In Which The Laundry Room Receives A Makeover

The laundry room, along with the weedpatch and the shed (former dog's house), was the ugliest part of the house.
The walls had like three or different colors. The floor was a horrible, dirty, ripped green linoleum. It was so ugly that we tried to improve it by covering it with colorful rugs, but it didn't really work.
We've been working on it for a year now. First, we painted the ceiling white and tried to white wash the walls, but after three coats, it still looked bad. We also changed the switch board. This summer we decided to change the floor. Meg found some tiles that she liked, and as soon as we had a free weekend we retiled. We didn't want to rent a wetsaw, so we marked the tiles that needed cuting and took them to a tiles place in downtown Ogden. It was cheaper and faster than doing it ourselves. Not to mention better done, since some of the cuts were quite tricky. The tiling itself was pretty easy and quick. Megan then painted the room a dark yellow and we put floor boards. The room looks so good that it feels like it's an indoors part of the house now!

Our Weed Patch Is Beautiful!

One of the ugliest features of our house, when we moved in, was a patch of dirt between our two driveways. Now one the ugliest one is Manuel.

Anyway, this patch would only grow weeds, and nothing else. We tried watering and doing all we could (we didn't know how to do much back then), and all we got were more and more weeds.



We had to keep looking at that ugly thing for the rest of the summer. We tried to fix its appearance a little bit by planting a couple of cherry trees, but it didn't help much. Then the snow came and covered it all. It was wonderful.

But when the snow melted, we were faced with that horrible thing we could only call "The Weed Patch."


We finally decided to do something about it, and resolved to cover it with rocks and things like that. We weren't sure what we wanted to do, but the first step was to get rid of the top soil. We wanted to rent a sod cutter, but it was big, and we don't have a truck. So, one day when it was raining, I thought that the ground might be soft enough, and started shoveling. It was a lot of work and it took three days, but it wasn't as bad as I thought.



We ended up putting a bunch of rocks, pavers, and mulch to cover all that indecent weedness that knew nothing of boundaries. This time we did need to borrow a truck. Fortunately, one of our neighbors was interested in some of the soil I shoveled off, so we traded: dirt for a truck. Awesome deal if there's ever been one.

Anyway, this is how the process looked:




And the final thing:

Our Hole in the Wall Is Finished!

There's a hole in the wall between our hall and living room. When we first moved into the house, it had an awkward looking telephone holder that was too small to hold any phone book (that we've ever seen), as well as an ugly box phone jack.

Our first project was to rip off the ugly holder and painted the walls of the hole the same color as the living room walls. But we always said that we would do something else with it.

Megan found some cool looking mini tiles at Home Depot and decided to try something with them, and the result looks as good as:
-- pizza with five meat toppings and anchovies (according to Manuel)
-- Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line (according to Megan)
-- when all the evil from earth dissapears and only cool, hip Mormons will remain (according to cool, hip Mormons)
-- etc. (sorry, we couldn't agree on just one simile).



Manuel replaced the phone jack, which has a 0.5 level of difficulty (out of 100.5), but he's still very proud of it...

Anti Tom Literature

Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of my all-time favorites. It's beautifully written, and the characters are so well developed that you really feel for them when something bad happen--and a lot of bad things happen to them. It is true that the book is somewhat melodramatic (it was published serially in the time, and those kinds of publications could be compared to the soap operas of our time), and the author's agenda is quite clear. She portraits the slave in a (maybe purposely?) naive way, and the stereotypes portrayed could make cringe any modern reader. But overall is an amazing book, and a must read for every breathing being!

This book was considered the cause of the civil war because of its secessionist views, and although is was highly respected in the North, I was surprised to find out that in the South there was a whole movement of so called anti-Tom literature. Some of the most popular ones were The Planter's Northern Bride, by Caroline Lee Hentz, and The Sword and the Distaff, by William Gilmore Simms. The Planter's Northern Bride is easily available and quite cheap, but the only copy of The Sword and the Distaff is priced at almost $300.00 on Amazon.


I found a couple of links to the complete texts (here and here), though, and they are a very curious read. It's interesting to see the perspective of the Southerners of the time regarding slavery. These authors argue that the slaves were very happy in the plantations, and that if there was any abuse against slaves, it was caused by those masters who were also abusive towards their children. Slaves then equaled children, and in the authors' minds, that was perfectly fine. They say that slaves would rather die than leave their masters, and that if a slave ever left the plantations to go to the North, it was because "they have most of them been made disaffected by the influence of others-- tempted by promises which are seldom fulfilled."

As any decently written book does, the anti-Tom books give us a very clear perspective of a section of the population's opinion at the time, and how hard they tried to justify an action as horrible as owning slaves.

School's Out!

Last Thursday was our last day of school. We had to go to school on Friday, but it was mostly to box our things and to get our classrooms ready for summer school.

I was offered a different classroom. One with a door and at least one real wall. The teacher in that classroom was going to leave, because she's an elementary teacher, and with our school changing to junior high (currently it's a middle school) there will be no more sixth graders, and, therefore, the school has no use for elementary teachers anymore. Thing is, the principal decided not to give me that classroom, but one of the old science rooms instead (the science teachers are getting brand new classrooms with computers in each desk), and it's like ten times better than the classroom I wanted. It has two doors that lead outside, a door to enter my classroom from the hall (I didn't have one of those this year, which can be extremely distracting in a middle school), four real walls instead of crappy panels, and a walk in closet!

With my Language Arts class we made a movie. We were supposed to make three, but they were so stupid the last days of school that it was like trying to teach cats how to dance the Can Can.

The Bad Dream
Uploaded by lobizao

I also made a video for the end of year assembly (the teacher in charge asked us to please share anything, because she didn't have enough material). It took me a long time to film and edit this, and at the last minute she decided to ask the nerds in the computer department to just show two million pictures with background music instead.

End of Year Assembly
Uploaded by lobizao