Podcasts

Last night I was driving back home and I got to hear one of my favorite radio shows:

This American Life

It is a dream of mine to be on that show in some fashion. I’m gonna send in a piece of writing and get on it someday.

But last night! Ira Glass got on and announced that the show will now be available as a free podcast.

HOORAY!

I am hooked on podcasts. Love them. And I haven’t even had a pod for very long.

These are the Podcasts I subscribe to:

The Glen and Helen Show (Instapundit’s podcasts)
FatFree FIlm
Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet
The DIner
KCRW’s BookWorm
KCRW’s The Politics of Culture
Irrational Public Radio

And now, This American Life.

Okay, all of these are great, and I listen to lots of archives. I’ll have to give the blow by blow about them later.

The old flower bed has been made new



The old flower bed, originally uploaded by murphy_h2001.

This is a photo of the flowerbed along the front of my house.

The far left climbing plant is a pink jasmine. The far right climbing plant is a yellow rose plant.

The middle plant is a camellia.

The other two plants are an eyesore, and I have been wishing them gone. I gave them a year to impress me; they’ve had their chance.

They flowered once, but the short lived glory of the bloom ended and left only an ugly denuded stalk. They had to go.

So, I found a plant sale. They sold me two hisbiscuses and two english lavenders.

As you see below, I pulled out the ugly plants and put in the pretty ones.

I left the camellia, even though it has not impressed me much. it is a slow grower, and doesn’t bloom very much. But the leaves are green, and it’s not dying. Camellias can be pretty.

All the plants in the front bed now are herbs. That pleases me. And I hope they grow and become verdant and blooming.

We’ll see how things turn out.

the new sage plants



the new sage plants, originally uploaded by murphy_h2001.

This is the star jasmine climbing plant near the door. It has had a bald patch of nothing in front of it for a while.

I planted these new little flowering members of the sage family. My hope is that they grow and make lots of flowers.

old medicine cabinet

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old medicine cabinet, originally uploaded by murphy_h2001.

This is the old medicine cabinet. As of yesterday it is banished from our home altogether.

Note the brown wood trim that matches nothing else in the house. Note the peeled finish on said trim.

It was ugly. It was old. It has needed replacing.

But we didn’t know how to replace it. It might be

HARD

to replace. We didn’t know.

But we finally decided that we would try it anyway. We measured it, and thought we would see how much it cost to replace a medicine cabinet of that size.

We found a medicine cabinet of that size. Well, very close to that size, It was not that expensive, so we bought it to see if it would fit.

I took a box cutter and cut the paint along the edge of the old medicine cabinet. If you do that, sometimes you can prevent strips of the old paint from peeling away when you remove something.

The gaping hole that was left was full of mouse poopies. Yikes! I’m glad we don’t have mice anymore. These were offal of mice long dead.

And I was about to put in the new cabinet when Chris had second thoughts.

Perhaps the new medicine cabinet was not good enough. Wasn’t it a little crooked here and there? Weren’t there gaps in the corners where the edges met?

Didn’t we deserve BETTER?

I glared at him. This medicine cabinet was perfect, considering the price. I mean, come ON.

But he wasn’t satisfied. He thought we should research further medicine cabinet options.

I did not have time for this. There was a gaping hole in the bathroom where a mirror should be.

But Chris wanted nice things for our home. Maybe if we put the old one back while he looked…

But no! That was retrograde progress. We needed to move forward, he said. He would find the right medicine cabnet for us.

I disbelieved him.

He promised.

Fine.

In point of fact, both mirror fronted medicine cabinets lived in our hallway, propped against the wall for that week. The cat spent a lot of time looking at himself in them.

But Chris was diligent. He looked everywhere, and found that I was right. I WAS RIGHT.

However, he was right too. That particular individual medicine cabinet was a tad crooked. He found another one with greater evennesss and we installed THAT one.

Also note, in the above photo, that there is a new shower head in the bathtub. It’s a fancy shower head that replaced the old sputtery one.

That shower head was the original purpose for the visit to Lowe’s to begin with.