Good Things List No.95: New Greenhouse, No-Waste Coffee Pour Over, Book Reviews & More

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch: learning to use a greenhouse, a no-waste pour-over coffee maker, plus six short book reviews and a wonderful movie.

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Welcome to our first full month of spring! It’s a great time of year – in our area the daffodils are blooming, the lilacs are in bud, and the cherry and plum trees are in full bloom. There is bright green everywhere I look and I see new things awakening every time I go outside.

We’ve got some fun things on store for this month, too – I am hosting our family’s Easter dinner, as well as a milestone birthday dinner for our daughter on the same weekend. We have yard and garden plans to work on (now that I have my wrist cast off), a side porch to finish, and we are planning for a overseas trip in the first weeks of May. I hope you have some good things you’re looking forward to this month as well – here’s a list to help get us started!

Good Things List

New Greenhouse

We overcame our sloping cement pad and finally finished the Costco Yardistry greenhouse in March! While it does come in many pieces with a 100+ page instruction booklet, Brian tells me it wasn’t hard to put together just time consuming. And it is pretty with all that cedar, isn’t it?

Learning how to use it is going to be a whole new gardening thing, though. I’m just starting to figure out the huge temperature swings that can happen in Spring. The first day I checked our basic $6 hardware store outdoor thermometer inside the greenhouse it was 88 degrees – and only 57 degrees outside!

Time for a thermometer I can read from inside our house, apparently. I found this wireless thermometer for less than $25 that has three sensors. We put one inside the greenhouse and one in an outside area so we can see both temperatures at once in the house and know if I need to run out and open the door and window (we may get a chicken coop where we can use the third sensor…).

Even though there is a top vented window (top left photo) with an automatic arm that opens when it hits a certain degree (we set it to about 70 degrees), it’s not enough air when the south-facing sun hits it on a warm, spring day.

We still need to bring in electricity and we’re going to run a hose with a spigot so I’ll have water available inside the greenhouse.

If you have any tips or online places I can go to learn more about using a greenhouse for seed starting and hardening off, I’d love to hear it!

Stainless Steel Pour Over Filter

A sweet reader turned me on to this no-waste all stainless pour over coffee maker with integral mesh filter. It’s so easy to use and clean and makes great coffee! I had been using a ceramic pour over cup with a paper filter that I composted, but I really like this no-waste option. And Brian, who’s the coffee snob person in our house, has been using it daily since we got it!

March Books Read

Charm City Rocks, Matthew Norman. I really enjoyed this sweet love story about a former girl-band drummer and nerdy piano teacher – it gave me Notting Hill vibes in all the best ways. It’s unusual for sweet love stories to be written by men and I’m always interested in their point of view when they do. In this we witness so much awkwardness on the part of the man who’s meeting a musical crush – and I suspect men feel this way a lot of tmes with women. I saw the same theme in the previous book I read of his, Henry & Grace’s Holiday Movie Marathon, including the storyline of some pretty hard things happening in the main character’s lives and how they slowly overcame them to find each other. I do always wish there would be more at the end of stories like this so we could really see how the main characters manage to fit into each other’s fairly different lives.

The Nurse’s Secret, Amanda Skenandore. A reader who knew I enjoyed historical fiction recommended this to me (I’m so glad for recommendations!) and it was a very good read and different from other historical fictions I’ve read. Mainly because the lead character is a bit unsavory and could be an unreliable narrator? She’s been dealt a hard hand and has learned on the streets of 1880’s New York City to take what she can and is very good at it. But she gets caught up in something that she actually didn’t have anything to do with and decides to go “undercover” as a nursing student in a new school for nurses in the city. The nursing school – the first of it’s kind – was a real school established in the late 1870s and we see how the nurses are treated by doctors, what kind of things they are allowed to do and how they help the patients. This was all pretty interesting. There is a series of murders also that the main character gets into, but that was back story to me. I do wish the first part of the book of her on the streets wasn’t so long, as the nursing school was the best parts, and that the ending wasn’t so rushed so that you saw a bit of how she was after being found out.

A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst. Goodness, did I find this book harrowing at times. It’s is a historical nonfiction book that reads a bit like fiction about a husband and wife in the 1970s who are traveling from England to New Zealand on their own boat, just the two of them. A whale breaches under the boat, puts a hole in it, and sinks it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They survive on two rafts with whatever supplies they managed to salvage for an incredible 118 days – some of it within view of large ships that passed them by because they couldn’t be seen with the waves. I simply can’t imagine. The time at sea is only the middle portion of the book, though – we see their relationship, how they came to be sailors, and what happened to them after. Although all I can think about now is what it was like on those small rafts – and what they had to eat – for all that time!

Holly, Stephen King. Brian and I listened to this after first listening to the Holly story included in If It Bleeds (a collection of short stories). We really liked the character of Holly who is a middle aged, sort of OCD lady with low self esteem who finds her niche as a private investigator through a retired police officer who took her under his wing. This is her first full length story and she is running the agency after her mentor has died and partnering with another retired police officer. It’s during the pandemic and she’s asked to look into the disappearance of a 20-something daughter by her mother. This leads to other disappearances and connections to an older retired couple of professors who have a cell in their basement and do things only Stephen King would think of. Brian thought the story went on too long and wasn’t one of his King favorites. I enjoyed the suspense of it and learning more about Holly, though. She’s a really likable character.

The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker. The sci-fi premise of this book has stayed with me since reading it: the earth starts slowing down and the days and nights get longer and longer. We see what people and governments do with this (ClockTime – keeping to the 24-hour clock vs. RegularTime – going with the new day/night times) and how life evolves over a period of a year. This is told as the background, though, to the coming-of-age story of an 11-year old girl with all the friendship and boy issues that come with the age. Honestly, the story of her life was more of a distraction for me, since I was fascinated with the slowing and how neighbors, family, friends, the government, and world responded. Looking at other reviews, I see they seem to be split along the same lines, those like me who wanted more of the background story and those who found that as the distraction, lol. I do really wish we had learned more about the state of the world at the end, when we learn the girl is looking back from 10 years in the future, but she wraps things up really quick giving us only a glimpse. She does still seem to have hope, though, which is the biggest theme I think – how do you live each day when each day looks different from the last and no one has answers?

Nothing to Do But Stay, Carrie Young. This short pioneer history of homesteaders in early 1900s North Dakota was also a reader recommendation and I really enjoyed it! It’s the story of the atuthor’s family and tells about of her mother homesteading all on her own in her late 20s before meeting another homesteader and marrying. She then rapidly had 6 children and it’s nothing short of heroic to see how hard she worked to see her family clothed, fed, and educated.

Watching

Project Hail Mary, Theater. We LOVED this movie of one of our favorite books and thought they did a good job of bringing the book to life. Just as fun and heartwarming as the book and Ryan Gosling was wonderful as the reluctant hero.

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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