in front of a bright reflector held in the shaky hand of a non-photographer without a tripod.)
Hell Broke Luce by Tom Waits on Bad As Me is an awesome song. It’s wonderfully dark and oppressive, which is fitting for a song based on the broken life of Jeff Lucey. Jeff, a lance corporal in the Marine Reserves from Massachusetts, fought in Iraq during the Second Gulf War. When he returned he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and his life spiraled down and down until he eventually ended it.
Thank you, Tom. I appreciate the tribute to one of our fallen.
This past weekend I had to transplant the peas since they had grown too tall to continue without support. However, it was too early to transplant the tomatoes. They were still tiny and weak. I should have left them in the window for another week or two, but I went ahead and transplanted them. I’m not sure why. I’ve been concerned they wouldn’t survive so I was glad when I came home from work today and found they had started growing new leaves. This weekend they only had two leaves each, now several have another set of small leaves.
I still don’t know for sure if they’ll pull through, but I’m hopeful. If more than one or two tomatoes don’t survive, I’ll pull them all and plant new from seeds right in those pots. It is important for the experiment to have nearly all healthy in the beginning.
I am toying with the idea of trying my hand at aquaponics. My wife and I were impressed when we flew out to Milwaukee and visited Growing Power earlier this year and saw their systems and how much food they produce on 2 acres. Soon we are going to have a small, extra bedroom available for my hobby use and I’m wondering if I should try raising some fish, fruit and vegetables in that room. However, that room gets almost no direct sunlight. I would need to provide artificial light for the plants.
How much light is needed and how much electricity will that use? Browsing the web I found lots of information, but nothing that convinced me I’d be successful with a reasonable amount of electricity, so I’ve decided to try a small experiment. I am going to try raising some pea and tomato plants using only artificial light in my cellar. That should give me a clear idea of how much light is needed and how much electricity it will take.
I planted Burpee Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas and Burpee Better Boy Hybrid Tomatoes and put them near a window on November 3rd. The first pea sprouted on November 7th and the first tomato on November 11th.
This past weekend (Nov 17 & 18) I built an artificial greenhouse in the cellar. It is one foot wide by eight feet long by seven feet tall. On each narrow end is a fluorescent light with two forty watt, 3350 lumen, 48″ bulbs standing vertically and plugged into a cheap timer set to turn on 14 hours per day. Each long side has a 6 foot by 8 foot tarp covered on the inside with aluminum foil. I know it would have made more sense to use mylar, but the tarps and foil were at hand. One of the tarps is tied in place with ropes, but the other is movable. The movable one is stapled to a 1×2 board that slides along two rails. I can easily slide it about 5 feet from the plants so I can get in there and tend them. Along the bottom of the greenhouse is a row of one foot wide buckets. I drilled holes in the bottom the buckets and placed them in small plastic trays to catch any water that flows out. Hanging from the top of the greenhouse are strings for the plants to climb.
The four pots on the left each have one tomato and one pea. The four pots on the right each have two tomatoes and four peas. By using the vertical lights at either end of a line of plants I’m hoping to discover how far from the lights the plants will grow. By having half the pots densely planted I hope to find out how dense planting affects the health and yield of the plants. The more densely I can pack the plants, the more food I can get from that tiny bedroom.
I’m just a guy with many interests. Something comes along, strikes my fancy, and I’m enthralled. I become obsessed until I work my way through it, understand it, and eventually become bored. In time I move onto my next whim.
As I work my way through a hobby I like to keep track of what I’ve done and what I’ve learned. I figured an easy way to do that would be a blog. Who knows, maybe one of my posts would even provide some useful information or light entertainment to someone interested in one of these hobbies someday.
I used to create websites as whims struck me, but I kept abandoning them or shutting them down as I moved onto the next hobby. This time around I decided to create a place that isn’t specific to one topic where I could post anything that struck my fancy. I can divide up the hobbies by creating a new category for each.
I fully expect there will be lulls between hobbies. You can expect a flurry of activity as I find a new hobby and suddenly it’ll drop to zero as I get bored. That’s just the way I am.
Welcome to my journal.
