House St. Clair: June 2006

Monday, June 12, 2006

Can anyone identify this flower?

I found this growing in my little patch of 'woods' out back. It is a vine without viney tendrils, if that makes sense. I took the second picture to get a good view of the leaves. I haven't had any luck looking in my plant books as of yet, but I'm going to break out the Big Book in a minute here. Anyone?

They are really small flowers, about as long as my thumbnail, perhaps. The plant itself is probably close to 3ft. tall. Whatever it is, it's lovely, but I would really like to know its name!

EDIT: I should have known this, but in my defense, I've only really seen Nightshade once. This is Climbing Nightshade, less poisonous than Deadly Nightshade, but still poisonous. I still like the flowers!

Friday, June 02, 2006

Vinegar

  • Vinegar can also be used as a solvent for removing the adhesive residue tapes leave on glass and plastic. It works well for quickly removing an adhesive residue that has been left on for about 1-2 weeks. To remove the adhesive residue using vinegar, you should:
  1. Apply the vinegar to a cloth or paper towel.
  2. Dab the cloth or paper towel in a little bit of vinegar.
  3. Scrub at the surface with the damp side of the cloth or paper towel.
  4. Dry the surface.
from Wikipedia.

Guess what? It also works on the glue residue left on my linoleum! My entry room smells like vinegar now. *sigh* But the test spot came right off! Very cool.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Wallpaper up! (Well, some of it anyway.)


I learned how to put up wallpaper from Bob the Builder. No, really. There's this episode where he's putting up wallpaper and he puts the glue on the wallpaper first. Up until that second, I had always assumed that you'd put the glue on the wall, because doesn't that make more sense? I can't imagine trying to wrestle a sticky wall-sized sheet of wallpaper, and then trying to line it up correctly. It would make so much more sense to put the glue on the wall first.

Needless to say, I'm not done yet. Since I'm using ancient wallpaper, I decided to wait after three panels to see if it was going to disentegrate on me. I would have been very mad if I had done the whole border and then wake up in the morning to find it all over my kitchen floor.

Here is a close-up of the pattern. It's actually very pretty, and the brown is actually gold accents.

I don't know how old it is, and I can't read the maker's name on the other side. It's blurred. But I like it, and it only cost me fifty cents for a roll at Goodwill. :)

Although I can't imagine an entire room done in this at all. *shudder*