Around the House

NOT SEEING RED: It's cold, stormy, and late October. We have about four dozen tomatoes that are just not going to make it to red this season. 

This morning, I Googled our options, and it looks like some green tomato salsa is in our future. Maybe even a bit of relish. 

We certainly had more than our fair share of red tomatoes this year, so I can't complain.

BALLOON HANDS: Annabelle has a special cake to make this week for a gala fund raiser for Birthday Dreams. Of course, doesn't that sound like the perfect time to start experimenting with a new cake decorating technique? ;)

She wants to recreate the Birthday Dreams logo for a cake topper. It involves a heart (that will be easy), and a couple of balloons (not so easy). 

We'd both heard about making edible 'balloons' for cakes out of gelatin and food coloring, and decided to give that a go on Sunday afternoon.

You dissolve gelatin in water (a 1:2 ratio), add color and luster dust if you want, heat it for 15 seconds in the microwave, and then start dipping your balloons in the liquid. It makes a terrible mess, in case you were wondering.

You hang them out to dry for a day or so.

So attrition can be expected. A couple of our balloons deflated, for instance. However, we used the rejects to practice removing the balloons, and to test how set up they were.

Actually, even our reject ones are kind of pretty, so I think the others will look pretty darn good!

THE FLOOD, PART 2: So, a month or so ago, our basement had a bit of a flood during a storm-for-the-ages event. 

Turns out, it wasn't a one time deal. 

This past Thursday night, another crazy front hit our hill. Lightning, thunder, hail and bucket and buckets of rain, some of which wound up in our basement. Again.

Because we can't really have this become a regular event, we started casting about for mitigation ideas. We quickly honed in on this uncovered stairwell leading down below as the Number One problem when it comes to letting water in where it shouldn't be.

Thankfully, Christian came up with the great idea of building a little roof over it. We started that on Sunday, and as of Monday afternoon it's now all framed in and we're just waiting for some dry weather so we can waterproof the plywood. 

The design even includes a hinge to lift the roof up on the rare occasion we actually use that stairway). 

We're optimistic this will staunch the vast majority of problematic precipitation.