Monthly Archives: November 2011

How to Repair Greenhouse Panels with a Riveter

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We get lots of wind.  Not only do we live on the plains in a desert, but we don’t have any houses behind us to block the wind.  So when it gets windy, we see the brunt of it.

The other day the wind picked up and broke a few panels on our greenhouse.  I wasn’t able to get a hold of the company that made it so I had to come up with my own solution to fixing it.  I tried small screws, I tried glue and a few adhesives but nothing was working to well.   The screws seemed to work about the best but it wasn’t a good fix.


Our Hobby Greenhouse

I figured I’d try a rivet tool.  I found one at the store for ~$10.  It worked great.  Just drill a hole, put the rivet in, squeeze the handles and bam.  Done!


Installed Rivets

I am not sure how much longer this greenhouse will survive, but I figure I can keep it together for at least a few more years.  It serves as a chicken home in the winter and a place to grow fun stuff in the summer.  I bet I can find all kinds of uses for this new tool too!  🙂


Rivet Tool

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Thanksgiving Highs and Lows

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This Thanksgiving was pretty low-key. We went to my grandma’s  new house here in Greeley.


Thanksgiving 2011 at Grandma’s house

Then we went over to Britton’s family’s house for another meal. So we were highly stuffed.

While we are happy to have a four-day weekend, in some ways we are ready to get back to the normal work week for a few reasons. 1) My car broke down when I was out doing inspections on Wednesday. We had to get it towed from Fort Lupton back to Greeley. Because of the holiday they won’t even look at it until Monday. That makes me a little anxious. And 2) Britton is on-call this whole weekend, so on Monday he’ll get to turn the pager over to someone else.

Other than that, we’ve been enjoying the time off and the opportunity to think about our lives and be thankful for all we have. We’ve accomplished so much this year! It’s amazing. We are so thankful. Since the holidays are about bringing family together, it also made me remember how much I miss my dad. Holidays are hard like that. Sometimes in a weird way, I am happy I still have such strong feelings about my dad inside me though. It makes me feel like he is still here, somehow.

We’ve taken a couple of walks and even walked down inside the Greeley ditch (since it is empty this time of year) to stay out of the crazy wind. It’s like finding a new world to explore down there. Old ditched (literally) rusted bicycles, tree branches and crawdads line the bottom. We avoided Black Friday like the Black Plague and stayed inside and made turkey sandwiches, tea and brownies. We played Wii Frisbee golf, bowling, and the airplane game on Wii Sports Resort.

This week we also got our medical student who moved into the basement bedroom, but she is with her family this holiday weekend, so we have the house to ourselves. We also got our vacation time approved and are planning on going back to Rincon toward the end of January! We are already making a list of all the things we want to do when we are there!

Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to lately -the highs and the lows. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Avocados Galore!

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My aunt Laura invited us to an avocado tasting party put on by the Avocado Diva and Vintage Inn in Eaton/Galeton. We had so much fun! The bed and breakfast was a beautiful house and the hostess is a terrific cook. There were all sorts of different foods to try that had a little avocado in them. From chocolate/avocado fudge and avocado salad to delicious guacamole and avocado leaf tea!


A nice spread of avocado and other snacks!

The Avocado Diva brought all of these avocados straight from small-scale farms in California. We learned all about different types of avocados including such varieties as Zutano, Bacon, Pinkerton, and the most famous: Haas. The type we were most impressed by was the Mexicola! According to the Avocado Diva, Brenda, this is the original wild Mexican avocado. It looks sort of like a fig or a plum and the skin is edible! The skin has a sort of nutty flavor to it. This is also the variety that you can use the licorice smelling leaves in iced tea. What’s more, is unlike most of the hybridized varieties, this one you can grow true to form from the seed. So we are going to try and sprout some here and maybe in PR too!


The small black, smooth-skinned Mexicola Avocado in comparison with another variety

We bought a variety box of them and are looking forward to enjoying our gourmet avocados for the next couple of weeks! Yay! We did find two or three avocado trees on our property in Rincon, so this makes us all the more excited to eat off our land! We learned today that there are avocados that mature at different seasons. Some are summer varieties and some are winter while others are year-round producers. We would love to be able to eat these all year round!


Holding a small Mexicola next to our box of goodies

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The Rum Diary and Coffee Shops

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We have been having what we call “vacation weekends” for the last few weeks.  This is where we do things we’d normally just do on vacation.  Like going to movies and visiting coffee shops.  That’s what we do when we are in Rincon and  Puerto Rico anyway.


Cassie Using the Computer at the new coffee shop Blue Mug in Greeley

Last weekend we went out to see the Rum Diary in the theater.  It is  based on a Hunter Thompson creation and takes place in Puerto Rico in the early 60’s.   It stars Johnny Depp too so we figured it was worth checking out. Cassie had read the book a few years ago and even then they were planning on making a movie.  It turned out pretty good.

But of course we are biased since it is a PR story! A lot of the scenes we knew exactly where they were filmed! I thought it did a good job of showing both the poverty and wealth of the island through the eyes of an outsider who attempts to uncover some of the news stories on the island in between Depp’s character’s drunken romps. It even went a little into the history of the US military bombing ranges on Vieques and Culebra and rampant corruption.

Depp’s character gets to drive a sweet 53 Corvette.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to take my Corvette down to PR but it’s not as cool as this 53 and it would be pretty expensive to ship it.   That and the sea air would most likely destroy the frame!

In other sort of related news, the offer we put in on the other house didn’t go thru otherwise we would most likely be working on weekends and nights.  It’s nice to have some downtime although it’s going to get really boring over the next few winter months until we get down to our place in Rincon. We are thinking January or early February depending on my work on-call schedule. With all of these ‘vacation weekends’ we are really geared up to get down there and get some work done on our house and property. But we’ll probably still take a few breaks at the Banana Dang and see a movie or two at Caribe Cinema for good measure. 🙂

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