With a day off ahead of me this morning, I decided I’d take a ride down to Minnehaha Falls before Minneapolis hit 90ºF. I had almost reached Minnehaha Park when I came upon an unattended yard sale. I strayed from the path to take a look at the few items on offer, one of them being a small, three-legged table—a class of tables for which I have an unusually strong attraction.

I liked the table, but without the homeowner to talk to, there wasn’t any way to have him or her hang on to it for me until I could return with the car. A sign read “SALE. Please place money in the mail box.” I was disappointed to read it and realize there was really no one there. But then, I haven’t touched my car since last Saturday, so why use it now? The table was pretty lightweight. How much was this table, anyway? A dollar, it turns out. AND, I had a dollar. How was I supposed to pass up a $1 table? Maybe it could fit in my basket? Yes. Of course it fit in my basket. Everyone knows a Brompton fits anywhere, but as it turns out you can also fit just about anything in a Brompton. Expand that a little bit and you’ll have a new version of my father’s oft repeated, “Everything fits in a Volkswagen.” Here’s proof that just like we don’t need to burn gas to get to work, go to the store, or get to the farmers market, you don’t need a car to go trash picking garage sale-ing.

So I didn’t make it to Minnehaha Falls, but I did I make it all the way home without a hitch and even got a salute from the Flanders team for my nice ride and nice furniture.

It may be only April, but it’s already time to pull on your mushroom hunting fashion boots. You’ll fend off ticks and look good while slinking through the woods.

Tom found this pair of morels nestled in the grass. Excited at an early find, he didn’t even wait for me to take their picture before plucking them from the ground. They were a little dry, but let’s not get picky here.

Most of of the mushrooms we found are probably inedible or at least not choice, but they weren’t all boring LBMs. I am curious if these might have been Velvet Foots (wild Enoki). Pending confirmation, I have decided to call the above fungus a Hamburger Bun Mushroom.

There were, of course, plenty of Little Brown Mushrooms. Here they are gathered together in a tiny mushroom village.

This is the sort of mushroom under which a fairy might enjoy a tiki drink.

Morel #3. They don’t call her the Minnesota State Mushroom for nothing.

A Mushroom Choir.

A woody-looking fungal friend.

Furry shelf mushrooms from below, showing off their hedgehog-like undersides.

Furry shelfies from above. Now you see their furriness, yes?

All in all, we had a good walk in the woods. Now that we know for sure that the season is on (and early), we hope to get back at it next weekend with our out-of-town guests and 4 pairs of eyes to comb the woods.

Meet the new vertical storage to the left of our stove. Here cutting boards, trays, sheet pans, bread pans are stored efficiently and ready for easy access. But it wasn’t always that way.

When we moved in, there was a counter to the left of the stove shoddily propped on top of two pieces of wood. I’ve always wondered if there might be a cheap, easy way to turn the wasted space under the counter into something we could use.

An easy answer didn’t show up until I found the remains of an IKEA Eneryda coffee table on the sidewalk near our apartment. Eneryda was sold with casters for its base and a sheet of glass supported on fours legs for its tabletop. When I found this one, it had one leg, no casters and the glass was long gone. Added was a not-so-clever slogan advocating illegal activity scrawled on the back in pink marker, a lot of sand, and water damage.

After giving Eneryda a good cleaning to remove the accumulated street grit, I ripped apart the existing framing in the kitchen and slid our freshly trash-picked “cabinet” into place. While a perfect fit width-wise, Eneryda was about 4 inches too tall. As you can see in the above drawing, there’s a center board that divides the piece in half and creates four openings, two on each side. This meant the openings weren’t really deep enough for a sheet pan. Eneryda would have to adapt. My plan was to get the job done in three cuts — one for each of the side panels and one for the center board midway down. Two of the openings would stay as-is and the other two would become one, double-wide.

Did you know Ace Hardware will cut wood — any wood — for $1/cut? If you’re an apartment-dweller with limited access to power tools, this is essential information. After a quick couple of phone calls to confirm the table saw at the Ace in our neighborhood was indeed operable, I disassembled the entire unit and gave it an additional cleaning of its discrete parts. I then measured and marked each of the cuts before heading off to the hardware store, where the cutting itself was quick and easy.

With the new lengths ready to go, all I had to do was re-drill IKEA’s pre-made holes into the new “ends” of the panels. I started with the holes that went clean-through and then moved onto the shallow holes, taping the bit at the desired depth for each.

After drilling, I reassembled the unit, put it in place and let it sit there for a week before I got around to painting it. During this time, I realized our kitchen floor isn’t really level, and so consequently a counter-top resting atop a cabinet sitting on that un-level floor would not be level either. I was going to need a shim. Shimming directly under the countertop would have been an option, but Tom suggested that I shim it on the floor. But there was a problem — how would I cover a triangular gap along the side of the new cabinet?

Molding! I bought a length of quarter-round molding as well as some caulk to make up for any imprecision in the assembly. I also picked up a sheet of balsa wood to serve as facing for that space you can see in the above left image between the wall and the shelf. Balsa is probably not the ideal material in terms of durability, but it did meet the criteria I had in mind of “things that can be easily cut with an Exacto knife,” which was to be my tool of choice for trimming the facing so that it would hug the existing baseboard.

Materials in hand, I set about painting, adding a cardboard backing, and installing the cabinet. The molding and balsa wood worked well to finish everything off and perfectly concealed the wood shims underneath. I loaded staples into my staple gun to attach the backing and replaced them with brads to attach the balsa. Lastly, at the base of each shelf I laid pliant cork contact paper. We left the shelf to dry overnight and introduced the sheet pans to their new home the following day.

Total Material Cost:

• Eneryda Coffee Table, $0 — scavenged found
• Cardboard backing, $0 — trash picked found
• 1 – 36″ sheet of Balsa Wood, $2.49
• 1 tube of white window/door caulk, $3.49
• 1 length of shoe/quarter-round molding, $4.49
• White paint, $0 — left over from another project
• Spackling, $0 — left over from another project
• Wood glue, $0 — left over from another project
• Scrap wood, $0 — donated by Julia
• Cork shelf liner, $0 — left over from another project
• Fasteners (1 screw, staples, brads, etc.), $0 — had on hand

Tools Involved:

Today is the last day of January. I am happy to say that I have walked every weekday morning this month since January 3 (with only one exception) and most weekend mornings. I never would have thought I had time before work to take a walk, but it turns out it was just a matter of forming the habit, one day (and one step) at a time.

In early December I started reading a blog called Zen Habits by Leo Babauta after a coworker sent me a post by email. I’d been reading it for about a month and had become something of a Zen Habits evangelist when, at the end of 2011, Babauta published what he called “A Compact Guide to Creating the Fitness Habit.” This has been one of my favorite posts on the blog, especially since while I know exercise to be a good thing, I’d never been able to make it a part of my routine beyond the occasional weekend walk, taking the stairs, or through bike-commuting to work. A key part of the piece, given its late-December publication, was its declaration that resolutions never last and are perhaps best avoided:

“Instead of creating a list of resolutions this year, create a new habit.”

I like the idea of giving up on resolutions. “This is going to be the year I ______,” doesn’t ever get me very far. Leo also shared his “top principles” for forming habits:

• Make it social.
• Do one habit at a time only.
• Make it your top priority.
• Enjoy the habit.

I took these to heart and decided to apply them to improving my mornings by taking a walk before work. My old morning routine went something like this: wake up, shower, dress for work, eat breakfast with Tom, say goodbye to Tom at 7:15, read the internet until it was time to leave for work at 8:00. The order of this varied depending on my wake-up time, but the point is, I was reliably wasting 45 minutes staring at a screen (by myself!) each morning.

I chose to modify my morning, rather than my afternoon, based on the idea that this had to be my top priority. I knew that if I aimed to take a walk after work that I would be inclined to make excuses to avoid doing it at the end of the work day. I also wanted to make it easy. This meant that I had to make it hard to not walk. Thus became the new routine: wake up, shower, dress for a walk, eat breakfast with Tom, walk out the door as Tom is also leaving, set a timer on my phone for 10 minutes, walk until the timer goes off, walk back, change into work clothes, leave for work at 8:00. My walk is different from day-to-day. I walk in whatever direction I want. Sometimes there is a “purpose,” e.g. a walk to the store for an item for dinner. Some mornings I walk and talk, which is helping me to kick a *bad* habit—talking on my cellphone on my commute to/from work. Mostly I am walking to walk. Going back and reading Leo’s post again, I realize that this habit is very zen indeed:

“So enjoy the habit change, in the moment, and don’t worry what the outcome of the activity is. The outcome matters very little, if you enjoy the journey.”

During my second week of walking, I started to take pictures on my walk. I’m not lugging a camera around, so they are always on my phone, but this practice adds to my own enjoyment and causes me to be more aware of my surroundings and thus more present, too. Taking photos is also a way to make it social—I’m using Instagram to take and edit my photos and push them to Flickr and sometimes Twitter. There’s no hard rule that every walk has a photo to go with it, but I like the idea that these pictures become a record of my walks—the weather, the light, where I went and when.

I haven’t yet decided if there will be a new habit in February (tomorrow!) or what that might be, though I have a few ideas. One thing’s for sure: my morning walks will continue. I’m hooked.

Tom and I walked at Wood Lake Nature Center on Sunday. This was our second time there, the first over Memorial Day in May 2011. There were no turtles in sight yesterday (they are in brumation this time of year, so I learned), but we did find an array of winter textures and a few chickadees.