Rainbarrels and hooded sweatshirts and my puppy

I'm wearing a hooded sweatshirt and it's the middle of July. How cool is that?

I was asked about rain barrels in my last entry. I know very little about them aside from what I've seen on Living with Ed and what I've been able to google. The initial outlay can seem a bit steep and depending on how much rain you get and how much you need for your purposes, the recoup might be longer than you really want to invest in. I hadn't intended to spend as much on ours. I sent my husband to the hardware store to check out the prices and he came home with one. It was a bit over a hundred dollars, which made me gasp a bit since they weren't quite that expensive online, even with shipping and handling. He thought it was worth the price since we had it immediately and we didn't know the reputation of the companies we had googled. He had a point.

Basically rain barrels, if you're going to use the water for anything to do with food or human contact, need to be food-grade plastic. The companies I looked at online weren't producing rain barrels from scratch, they were re-tooling used plastic barrels from restaurants. Some of their prices were really steep, others reasonable. But again, I couldn't find anything about any of the companies.

I suppose if you're handy you could maybe see about getting a plastic barrel or two from a restaurant. I mean, they either have to pay to have them shipped somewhere or they have to recycle them. I'm pretty sure they're spending money on getting rid of them somehow.

I think we figured that it would take two years for us to recoup our investment. I think that's reasonable.

But we're going to bring it in for the winter and store it in the basement. The winters are brutal in Wisconsin.

I tried to do some knitting the past few nights but I've fallen asleep as soon as I crawled into bed. I haven't necessarily stayed asleep though so my sleep is still a bit haywire. I made the couch back up this morning thinking that if I sit on the couch and watch tv at night, I might actually stay awake long enough to knit a while. I scrapped the crocheted blanket because it's just too heavy for Haiti. They need lightweight so I think I'm going to do another knitted log cabin blanket or two. Or three...there is a lot of yarn there.

Professor is limping today. I think the cold is affecting his leg. He's been bouncing about and running and jumping (although not on his ottoman or the couch) and has even lost a pound or so. But today he's slow and gimpy. But then, so am I. Which leads me to believe it's arthritis because my knees are hot to the touch. I have an appointment with the rheumatologist on Tuesday and will ask to go back on my meds. They're cheap so it won't break the bank. And they're very affective.

Well, off to knit and see if I can stay awake until it gets dark at least.

TTFN