Why I Oughta...

Back at the end of July, I posted a photo of the wall-hung workbench that I had selected to build first in the garage (garden bench) and then down in my shop (once I got the hang of it!).  I pulled down some plans from WoodSmith Plans and got started ripping down the lumber to make all the pieces.  But there was a part that I got hung up on - these angled brackets with notched cuts at the bottom that I've circled above.  The plan calls for these supports to be notched and attached to a ledger board (that gets attached to the wall).  But, my little, amateur woodworking brain couldn't quite figure out how to make those cuts.  I took a sacrificial board and drew all over it to get the angles right.  I even took it over to Nat's Dad's house and had him mark it up so I could figure out the best way to make the cuts.  He showed me how to use my table saw to get most of the wood out, then a saber saw to make the final cuts.  But then I got home and had to actually do it

Raised Bed enclosure via Wayfair It has been a couple of years since we had a garden .  Sure, we've tried to grow tomatoes and basil in containers (with mixed results), but ever since we moved out of our house in Elmhurst, we have been garden-free.  Nat has mentioned that she misses it.  She misses the veggies.  But also how our kids were involved and helped both plant and harvest.  Not to mention the understand you get about health and nature and the environment when you grow your own food. Why do I bring this up?  Because a week or so ago, Nat texted me the photo that you see above of this raised ben enclosure that she came across.  This one is being sold from Wayfair , but there are a few different varieties of these things sold from various places online.  They start at about $1K and go up to $3K.  Which...if you ask me is nuts. If you've been following along on the blog here, you may remember that I've been dreaming about a raised bed project for more than

Two months ago, I posted a photo of some of our front hydrangeas and they were looking pretty small.  Today?  The Annabelle's are big and blooming.  Those two that you see above are Annabelle's and they're on the south side of our porch.  These continue to outpace in both size and blooms the Vanilla Strawberry variety that we have in front of the porch that face due East. In looking at some of our neighbors, our hydrangeas are behind where some others are at currently in terms of blooms.  Might be because ours aren't as mature as the ones next door or maybe they're some other variety.  I didn't cut these all the way back to the ground, but according to this product listing on White Flower Farm , that's what many people choose to do: Because she flowers heavily on the current season’s growth (“new wood”), most gardeners cut the stems to the ground in late winter. New shoots emerge from the base and bloom the same summer. I know that's what the

As recently as July of this year, I posted about some #client work for the Mitsubishi Regional Jet my team has been doing at Edelman in our B2B Marketing practice.  Back in February, I shared some other client work here on the blog .  Those two examples give you a sense for the types of things we're doing at Edelman, but one thing that always struck me was:  we weren't eating our own dog food . I mean...we build really great communications marketing campaigns for our clients, but we don't market our own practice in any way.  So, with the combined effort of a bunch of folks at Edelman, we decided to change that by launching our own content hub. It is *just* getting started, but that's the key part:  starting.  There is so much inertia against moving on something like this that it has taken the better part of six months to get to this point.  We're using a marketing automation tool that we often-times use for our client projects. Our team is growing and we&#

Yesterday, I posted a photo of the variety of grapevine that I planted in our container this Summer (Somerset) and mentioned that I did that just because I wanted to post a follow-up.  Today, is that follow-up.  You can see that we have been attacked by some Japanese Beetles.  They've basically skeleton-ized some of the larger leaves.  Unfortunately, they arrived when I was out of town for the better part of a week, so they got a head start.  Since then, I've tried to monitor the plants and remove the beetles everyday by hand.  I tried drowning them in soapy water with mixed results.  Turns out, the Japanese Beetle is a known grapevine.  This piece from My Grape Vine says : The Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica, also known as the jitterbug) is one of the most visible and most destructive feeders of grape vine foliage out there. The Japanese beetle attacks most green parts of the grape vine, but mostly feeds on young leaves in the upper part of the canopy. If you loo

Back in July, I posted a photo of our mid-Summer containers on our back patio and mentioned that I somehow failed to mention/post the details of the grapes that we planted in one of our wine barrel planters.  Above, you can see the variety:  Somerset grapes.  They're self-pollinating and so far, I don't have any fruit coming in this first season. I'm hoping that they'll overwinter in the barrel and come back next Spring.  I'm posting this mostly because I want to write something here on the blog that I'll post tomorrow showing the current state of this vine. 

I picked up this pair of flat cars with Chicago and Northwestern trailers a while back at the train show, but it has not made it out of the box yet.  I'm a sucker for Chicago and Northwestern (or North Western) train cars.  My oldest sister worked at the C&NW before it was gobbled up by the Union Pacific.  If you look closely around town, you'll still see signs for this line on bridges, buildings , stations and what-have-you. Maybe this is the year we get the full Mantleburg line out and running on a table?