Torii Gate

Here's a few pictures of a Torii Gate I built to define and highlight the creek bed from the street. As you remember, the original vista looked like this:

That's not really that attractive. So I cleared the woody shooty things (which are some sort of impossible to kill willow our neighbor tells us...) and we had this:

An improvement to be sure. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a few more split fence posts (which they now sell at Lowes...) and put in a short length of fence across the front of the creek here, three posts, two sets of rails.

It was OK, but not great. It cut off the view more than I wanted, and because of the steepness of the slope I either had to put it up at street level and six feet past our property line, or weirdly low and near our property line.

Then in the end I ended up putting it right where a drain pipe that runs under our driveway empties, which is not the most brilliant thing I've ever done.

So I took the fence down, designed the gate, built a quick mock up to hold up in the space and discovered it was WAY too big. So I scaled it down and built this:

Scaled down was very nice, too, because I cut the lumber costs way down. Total cost with lumber, hardware, concrete and stain (which I'll apply once the wood dries out some) was $125. Not too bad.

Diane is planting hand-me-down vinca a neighbor took out, and even out there right now even though it's full dark!

CFLs -11, PG&E -25

Just got our first post-CFL conversion PG&E bill. It's not a full month of CFL usage, probably about 16 days worth and slightly less than that conventional.

Anyway, our usage dropped 11% over last month and our bill dropped 25%. Both were one-year lows since we've been in this house.

Next month will be a truer picture because we'll have only CFLs for the whole month. I'd love another 10 and 25 drop!

Drenched Dogs in Davis and Wattage Wows

Yesterday was Picnic Day at U.C. Davis, an all-campus open house, parade and party with a 100-year-or-so tradition. Diane volunteered to work at a Plant Science booth and Frankie was going to be there with the Cal Band, so we made a day of it and decided to take the dogs.

Did I mention it poured for a large portion of the day?

Spanky clearly didn't care. Idgie did give us those occasional "Don't you damn humans have enough sense to come in out of the rain?" looks. But it was fun, and they ride well and we all slept like the dead last night.

Haven't gotten a PG&E bill yet, but Diane is writing her column on our CFL switchover, so I did do a count and a little math: All in all, we replaced 54 bulbs with a total wattage of 3,155 with 54 bulbs with a total wattage of 658, a 79.1% decrease.

Another way to look at it, it's the equivalent of taking out every recessed bulb, every outdoor bulb, the overhead fixtures in Diane's office, the spare bedroom, both bathrooms and the garage door light.

Froggy in the Tulips

Dogs' Day Out!

Today the dogs went out to lunch.

There's a cafe in Murphys with a dog menu. Really. A turkey hot dog and two cookies and a big bowl of water.

Saw it a few weeks ago, and went today. The dogs quite liked it, and Diane's gonna write her column about the place. They have human food too, and it was OK.