Matt and Mariel gave us a taste of Southern California last year: a little Limon dwarf Meyer Lemon Tree. Very Pretty. After a tough winter in our bedroom (much too dry), the summer weather has coaxed some tiny lemons out.

Betsy finally had her lumber hernia fixed this Wednesday. She has been putting it off for several years now. They are pretty rare (only 300 have been recorded, ever). Lumbar hernia is not to be confused with a herniated lumbar disc. See here for typical medical discussion of them.
The surgery went well and she should be all set now. Thursday evening we had a town wide power outage. When I tried watching the news later that night in our bedroom, I discovered that the FIOS Set Top Box in our bedroom did not survive the outage.
The next morning, as I was waiting for a Tech to either resuscitate it, or send a new one, I realized that Betsy would be spending at least a few days recuperating in the bedroom so rather than waste everyone’s time working on the dead low def STB, I had them upgrade it to an HD one. Then I ran out to BJs and picked up a 27″ Samsung full HD (1080p) at a great price. Then I had to figure out what to do with the STB (I relocated the one from the kitchen for now), and the Bose we use as the sound system. I picked up a set of plastic shelving, cut the legs down to the right height and installed it that way:

As you can see, the plastic shelf was really not meant to hold the 18lb TV. It sagged in the middle until it was resting on the Bose.
On Saturday I tried Target, Sears, Best-Buy and WalMart but none of them had anything that would work. So I went down to the workshop and cobbled on together from an oak tread I had gotten several years ago to replace the (still) cracked step on the stairs up from the front door, and some redwood left over from the never used skirt for the hot tub.
Voila. It came out pretty nice. A little minwax and it should look pretty close to the armoire.