Why I Oughta...

As the weather started to warm up, I was able to get out into the yard to do some late Winter pruning on a bunch of items around the yard.  I cleaned up the hydrangeas, used a new extension pruner (more on this at some point) to clip off some water spouts on trees way up in the air and even tended to this pair of Linden trees that we've espalier'd into a horizontal cordon.  Here's a post from September of 2017 where I shared photos and description of the wire setup .  The photo at the top of this post shows the state of these two trees before any pruning.  It is hard to really see all of the cordons or arms, so here's an annotated photo showing the position and lengths of the arms/limbs:  The Greenspire Linden on the left has four levels of cordons and the one on the right has what I'll call 4.5 levels.  I decided to try to prune off the top - what I found out is known as the " apical meristem " in an attempt to drive more growth into the existin

For the past 10+ years, I've been sitting at this desk for a couple of days each week.   And by calling it a 'desk', I might be being generous.  It is really a table.  With two tiny, slim drawers.  But, I call it my 'desk' when I refer to it.  "Put it on my desk."  Or "I think it is on my desk."  Nat bought it at West Elm when we were first moving into our old house.  When she bought it, I was setting up a tiny home office.  Upstairs in what would become our little nursery outside of our master bedroom.  It is a stable, even surface.  And compact in size.  When #1 arrived, I relocated downstairs to a first floor bedroom that was larger.  But, the small desk was going with me.  And there it lived for seven or so years.  After a few years in storage, we moved it into my new office in our new house.  Until now.  Nat found me a new desk - a desk that I've admired but figured was out of our league price-wise.  But, thanks to the Crate and

If you've been to a Disney Park here in the US, you can't swing your double stroller around in a store like the Emporium on MainStreet USA without seeing some form of merchandise with the name of the park on it.  There's shirts and mugs with Magic Kingdom on them.  There's tons of items with Epcot Center on it - including some vintage logo things like hats.  Same with Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios.  Then there's all the merchandise that have the opening year of the entire resort on them like WDW '71. But, one of the things that I noticed during my trips to the Tokyo parks was that there isn't a lot of stuff that they sell that actually has the name of the parks/resort on the merchandise.  There's ONE shirt that I found - a plain grey shirt with blue words on it that has the park names on it in each of Land and Sea parks.  No kids clothes with the name of the resort/parks what so ever. What they DO have is what I'd describe as character-foc

I've now been on three different Pirates of the Caribbean rides in three different parks.  The first one I ever rode was down in Walt Disney World.  And it is great.  Has just one drop and what I thought was a really nice show.  But then, I rode the one in Disneyland.  Woah.  Totally different and ummm...better?  Like, first there's the pre-pre show.  The whole seeing the boats come around the Blue Bayou restaurant into the loading area.  Then the whole bayou scene with the guy playing the banjo and the fireflies buzzing around.  Then the drops.  There's more than one!  That was nuts to me. And now I have these (admittedly) blurry photos of the Pirates of the Carribbean at Tokyo Disneyland.  The reason they are all blurry is that there are tons of signs advising one to NOT take photos on the rides and so I wasn't sure what to do.  I was worried about the brightness being seen from my phone screen on the ride, so I pressed the phone against my body, tried to put my

I found myself in a Japanese hardware store in Ginza and discovered that a lot of the products are just like ours:  made in China.  But, there was a section that had some signage that proclaimed:  Made in Japan.  That's where I spent my time poking around to try to find something small and inexpensive that I could bring home for myself and for my tool-loving family members who had birthdays coming up.  There on the rack were a series of these precision screwdrivers.  Or "micro precision drivers" as I think they were billed.  This Phillips head driver from Vessel has that red padded section that you can use to twist the screw into place while applying pressure to the base.  I have a set of precision drivers, but they're stuck in a case and it always takes me a second to pull them out.  Now I have a driver that I can keep in the coffee mug on my desk at home along with my most-used regular-sized driver and a pair of needle nose pliers.  You can buy a full set of

Of the course of the past week or so, I've shared a bunch of details of my trip to the Tokyo Disney Resort including a stop at Tokyo DisneySea.  My trip there coincided with a unique celebration called "Duffy's Heartwarming Days 2019" that was taking place in the Cape Cod section of the park that seemed to be a particular draw for some guests. The Heartwarming Days celebration features Duffy the Bear and his friends Shellie Mae, Gelatoni and StellaLou.  They had this display with little characters set up that you see above that had a super long line of folks waiting to take photos. The Heartwarming Days celebration ran simultaneously with the 35th Birthday celebration of the resort so they had situations where you could get a photo of a 35th Birthday marker (like this nautical Mickey themed one) and the Heartwarming Days banners (on the roof and on the next building).  This had a shorter line - but was still having people take photos (I blurred this little gi

I don't think I've mentioned how the addition of a Toto Toilet to our master bathroom has fundamentally altered my life.  And, that's probably best.  If she is reading this, Nat is seriously cringing right now.  So, I'll just move along.  TMI, Nat?  Sorry!  Briefly...I'll just say this: Yes...I'm proud to be totally #TeamToto. But, before I move along, I wanted to flag this for all of you:  some of the public area toilets (think....bathrooms that are adjacent to a multi-tenant high-rise office building) have not just the normal front/rear wash and pressure but also the button marked 'privacy'?  And the 'volume' toggle underneath it?  That's basically a white noise function.  White noise, chimes and bird chirps.  For real. During my time in Tokyo, I didn't come across this very often so I'm not sure if this feature is rare? The first time I came across Toto's in public was during my time at Google.  Here's a post from