iPHONE SAVES THE DAY!!

I'm not as obsessed with the cult of Apple as some folks are.  I don't worship at the throne, but I do love my iPhone.  Keeping in mind that I have had only the most limited cell phone for the last twenty years and now I have a phone that is smarter than I am, (yes, I know, not that difficult to achieve) and which has unlimited minutes and a data plan.  Anyway, here's how it bailed me out today.

 Three of us from CALS went to the bank this morning to change the signers on our bank account.   We did not ask ahead what to bring and it turned out that one of the things we should have brought was the minutes that said who the new officers are.  
I didn't have the minutes but I  had put them in the Dropbox, (a file sharing program).. I asked the bank officer if, since we hadn't brought a copy of the minutes, could  I email them to her right then, and she said that would be acceptable. So I sent her a link from the dropbox.

In a normal world that might work, but the bank has a firewall that keeps them from being able to open that kind of a link.
Not to be deterred I thought I could open the dropbox document in one of the other apps I have that read documents, but apparently I only put those on the iPad, not the phone.  (I will rectify that right away).
But never fear, I do have Pages (Apple's version of Microsoft Word) on my phone, so I opened the document in Pages, selected and copied it, pasted it into an email and emailed it to her and she was able to open it. 

This doesn't sound like a big deal, but a year or so ago when NBNA went to change signers on our bank account, we had about six people who had to be there to make the change.  Some of them had kids, some were taking off from work, and it was very hard to get that many people to the credit union in the middle of the day.  And that time when we got to the Minutes issue, it was an unsolvable problem, and we had to give up the whole transaction and go home and come back another day.  

So my iPhone is king for a day for me today.  

AN UPDATE ON THE WINDOWS PROJECT

It seems like just yesterday we started this project, but in fact we ordered the windows and they were delivered August a year ago. I have to keep in mind that originally, all I cared about was that I wanted the windows on the outside of the house to look like maybe they were the original ones.

Work started, sort of, in January, and Richard and Candie started pulling out the walls and replacing the insulation while we were in Hawaii.

When we came home in February we decided we really needed to get started on the windows, which meant we had to go back to the City to get the permits. We were very worried, because the historic windows are always examined with a fine tooth comb. It turned out to be easier than we expected but it was very scary nonetheless. We worried about a lot of things that didn't have to be worried about.

After a long time, it seemed to me, of putzing around they eventually got the windows put in. This was in fact a very long job, mostly because the windows are square and the house is not. Richard is a obsessive about things being perfect so in fact every window is level even though there is nothing to judge it from except using a level but they look right. And the inspector was in and out in about 20 minutes when he finally came in and signed off on everything.

Richard also had to work with a slight downward slope of the floor which also makes things look on me. After he finally got the windows installed we decided that maybe we should get rid of the crappy acoustic tile on the ceiling.

Once that was off, they had to scrape off a ton of glue with pieces of tile stuck to it. So they did another labor-intensive job and then put beadboard up on the ceiling which looks like the other sunporches in our house. And they painted it the blue of the sky.

After we saw what lovely painting they did we decided we should have them paint the walls too. Then Richard suggested we put wainscotting halfway up the walls and put beadboard on the bottom and drywall on the top. So they did that. And painted some more. After that was finished mostly, we decided that maybe they should refinish the floor as well.

It is a painted wooden pine floor that we have had a rug over most of the time we've lived there. So right now he is refinishing the floor. It seems like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we still need the wainscoting trim, the trim around the windows and the shingles around the windows on the outside of the house. It's going to end up being the nicest room in the house.

In the meantime, I feel like the old Murphy Brown show where she had a painter in her house for about the rest of her life.   I think Richard is also planning on building us some sort of a corner bookcase for one end of the room. 

A VISIT TO MAPLE ROCK GARDENS

We took a neighbors trip to an event that High Hand Nursery was sponsoring at Maple Rock Gardens. I had never heard of this place, but it's up near Newcastle.  We got  directions from their website, so I'll assume it was in Newcastle, though we never saw the town.  

Anyway, this place is  really fabulous.  I believe someone lives there, but for all the exotic-ness of the gardens, the house is pretty unprepossessing.  It's about 3/4 of the way up a hill, and has a 180 view of the surrounding countryside.  The rest of the hillside is gorgeously landscaped with paths, steps, waterfalls, streams, courtyards, and fountains.  They even have a model railroad that has about a block worth of tracks.  

I only took close up pictures of things, so I'm putting in pictures from their website.  

We had a really good time and got lots of ideas for plantings and designs.  Most are best suited for a huge estate, but we saw some nice specimens.  I'm including a couple of pictures of them.  

They had a contest where yo,had to cunt the number of bridges up crossed, the number of water features, the number of bridges, etc.  it was pretty much impossible.  There were so many trails, things that wind back around each other, and the question of whether a waterfall is a water feature, or is a a stream, or are just the fountains water features?    

The picture below is the only one I took.  I like the ghost fern in this pot.