Just about this freezing time of year, I usually begin to make up batches of homemade suet to feed my backyard birds. I bought some beef suet at the local grocery store and stuck it in the freezer for winter feeding and now that it’s January and finally getting quite cold, it’s time to give the birds a treat.
My recipe includes adding peanut butter and stale crackers, cornmeal and just about any other thing the birds might like to the store bought beef fat. I usually add some old bread (kept in the freezer too) and flour to hold it all together and then cool it in a large, foil pan.
Personally, I don’t like to add seeds. I keep the seeds in separate feeders.
Once it’s firm, it can be cut to size to fit your suet feeder or placed in a mesh bag. I only put one piece out at a time and freeze the rest, just in case some animal comes and takes it in the night. I had a fox eyeing the feeder one year.
Just a word of warning – your birds will love this and eat it up quickly! The squirrels will like it too, of course.
When I bought my house, I knew there would be much to do to make it livable. While I was busy shelling out money for garage doors without holes in them, siding that wasn’t rotting off the walls and fixing the leaky basement, my tub was slowly peeling.
Someone (before I bought the place) had given the downstairs bathroom a quick makeover by slapping some white paint all over the tub and shower area – it’s even on the tiles. As we began to use that shower, the paint began to peel. It was impossible to clean the tub without pulling the layer of paint off, and the whole thing had become almost unusable and tremendously disgusting looking.
The house was built in the 1970’s and as I found out (and you can see here) the tub/shower had once been gold. In fact the guy who came out to give me an estimate for the refinishing said it looked like it had been refinished twice already.
So what’s your option when your bathroom looks like this? You can re-do the entire thing and rip out the old – but bathtubs won’t fit through doorways, so how do you get a new one in when they are usually installed when the house is built? Well, not without a lot of mess and huge amounts of money.
The only other option is to refinish the existing one. A company called “Miracle Method” did mine. It was suppose to take one day and ended up taking two full days. (Apparently my tub was one of the extremely gross ones.) Then one day (24 hours) for the job to cure. Fortunately I have another bathroom upstairs to use.
I had to pull off the wood strip along the base of the tub, take down the shower curtain rod (which was screwed into the tile) and have a plumber come out and remove the faucet, handle, etc. (He had to return to put new ones back on too.)
It was a messy job. Sanding down the tub caused white dust to fly everywhere and even though I took everything I could out of the room, I had to wipe down the walls and floor afterwards – after the horrible smell went away which took about 3 days.
It cost me a little over $1,000 for this, but I am happy with the results, even if the tub is not like a normal tub. It’s more like a paint job on a car. In fact the guy who did the job said it would hold up best if I applied Canuba wax to it occasionally! I also have to be careful when cleaning it. So, it’s not like a new tub, but like a “better than what was there” tub.
On January first the temp reached into the mid-forties the sunshine drew me outside to pick up fallen branches that were scattered over the front yard. There is no snow here in southern New Hampshire.
I think that is a first for me since I moved back to the northeast. We have had a white Christmas for the past 6 years and don’t see the ground until Spring. This year was different. We had 23 inches of snow in October and have had very little since.
Pictures of Past Snowfalls
Basement slider- I won’t be using this door any time soonMy neighbor’s black lab walking in deep snow
The photo here is one I took last year on January 12th during a snowstorm that dumped a bunch of snow on top of the bunch of snow we already had.
This was the year when my landlady had decided she didn’t need the driveway plowed by the guy she had been using. Because she was waiting for the new, busy plow guy, our driveway was way down his list and we had to wait! I didn’t have to get out in my car, but I didn’t like the idea that we were snowed in. Good thing I work from home!
Christmas day last year, 2010, was spent in my rental house. In fact we did Christmas a week late since my daughter was sick Christmas day. We spent the day with my daughter and her boyfriend and his daughter and my son. There was plenty of snow and we went outside to try out the new sleds and snowshoes once the presents were unwrapped.
At the time, I was not sure if I’d be living in that duplex for another five years or what would happen. As it turned out I was able to get into a home of my own where we will spend the holidays this year. It’s a good feeling to have my own place again. My kitchen is big so I can make cookies and have room to spread my mess out all over the place!
Snow is coming tonight, so maybe we will have a white Christmas after all.
New England's Narrow Road 