#bathroomremodel — Public Fediverse posts

BTW, spouse made this vanity and the matching medicine cabinets, and I finished them. He also tiled the backsplash and did all the plumbing and electrical work. It really helps us save on labor costs, which ultimately means we can afford some nicer materials. I’m so hashtag #blessed that I married such a skilled and talented guy!

#BathroomRemodel #KitchenRemodel #KitchenDesign #InteriorDesign #DIY

Occupied

So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.

We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!

We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.

If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.

We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.

We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.

The Occupation

Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.

My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.

Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.

They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.

There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.

This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.

The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.

Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.

And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.

And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:

The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.

And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.

There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.

There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.

Occupations, Other

Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.

My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.

Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.

I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.

We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.

I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.

James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.

Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.

My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!

For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.

https://youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw

Welcome 2026

After last weekend’s main drain backup it turned out the plumbing wasn’t finished with us yet. Thursday afternoon the shower in the basement bathroom we’ve been using for the past month while our main bathroom remodel takes its sweet time, decided to leak. And it wasn’t one of those slow drip, drip leaks. But we can fix leaky faucets!

It turned out the plumbing was original to our 1952-built house and there are no longer tools and parts to fix it. So we had to call a plumber. He had to replace the shower/tub fixtures, but in order to do that, he had to cut a door-sized hole in the wall of the adjacent bedroom to access the pipes. He then had to replace the steel pipes with copper ones. And now we have new basic shower/tub fixtures and a large hole in the wall. But no more leak!

James and I do not have the tools or know-how to do drywall, so eventually we will need to hire a handyperson to come and do it for us. Since this is a guest bedroom and it is winter and people do not come visit Minnesota in the winter, especially our southern California and New Mexico family members, we can wait until spring or summer to have the wall repaired.

Meanwhile, my main bathroom remodel is not yet done. It is getting close though and I expect it will be completed this week. The tile is done and looks oh so pretty. The grab bars and folding shower chair are mounted. Now we just need a shower door, shower fixtures, a toilet and sink. And of course, with all the new and shiny, I’m looking at the medicine cabinet and wrinkling my nose because it is showing its 25-year-old age. And of course, new paint on the walls is going to need to happen too. When we contracted for the project we both naively thought the rest of the bathroom would not need changing. At least these things we really can do ourselves.

We had vegan black-eyed peas and pumpkin quesadillas on New Year’s Day. They can also be made with sweet potato or another winter squash. Last year we used butternut. Such a tasty meal! I got the recipe a couple years ago from the Washington Post and sadly it is trapped behind a paywall. However, if it is a recipe you are interested in, let me know and I can email it to you, I just can’t post it online.

Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is supposed to bring good luck. It’s a tradition from the southern part of the United States. My mom is from Oklahoma and grew up having to eat them on New Year’s, but scoffed at the tradition, along with a lot of other southern cultural things, as an adult. Her mom, my Granny, always had to have them, however. Due to a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body, she lived the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. My mom always had to go to the grocery store and buy a can of black-eyed peas to take to her otherwise she would never hear the end of it. Since Granny couldn’t cook, I assume my mom opened the can and Granny just ate them. I was generally still in my pajamas after sleeping in on New Year’s Day, and was never present for the eating of the black-eyed peas. I just remember my mom grumbling about silly superstitions.

Because of this, I never ate any until I started growing them in the garden several years ago. We tried them out in hoppin’ John and a few other dishes, but not until I came across the quesadilla recipe did we settle on our own “traditional” way to eat them on New Year’s Day. Do I believe that they bring me good luck? No, especially since after we ate them the basement bathroom leak happened. Is it a fun way to honor traditions and ancestors and have a tasty meal in the process? Absolutely!

We ended up with some extra cooked black-eyed peas and James was trying to figure out what meal he might add them to. He’s going to be making split pea soup and thought he could add them to the soup. What did I think about that? I shrugged, seemed like it would be fine.

He continued kitchening in silence, and then suddenly asked, “Do you think it will kill the green peaness?”

“What?!” I exclaimed, and scowled a little.

If you are wondering about my response, say “kill the green peaness” out loud.

James looked at me a bit confused. Then I re-ran what he said in my head and saw the jar of green split peas on the counter. Then I started laughing. Then he realized what I thought he said and started laughing too. I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face. We are still laughing about it. And now, of course, kill the green peaness has become a thing.

There’s snow on the ground and will be for several months yet, but I ordered my garden seeds! I posted my list last week, and now you can all roll your eyes or giggle because yes, it changed. But I have a good reason!

I was planning on ordering from four different places and remembered Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. They are an heirloom seed place I bought sweet potato slips from a few years ago. I did not get a good sweet potato harvest but that is no fault of theirs. Their product was good, my growing was not because I refused to put down black plastic around the plants to keep the soil at the really warm temperature they like. Surely a sunny spot and some straw will be just fine? Well, since the sweet potatoes weren’t much larger than ping pong balls, the answer was no.

But I recalled that they have lots of really interesting garden seeds I had never seen anywhere else. So I browsed their website to see if I might be able to consolidate my seed order. Why yes, yes I could.

I still had to order from three places, but Sand Hill prices are so good, I was able to shift around some of what I was ordering from the other two places and overall spend much less on seeds and shipping. Of course I had to throw in two additional seeds packets! I added caraway to the order so I will have a supply for sourdough pumpernickel bread making. And I added an interesting herb I had never heard of before called beetberry.

Beetberry, Bitum capitatum, is a member of the amaranth family. The leaves can be eaten raw as a salad green or cooked, and are highly nutritious. The tiny red berries that follow the interesting looking flowers are high in anti-oxidants and can be used to make jams or desserts. The plant also has anti-inflammatory medicinal properties. Even better, it is an annual native to most of North America.

Only two additions, but good ones you have to agree! One of the delightful things about Sand Hill other than their variety and great prices, is that they have no online ordering. I had to download an order form, fill it out, print it off, and send it through the mail with a check. This is likely one of the reasons why their prices are so good. I don’t mind at all that the whole process takes a bit longer because none of the seeds I am getting from them will need to be started indoors until March.

Seeds all done. Next I need to write out my planting calendar.

My two week’s vacation is drawing to a close and it is back to wage work tomorrow. In spite of the topsy-turvy bathroom remodel and plumbing problems, it has been a wonderful and relaxing break. I managed to read 84 books in 2025, more than I ever have before. If you are interested in poking around, check out my LibraryThing list. It says 90 but that’s because it also includes several books I chose to not finish. And there are charts and graphs too if that sort of thing floats your boat, though I’m not certain of their accuracy.

I had some fun on my vacation sorting books on my bookshelves. And I made progress on my attic project too. All the carpet is up. Now I’m filling in the seams on the plywood floor which will then get sanded and painted with primer and then painted with floor paint. Little by little!

I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Please send good thoughts that I will not have any additional plumbing issues for a very, very long time!

#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #beetberry #blackEyedPeas #Granny #holeInTheWall #NewYear #plumbing #SandHillPreservationCenter #seedCatalogs #splitPeaSoup