Spring is here again

You wouldn't necessarily know it considering temps in the 20s last night. But everything is cropping up. Our gold dust plants and liriope and canna lilies and ajuga all have new growth. Everything is lovely. In fact, despite a hot hot hot summer last year and a failure to sufficiently water on my part, the dogwood looks even better this year. Can't wait for the summer heat and cold beer on the porch!

Another weekend over

I keep busting ass all weekend and it still doesn't seem like enough! So this is when the blog is helpful. It's a good chance to assess...I did stuff after all. Who knew?

Adam had to work aaaalll day Saturday, and the end result was a nasty sunburn. I was on my own.

First things first, I got a wild hair and busted out the scissors and garden shears. Here is the front walk right after I started

Yes, that's a coffee mug. It was about 8 am and I was perfectly happy to scoot on my butt with my coffee until it looked like this

I was pulling up toupees of grass. At any rate, lots of good clippings for the compost.

In other front of the house news, we've decided that the next item on the insurance money list is the porch-- we've got funds to redo the water-damaged ceiling.


I spent this afternoon removing the fan and tearing out the ceiling.


Next weekend we should be able to reinstall the ceiling and replace any boards that have rotted out.

Finally got our bedroom light hung...


But what was simultaneously the greatest accomplishment and biggest disappointment of the day was the kitchen cabinet doors. I got the hinges on them and got them hung. Ugh. Aside from the fact that I really don't like them, I wasn't able to get some of the stiles lined up perfectly, and they almost all hang askew. I put the same style hinges into the very same holes, but they still were crooked. And then I thought maybe I had them on upside down, but that didn't fix it. It just reminded me that the damn things were crooked when we bought the place; we took them off the cabinets a few weeks after we closed, so I had completely forgotten. Also, several screws broke off in the cabinets. If anyone has good solutions for getting those out without destroying the face, I'd love to hear it!

My main complaint is how yellow they are. We could take them apart and sand them and put them back together so that they're square, and rehang them so that they're not crooked, but that's far more time than I want to spend on something that I hate. I hate the design. It's just too, too MUCH for the rest of the kitchen with all the other clean straight lines-- in the counter, in the backsplash, in the floor.

Ugh. I almost don't want to show the pics.


It's so hard to tell how anything looks without the countertop trim, the crown, and the baseboards-- not to mention with the green window-- don't worry; it'll be white and the trim will be caulked. I'm also not sure whether natural wood will be ok for the doors. The sanded red oak is pinkish. The poly makes it a little yellower, but not like they are now. Remember this?


Do we think that finishing new doors like the top one above will help out the yellow insanity? The company said they could choose the wood for red undertones (like that red strip on the door above)...If it doesn't, can we stain dark? And if we can't stain dark, I guess we'll repaint the walls...

U.G.H.

The one thing making me a very VERY happy camper is the fact that we are getting new doors. It's decided. We just don't know when. That's one reason we put the old doors back on; the other reason? We didn't know how badly we wanted new ones until we saw the old one. Soon enough. I can be patient. I love the counters and dishwasher enough to make up for anything else that's wrong with that kitchen. And I still have high hopes for it once the trim work is finished.

I just need about 720 more weekends to get there...

Accepting defeat

So I went to Little Rock this weekend, and when I got back, Simon had torn out most of the remaining four o'clocks. Before I could do anything else about it, he dug another 3 or 4 feet into the bed. Adam and I are going to try to devise some sort of "permanent" barrier. He's old enough that he won't want to jump over something, so as long as he can't pull or push it out, it should work. For next year, at least. As for this year, I've admitted defeat. (Update: Mom says seeds might still have time to take hold!!) I had a picture, but I couldn't bring myself to post it. I already threw a crazy childish tantrum over the issue. I'd like to forget the whole thing ever happened. The good news is, the bed just on the other side of the fence is going gangbusters:


These lantanas and four o'clocks should be blooming any day now. That bed is only actually a couple of feet wide and maybe three feet long, but the plants really overflow. It's sort of wild and secret gardenish.

Now, what was I doing in Little Rock? I think I mentioned before that my best friend bought a house. I wanted to see it in person and spend a little quality time with a bottle of wine on her front porch. We did all that and ate some yummy food, too. We also rearranged her dining room and talked shop-- colors and walkways and passthroughs. At the end of the weekend I made a special request. Could I please PLEASE post pictures of the ugly, nay-- heinous-- lights in her house. Pretty PRETTY please? She's a good friend. She said yes.

So I'll start you off with an easy one. This is inconspicuous, located inthe stairwell:

Next, we have the entryway.


Now it gets harder: The dining room-- shiny brass...


And the coup, lighting the breakfast nook--


But just so I don't leave you with a bad impression of her house, here's a quick pic of my favorite thing-- the dining room table that belonged to her grandmother. The table is stained dark, and the leaf is left a light honey oak. It's the best runner ever; no kitties pulling it off the table.


And meanwhile, back in our dining room...

Somebody's enjoying the fountain.

On the eve of destruction

Exhibit A: The Destroyer.


Exhibit B: The crime scenes.

This is the edge of the patio. Granted, the bricks were kind of falling off there in the first place, but this is after I've filled it back in. As you can see on the right, he's gone well below the paint line on the brick. And sometimes he kicks the bricks out into the yard.

A spot I haven't had to fill in a few days.

Can't see where the patio ends and the dirt begins? Not surprised. Another favorite makeshift bed.

Sigh. The infamous four-o'clock bed. The lawnchair propped up against the wall-- that's where he dug further into the bed killing the plants that were there. I'm rather hoping for a come-back.

And then there's the monkey grass, which he used to lay on. We have to keep the chairs on it:
So he occasionally does this:
Thankfully, this morning I found him sleeping here with the cat:
Between the tree and the bench. That is a location I can live with.

I also noticed a couple of blooms on the four-o'clocks across the patio. This means the plants in the bed aren't far behind.


I'll take what I can get.

It's gonna be a cold, lonely summer

I had dinner with my girlfriends last night. One of them is moving to Chicago; another is spending the remainder of the summer in Illinois. My best friend already lives a few hours away, and my sister is moving to Boston. Those of us left behind are going to have to rally together.

I'll tell you what's likely to happen. I'll end up spending too much money shopping, that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll single-handedly revive the economy! In fact, it's already started. I've been looking for an affordable salt mill and pepper mill set-- not a pepper mill and salt shaker. Mills. Both. I finally found these:


I've been searching for years.

The only other homefront news I think I have is that we have a tomato growing. I was starting to think the 2 liter bottle thing was a failure...and I still think it mostly is. We should have bought patio varieties and/or planted them in 5 gallon buckets and hung them from the carport. We'll try that next year.

In the meantime:


Now, if we can just keep the slugs off the strawberries, we'll be golden. We've had a constant stream of blossoms on the strawberry plants, but the slugs and snails just keep eating them! Since I sprayed the aphids away, I haven't seen them come back; however, the slugs are more than picking up the slack. So I'm gonna research some organic repellent. Since we tend to want to eat our own crops with just a rinse of water, I'd prefer to not spray chemicals if I can help it. Any tried and true solutions are welcome!

"Why aren't puppies reasonable" or, "Understanding imminent domain"

What a shitty way to start the day.

I was able to keep the dog out of my flower bed long enough to let the four-o'clocks grow nice and bushy. The corner where he dug the most never grew up, but that's ok. I'd resigned myself to putting a bird bath sort of between that spot and the rest of the flowers and letting him have the corner under our window.

In the meantime, he's found other places to dig, which I refill once every day or two, raking dirt back in them, or buying cheap topsoil when it somehow (??is he eating it??) disappears. I'm ok with that. It makes him happy. There weren't any flowers or grass, or much of anything really there for him to have ruined. But while I was in Florida, he got back into his flowerbed corner. And I thought, "It's ok. I've given up anyway. He can have it. I'll find a nice bird bath."

And what did I find this morning? He's dug another two feet into the bed and killed another four-o'clock plant. Grrr. I was trying to compromise with him. We had an agreement and then he goes and claims more for himself! Can't he see that that's a violation of the terms of our treaty?

I contemplated the idea of giving him designated digging areas, but he's not digging to expend energy or to catch bugs. He calmly digs out a spot and nestled in it up against something-- the patio bricks, the garage, the house foundation. It's how he likes to sleep.

So anyway. I guess this means I have errands to run between work and dinner: a new birdbath and landscaping rock to try and prevent further unauthorized encroachment.

Back from Florida

But home sick. Not homesick-- Home. Sick. Bleh.

I caught a nasty cold several days ago that's just hanging on. Probably doesn't help that I worked through my fever and traveled all yesterday. I score AP exams, which is only once a year, 7 straight days. Staying home under the weather isn't an option, really.

But I managed to push through and enjoy myself for the most part. And while I never made it into a swimsuit, I did make it onto the beach most mornings for a stroll. Critters and plants galore.





But I was ready to come home. You can only look at so many essays and eat so many reconstituted powdered eggs before you realize how good you have it. And it really was time to stop eating. They feed us buffet breakfast, candy, candy, cakes or muffins, candy, candy, buffet lunch, dessert, candy, snacky things like Chex mix and ice cream, candy, buffet dinner. More dessert. Every single day. And coffee running out our ears. They like to keep our caffeine and blood sugar levels up up up. After all-- we wended our way through 300,000 exams this year; that's almost a million essays total.

So it was good to be back. Adam is working full time now so my mother picked me up. We pulled into the driveway and I was greeted by this:


No, not all the cars-- those are always there. The canna lilies are finally FINALLY in bloom full force. They're outside our bedroom window:


Lovely thing to wake up to when I finally did wake up for good. At around 1 am, the dog started barking feverishly, so I went outside to check out what it was. If any of you out there have ever heard a trapped possum, you understand that it is an unearthly noise that they make. I couldn't get him to leave it alone, and when I saw that he had it in his mouth, I assumed its days were numbered. I've seen what he's done to other possums so, well, I simply found solace in the fact that he recently had his rabies shots.

But then he started barking again, right outside my window. I went outside to see what was going on this time, and he had moved the possum's lifeless little body to the patio. And was just standing there barking at it. I moved him into his pen so he didn't tear up the little guy and so I could have an easier time of, ahem, removal in the morning. And then I saw that it was breathing. Of the hundreds of possums I've ever come across, I've never actually witnessed one playing dead. After it was sure the dog was gone, about 20 minutes later, it slowly twisted its head around and crept away. I think the other possums that Simon's killed are ones that he's shaken. In this case, playing dead would have meant the end of this poor little fella-- Simon wants to play with them, and when they stop playing, they're fair game. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture, like some other blogger we know...But it was a very cool, if upsetting and sleep depriving, event.

So now I'm going to continue my efforts to sit on my ass and try to shake the cough and fever fatigue that seem to be lingering far past their expiration date.

WANTED: Motivation; Cure for Malaise

It's been a while since we made significant progress on the house itself. I could blame it on the "so much going on" excuse-- family in town, my sister's graduation, cleaning for the family in town, hemming and hawing over the possibility of an investment property (one of the considerations for that one being that it might slow down our "progress" on our house; psh), signing up for the library summer reading program, summer camps for the kiddo. It's felt a little like Sisyphus around these parts, which also means I'm not too motivated to post about what little is getting done here. Do I deserve a cookie for doing laundry? Dishes? Dinner? We're the kind of people who sort of let it go all week and play catch up over the weekend in between "well-deserved" breaks. I think we need a change of lifestyle.

I have bought 3 new strawberry plants that are doing well, and I've continued my quest to keep the yard free of too many dog holes. We've put our new fence posts in concrete and sawed the dog ears to the right height. Our tomatoes are super:


See? Blooms! Tomato basil mozzarella sandwiches, here I come...

And our basil is providing us with the loveliest pesto ever (a little trick I've learned? sunflower seeds instead of pine nuts-- considering the fact that we always have parmesan, oil, garlic, pasta, bread and now basil on hand, a bag of salted roasted sunflower seeds, at $1.83, makes several rounds of pesto-- we're talking 60¢ meals here).


But I can't say much is going on around the house besides that. All I want to do is sit on the patio next to my citronella torch and read. I like hot weather. It's been great. And on days like yesterday, with a cool breeze, I just don't want to do anything. We worked on the house every weekend for 8 months. And we figure we've deserved a break. The last few weekends have had more than their fair share of beer on the porch. But we have to get back to work. We HAVE to. And it's so hard to motivate. So hard to get things in order, ducks in a row and all that.

Where's that fire under our asses I was looking for a few weeks ago?

I just realized...

...what it is that I'm watching. The blue jay family is teaching the young ones to fly. What a lovely thing to have a front row seat for.

Good fences make good dogs

Yeah, look. I know it's ghetto.

The dog won't stay out of the flower bed. He just keeps digging and digging and kicking dirt all over the patio, and tearing up the root system of the four o'clocks. I originally put up the wire thing you can kind of see in the back...as pups go, he's pretty responsive to boundaries, however real. But that cool, wet dirt got the better of him and he ended up in the bed once again yesterday.

I thought maybe a more substantial looking blockade would help, so I used the ends we cut off of our fencing boards. unfortunately, the little plants that are struggling to come up, are doing so right at the brick border, and I didn't want to hammer the wood into them and crush the little guys.


So I spread them apart, and now they look like jack-o-lantern teeth, and I managed to hammer my hand, which now hurts ALOT. And then I spread cayenne pepper water all over the bed and fence. We'll see how he does. The places where he's not digging are coming up like gangbusters


Meanwhile, the living room is kinda coming together. At least it looks like a place to sit and most of the boxes are out of the way. It makes me want to sit in it, and I guess that's all that matters.




Pay no attention to the shadeless lamp. It was a moving casualty.

We also finally got the insurance claim's itemized settlement statement and it's VERY detailed. We'll hire some of it out and do some of it ourselves. I'm just glad we can finally get moving on some of this crap.

Miscellany

There were other things that happened around here besides the backsplash. A new hummingbird feeder:


I know this is common knowledge, but seriously, how do they get away with charging so much for red-colored sugar water? We made out own hummingbird food. I'm working on a regular hanging bird feeder, so I'll post pics of that when I'm done.

A new hanging plant for the porch:

Our climbing rose has about 30 buds on it, and about 8 or so have started to open. The rose in the compost started blooming! Adam painted the broom closet and hot water heater closet doors and got those hung up. I mowed the yard.

And does this rings a bell?


I finally sucked it up and bought a textured vinyl window covering:


I really like it, but I also haven't checked its privacy level at night time, so I'll do that soon. I'ts pretty easy to install-- static cling and water!-- but I'd recommend using 2 people...

I'd call this our most productive weekend since we moved in. I feel a little bit re-energized!