Photo: Marco Musso

After I got home today, the UPS guy came to the door with a dolly loaded 5 feet high with large boxes addressed to Shelly. I signed for it and brought them to the staging area, known in most houses as the living room and left them for her to open when she got home.

An hour or so later, she sliced open each of the boxes and unpacked the contents: all of the scented candles from her PartyLite party. At the time, I was in the basement, sitting in my home office, returning a couple of phone calls.

That's when it crept down the stairs, around the corner and punched me in the nose. The smell of . . . brown.

That's the only word I can come up with to describe this smell. It's kind of like how if you take a half dozen really attractive colors of paint and mix them together. You just end up with a nasty shade of brown. This is the olfactory equivalent of that nasty brown.

It's magnified by the fact that my nose is overly sensitive anyway, but I'm pretty much getting an instant headache from the swirling scents of melon, sun-kissed cotton, exotic spice, and wasabi ginger. By themselves, some of them are probably OK, but together, they form an entirely unholy union that's better suited as a cologne for Lucifer himself than as a way to improve the scent of our house.

Thankfully, the candles all ship out tomorrow and the portion that's ours will be sealed up in plastic bags to be used appropriately. One scent at a time. The way the chemists who formulated the artificial odors intended.

I've been intrigued by hydroponic gardening for quite a while. It eliminates many of the things that bug me about regular gardening: working at ground level, working outside, weeds, dirt, etc. Beyond that, it appeals to my geeky side.

Plants grown in a carefully prepared chemical soup, recycled water and carefully controlled parameters that results in bigger, healthier plants year round is just plain cool. I've got a couple of books now and have read dozens of websites.

I know that I'm prone to wanting to try a big, complex setup out of the gate. Because I know this, I now force myself to try a basic setup of something new before getting in too deep. As such, I gave the most basic kind of setup a shot.

Basically, the plants sit in plastic baskets filled with rockwool (an inert, lightweight material that holds onto moisture). Those are suspended just barely into a solution of water and a whole pile of nutrients. At the bottom of the nutrient broth are airstones (from aquariums) that pump oxygen into the nutrient bath and the roots of the plants. This gives the plant roots all that they need: nutrients, water and oxygen.

The result is usually plants that grow phenomenally well, even indoors. For my first setup, I'm aiming for herbs to cook with. The first plants to go into it are stevia, which is an herb that's extremely sweet. My intent is to harvest the leaves for sweetening my tea without artificial sweeteners and without calories. I got 4 plants initially, but will be giving a couple of them away to other people.

The rest of the 6 slots will be filled with basil, oregano, mint and parsley. I am NOT growing any form of cannabis and am not encouraging anyone else to do so. Because this method of gardening works indoors, under artificial light, it's the favorite choice for growing illegal plants, hidden in closets, etc. While I think that drug policy in the United States is wildly out of whack, I will not be held responsible for anyone getting arrested after building something that I explain how to build.

Anyway, that said, I ordered the stevia plants just before things got nuts at work and they had to sit in temporary quarters until this past weekend. Finally, on Sunday, I had the time to put this little contraption together. It ended up only taking about an hour and didn't cost much either.

What you need is this:

• 14 Gallon Rubbermaid Tub - make sure it's opaque. If light gets through, you'll have algae problems. Something like $6.
• Air stones - these are the bubblers for aquariums. I used 3 big round ones. $3 each.
• A valve for the 3 air stones. About $4.
• An aquarium air pump. I already had an extra one of these. However, they're cheap too.
• Air tubing. Another $4.
• 6 Net baskets - I ordered these from Hydro Harry's a few weeks before I actually built this.
• Rockwool - Also ordered from Hydro Harry's
• Nutrient. This stuff gets mixed 3 teaspoons per gallon to make the nutrient bath.
• The plants. While I'm probably going to start some from seed, I wanted to get up and running with as little hassle as possible, so I started with already growing plants instead of seeds. That decision was made easier by the fact that stevia is notoriously hard to start from seed. I ordered the plants and they shipped by FedEx.

To actually explain the build process, View the Tutorial on Flickr.

There are 2 quick notes that you should also know. The photos don't include one change that should be made. When you cut the holes for the net baskets, unless you want the baskets popping back up, you should cut out a bunch of the tabs around the edge. Second is that the air pumps are NOT waterproof and should only be run under dry conditions. I'm just running mine when I'm home and it's not raining. I'll be moving it inside as soon as I get lights set up and that will eliminate the problem.

I'm inside in the air conditioning on a quick break from the activity that has consumed my weekends, spare time and residual energy for the last couple of weeks and will likely do the same for weeks to come: painting my house.

When we bought last spring, the inspection said that things were fine as long as we painted within the first year or 2 of moving in. So, here we are, smeared with exterior paint, on a first name basis with the people in the paint department at Home Depot and in command of the exact cost of 5 gallon buckets of paint, brushes, buckets and rolls of blue tape.

We're also at that point in the project where I start getting that irrational urge to dig for my checkbook and throw several thousand dollars at the first contractor I can find. I'm fighting that urge. I understand how it's a rationally good idea for me to be doing this myself. But, standing on a 15 foot ladder as the sun traces across the side of the house toward my position, I feel like the guy in the desert who'd pay $500 for a glass of water. That somehow the sun has bleached all rational decisionmaking ability from my brain.

That's why I'd like to thank Willis Carrier (inventor of modern air conditioning) and the people in charge of putting Coke Zero for saving me thousands. The cool air and cool drink have restored the function of my cerebral cortex and I will be returning to my paintbrush and ladder after hitting "publish".

It's been really busy around here for the last few days. My mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law are going to be in from Montana on Saturday and staying with us. This always seems to snap us out of complete apathy when it comes to home improvement and cleaning. Suddenly, because someone else will be visiting our house, it needs to be returned to some level of order and cleanliness and unfinished projects become glaring embarrassments that need their shame covered up.

Photo: Todd Klassy

The home theater wall nearest the garage was the glaring problem this time around. The entire home theater was originally encircled by a wallpaper border. If you have never dealt with removing old wallpaper, you may not know that the product was invented in the depths of hell and removing it was featured as one of the tasks of Hercules that eventually got edited out as just too scary for readers. Apparently, the people who put this stuff up on the walls used some sort of Cold War era, top secret mega glue to put this stuff up, because it did NOT want to come down.

That, combined with the fact that the room is full of stuff that can't go anywhere else, has led to a slow progression around the room of moving things to the side, venturing into battle with the wallpaper, painting the area and moving the furniture back into place.

Except for the one last wall. It's pretty much been sitting as this beige and green blob in the middle of my warm yellow and "iced tea" colored theater, the leaves in the wallpaper mocking my lack of ambition.

When I finally tackled the task this weekend, it proved one of my personal development mantras that I've been trying to drill into my own head. Most painful tasks are all bark and no bite. All of these tasks that are barking threateningly at us are just not that bad in reality. We let the barking intimidate us because we're afraid of a bite that never happens. In many cases, 5 minutes or 5 hours or 5 days of just dealing with it completely takes care of it instead of the hours, days and weeks we envision.

So, in a matter of 4 hours or so, the wallpaper was down and 3 coats of paint were nearly done drying. Emboldened by my success and already covered in paint (I am NOT a tidy painter), I decided to make use of the aquarium stand that I ended up with.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a good deal on a used 75 gallon aquarium setup. It's all sitting in the garage while I build up the rest of the stuff I need to make it the spectacular project I envision. However, it came with a basic pine stand that was just 2 inches too narrow for what I wanted to fit underneath it. Which, of course, means I'll be building my own. However, that left what to do with the stand I had in the garage.

Enter the gallon of dark brown paint (matches the couch) I bought to see if I wanted to put a faux finish on the "iced tea" color (I didn't). While I didn't want to use it on the walls, it suddenly entered the picture to make the pine stand into the base for my snack station at the back of the room.

So, I moved the dropcloth over, pulled the stand inside and painted it up. It's now sitting in the back, with the refrigerator and pizza oven on top of it. I'll add a bit of a "counter" on the other half and put in the little cabinet also sitting in the garage and I'll have my prep area, popcorn maker, microwave, pizza oven, soda refrigerator and movie library at the back of the room. Almost no money invested, a few hours of hard work and I'm thrilled.

I'm sure my guests won't notice, but they don't need to. They already contributed by being the catalyst. And, I feel a renewed sense of ambition to get some things done this week. I'm downright humiliated by some of the barking tasks that I've been avoiding.