Dr Copa

Some of my wife’s favorite surfaces to paint on are mailboxes. A few years ago she painted a couple of whitehall mailboxes as Christmas presents to give away to family and friends, and they were a big hit. Seems that she has been getting a lot of requests from people to paint some for Christmas gifts this year as well; I just don’t know if she will have the time to paint them all!

I was thinking that she might want to take a look at other whitehall products to see if she might want to incorporate painting on some of their mailbox posts to match the mailboxes. You know, make it look like climbing vines of flowers on the post. I think that might look really nice, adding an extra special touch of class to it all. What do you think?

My wife and I own lot of shiny things.  My wife – she enjoys wearing shiny jewelry; I put shiny things on my vehicles, and in my house.  On my vehicles, I am all about chrome! (Especially on my Harley!) In the house, it is all about blomus stainless steel! When we moved here we had to replace all of the kitchen appliances; the existing ones were all broken.  My wife wanted almond colored appliances, but I lobbied for a blomus kitchen and stainless steel or brushed aluminmum applicances.

I won that little negotiation, much to my surprise!  My wife was just happy to be getting all brand new kitchen appliances and really didn’t care what color they were, as long as they worked! So we got a Jenn Air gas range, a GE side-by-side refrigerator with water and ice in the door, and a brand new GE dishwasher as well. A new over-the range Maytag microwave oven and we were good to go!  I also want to expand and buy some blomus fireplace accessories to put beside the fireplace in the family room. After all, why stop with just the kitchen? 

My wife and I have been talking about how to best dispose of our garbage. She would really like to compost and has been asking me for months to set up a compost pile.  She keeps telling me that the compost would be good for our garden.  We don’t have a garbage disposal: and I tell her that I’d rather just get a garbage disposal. Composting sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t feel like doing the work.  She tells me that garbage disposals are bad for septic systems, but I know lots of people with septic systems have garbage disposals!

I was reading an article on the Slate.com news website that discusses whether people should use garbage disposals or just put their garbage in the trash to be hauled to a landfill. The article assumes that no one has a septic system, and it recommends compost piles as the first and best choice, the garbage disposal as the second best choice, and putting garbage in the trash to be hauled to the landfill as the worst choice. I wish the article had addressed septic systems!

I’ve noticed as I drive around this area, exploring roads that I’ve never driven down before, is how many great looking Gaines Mailboxes there are around here.  Where we used to live in New England, practically no one spent the money on their mailboxes because in the winter time the wicked and most dreaded snowplow driver would frequently damage or destroy so many mailboxes. That was a cause of great frustration to many homeowners.

But now that we live in an area where snowplowing is not done frequently, I have noticed a lot of nice looking Classic Mailboxes lining the streets.  It actually is quite pleasant to drive through neighborhoods where the mailboxes are not all rusty and dented.  Nice Keystone Mailboxes give the casual observer the feeling that the occupants of the houses actually CARE about taking good care of their homes and yards.  They make a great first impression. 

When my wife and I lived in New England, we made our living doing landscaping work and grounds maintenance in the summer. We took great pride in how nice my clients yards looked.  Although we did basic work such as lawn mowing and shrub trimming, our favorite work was with the flowers.  In New England, the growing season is very short, so flowers are dearly appreciated when they bloom! 

We especially enjoyed working with planters.  One of the advantages of working with window flower boxes is that if you are planting something that can’t survive the winter up there it is fairly easy to bring the plant indoors for the winter – planter and all! 

I think my favorite window box planters were the ones that I filled with cascading petunias and the flowers cascaded all the way to the ground. That was simply breathtaking!  Lining the edges of a deck with a variety of decorative garden window boxes filled with dinner plate dahlias added a great dash of color to an otherwise stark deck.  And I like being able to move the planters around to mix it up a little bit, get a little variety.