Senior Night

Senior Night is the Friday night at the football game when the seniors on the football team and in the Marching Band are honored by having their pictures taken with their parents and presenting their mothers with roses and then forcing them to stand out in front of everyone so the audience can clap and yell "Hooray!" and remember how many years it's been since they were Seniors, on the cusp of the "real world", ready to leave High School and move on to bigger and better things.

 

It is also the night when the Seniors get a chance to look back on the year so far and realize that it won't be very long before all this fun and games with the instrument playing and marching and wearing slick uniforms and going to competitions is going to come to a dramatic end because they're going to have to come up with a real career and a real life that won't involve dressing up in fancy outfits every Friday evening and going to a stadium full of screaming football fans and trying to avoid being run over by three hundred pound fullbacks who don't care that it's supposed to be the band's turn out on the field.

It's also the night when little sisters (although not quite so little anymore) realize that it won't be very long before her big brother will be moving on and moving out, getting a life and getting a career that will not involve dressing up in a fancy uniform and marching around a little faux-grass field, while she still has two more years of this very interesting activity to go.

No wonder she doesn't look pleased.

Stairway to Heaven

One day, I got a really odd idea in my head. Winter was on the way, and I realized that we'd have to move all those lovely plants off the back deck, where they were elegantly draped across the railings (in these really cool planter boxes Cheryl had found at the store which are designed to straddle 2x4s). I wanted to keep the plants alive, if possible, but the only way to do that, was to bring them indoors and put them in a place with lots of sunshine.

There aren't a lot of windows on the southern side of the house, and none with any kind of mounting platform which the planter boxes could straddle.

But there was this big blank spot in the kitchen where the kitchen table used to be, right in front of the sliding glass door.  Perfect!

So all I needed was a structure which could hold all the planters in a kind of vertical stack in front of the sliding glass door.  Some kind of stair-step structure, so that one plant wouldn't cast shadows on the ones behind it.

Something like ... a ladder!

So that's what I created, over the course of an afternoon. A plant ladder. It isn't yet "done" yet. Since it's going to get water spilled on it occasionally, it will need some kind of water-proofing. And I'd like to set up some kind of auto-watering / auto-draining pump on it so it won't require a lot of attention. 

But it's a start.