Working It

HOMEFRONT: Apologies for the lack of posts as of late. It seems like our hands are continually covered in mortar, grout, joint compound, or wallpaper glue this week.

We *FINALLY* finished the tile installation in the downstairs shower. Hooray!
Honestly, it really wasn't much of a shower before. It had a drain that leaked, regular old drywall for its walls (who does that?!), and a broken shower head. 

So, we ripped out the drywall, resloped the shower floor so that water would actually get to the drain, surrounded the shower with cementious backer board, and installed a hundreds of subway-shaped tiles floor-to-ceiling.

And because one project begets another, new flooring is going down in the bathroom soon, and its adjacent hallway and bedroom. And before you put new flooring down, well, it makes sense to paint the walls. However, there was a 'small' problem: The hallway walls were covered in dark, dingy textured wallpaper. Worst-case scenario was that we'd paint over it if it was impossible to pull up. However, we found with a couple of test patches that we could pull at least the top, textured layer off without too much trouble, so then we had to remove the backer layer by scoring it, spraying it with some nasty chemical, and then painstakingly scraping it off one square inch at a time.

However, with CJ, Annabelle, sometimes Kennedy and I working together, we knocked the peel job out this week. The painting will be the fun part! (Also, yes, I know we need a new light fixture. The one in the photo is super dated and not in the cool funky-retro way that I like.)

Yesterday, CJ and Annabelle assembled a bath vanity from IKEA. It's a good exercise in following written, sequential directions.

Suffice it to say, we're nowhere near finished with the renovation(s), but we definitely made some serious progress this week. 

FIRE IN THE SKY: Speaking of this week, I've noticed "not normal" looking clouds bumping up against the east side of Mt. Rainier. 

They were stacked clouds, cumulus of some sort, but I didn't know what sort until I happened upon a post by KING 5 news about pyrocumulus clouds and Mt. Rainier. 

So there you have it, our meteorlogical lesson of the week.

BEES, PLEASE: Another story from our newsfeed this week involved burgeoning beekeeping in the heart of urban Detroit, Michigan.

A non-profit, Detroit Hives, is buying vacant land in the still- city, and setting up scores of beehives on them, where minorities are encouraged to learn about beekeeping. Talk about a win-win!


MEANWHILE, ON JUPITER: NASA's -year-old Hubble telescope continues to amaze. At least once a year,  Earth-orbiting Hubble turns its eyes to all our outer solar system planets to check on their weather. This week, new photos of our solar system neighbor Jupiter were released. (The photos were taken on June 27 of this year.)

Did you know that Jupiter's great red spot, an enormous storm, has been shrinking for years now? While it is getting taller and turning more orange, it is shrinking in diameter. Once upon a time the Great Red Spot was believed  to be large enough to cover the width of three Earths, but as of April 2017, the storm spot was just a little wider than one Earth (a diameter of 10,159 miles, according to NASA.

Using the latest Hubble images, NASA compiled an animation of Jupiter's rotation. (In case you were wondering, Jupiter completes one rotation every 9.8 hours.)

A few more fun Jupiter facts from the folks at NASA ...