All out-of-doors projects are subject to the whim of Mother Nature and our faux mosaic restoration is no exception. Joshua’s repair of the other concrete corner as well as Capt. Allen’s continued restoration efforts were stalled for several days by the gusty winds creeping our way from hurricane Illiana carrying all manner of debris.

With his routine now highly-refined, the Capt. is systematically moving from right to left and top to bottom. Precision rather than speed is the key word for this redux in general but surely for the small squares and the grout finesse.

Even though it seems Mother Nature always wins, we remain vigilant in our attempts to keep the rain outside where it belongs. With each hard downpour, the garage roof continues to pose maintenance issues in the garage proper and in the garden garage loft studio apartment.

Water in general, water use, and water conservation are of prime concern to all of us in Jerome and no one is more strongly cognizant than we are since our gardens are one of the larger consumers. Hence, we are ever-vigilant when we see overflows.

Day 5 – hard to image – brings us to astonishing accomplishment! Go Capt. Go! We wanted to document the detail of the finesse of painting the ‘grout’ area first and then filling with the tiles. Also of incredible note is the contrast of the old & discolored image where the topcoat yellowed along with the worst deteriorated areas against the brilliance of the restored areas.

This year provided a challenging and heart-felt adjustment in that we lost 5 of our 6 bee baby colonies over the winter which is always a heart-wrench. We believe the colonies were simply not sufficiently populated to keep the hives as warm as needed and then all varieties of varmints moved in – oh dear and what a disgusting mess!

The weather is blessing us and Capt. Allen’s ‘big mo’ is growing in momentum so he/we are screaming ahead amazingly with the redux of the faux mosaic – yea! Joshua did one of 2 required repairs on the concrete surrounding the work and the other repair will happen shortly. It involves scraping, sanding, priming, and repainting those surfaces.

As with all creative projects and endeavors, notions and paths shift as things come together. As fate would have it, the original artist involved in this redux project is no longer available to us so Praise Be the ‘Capt.’ stepped up to the plate – yea!

We had a close call a day ago with a bizarre complete splitting of the UV light housing for one of the pumps that supports the large upper pond. Joshua arrived to find the depth of the upper pond just shy of 1.5 feet rather than the typical and desired 5.5 feet.

A few weeks ago, our food bank had a windfall in what seemed like millions of packages of bacon. So many in fact that even after patrons stocked up, a large number remained and our food bank gurus Ann and Liz were concerned that it NOT go to waste.