kmkat & her kneedles

• I am still using up the spiral bound notebooks from my kids’ school days. Note: said *kids* are now 35 and 31, respectively.
• Given the size of the remaining stack, I have attained S.A.B.L.E. notebook status.
• I realized today that whenever I have trouble with a physical object of any kind, I turn it over to Smokey to resolve. Burnt-out track lighting bulb(s), sticky jar lid, and the latest, trying to get the lotion from a refill packet into the pump bottle it was (theoretically) designed to fit. Edited to add: he figured out exactly how the refill pack was supposed to work… in about 2 seconds.
• August, plus possibly late July and most of September, is the time of year when my super-soft nails attain a nice length worthy of polish. In a few weeks; the humidity will drop to desert levels and they will, one by one, break off. ::le sigh::
• I guess the silver lining of short nails is that I will no longer have random number typos; “3” instead of “e”, “4” instead of “r”, “8” instead of “i” Yes, they are that long, and yes, I am that bad a typist.
• The hummingbirds have all but disappeared, flying away to their winter quarters somewhere in South America.
• As soon as there were fewer hummers, we started getting woodpeckers — downy, hairy, and even a pileated.
• And as soon as there were woodpeckers, the chipmunks and squirrels largely stopped raiding the feeders.
• Gonna throw some corona facts at you right here. link from Chris
• The weather has become delightfully cool — highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s. Yay for sleeping with the window open!

One day last week Smokey and I were lying on his bed playing Boggle when suddenly there was a crash from the bathroom. The wall cabinet had fallen off its hangers, apparently because one more dust mote settled on it, causing it to exceed the 50-pound weight limit.

On the left, the fallen cabinet. On the right, its replacement,
stolen from the downstairs bathroom, which we seldom use.

The cabinet had been jam-packed before, with scarcely room for another bottle of anything. We went through it all before putting it back and eliminated a LOT of stuff — OTC meds that were years beyond their use-by dates, duplicates, things we will probably never need again. Now everything has breathing room, assuming that shampoo bottles respirate.

This was rather a big deal for us, which just goes to show how boring our lives are.

One thing led to another, and Smokey searched out the spare roll of bathroom wallpaper. (I had decided to repaper the room roughly 25 years ago, but couldn’t finish until Smokey replaced the medicine cabinet above the sink with a new one we had bought. That never happened.)

Now we get to the heart of the story. A few years ago Smoke replaced the towel bars with sturdy grab bars, which served as towel bars plus being a safety feature. But they attached in slightly different locations, leaving the old mounting holes exposed.

This bothered him. (Not me. Even as picky as I can be about appearances, somehow I never noticed those holes.)

Now that he had the wallpaper in hand, he became very, very clever.

On the left, an untreated hole and a camouflaged one.
One the right, another camouflage job.

Yes, he found nails with heads wide enough to fill in the holes… and covered the heads with wallpaper.

This is (one of the many) reasons I love him.

If any of you have DIY partners, let me introduce you to a useful YouTube channel: Project Farm. The owner tests various DIY tools and products in the same manner as Consumer Reports. He tests epoxies, duct tape, air filters, super glue, penetrating oil, dry wall anchors, impact driver bits — whatever those are — and much more.