sunroom

Another reason the house is colder is that the blinds are out of the two sunroom windows. The entire thing has two coats of primer on it and the trim has one coat of glossy white. Supposedly we're painting again tomorrow, but if the forecast holds that might not happen, since we won't want to open windows.
We're not doing anything imaginative with the crown molding. None of the rest of the house has it; I'm pretty sure it was added when someone overhauled the room, removing the original breakfast nook and installing two recessed ceiling lights. The other possibility, that the whole rest of the house had it and only this room was spared, is too depressing to contemplate. It's easy enough to tell just by looking at the wood, but I haven't got up close and personal with it. Yet.
The trim, including the crown molding (which is extremely small and unsexy), will be glossy white; the ceiling flat white; and the walls a buttery yellow. Benjamin Moore doesn't have its color on its site, but the walls will be, in fact, Benjamin Moore Butter.
I had considered a whiter yellow, maybe the cream of the ceilings in the sage rooms, for the sunroom ceiling, but the sunroom should flow into the kitchen (which is between it and the sage rooms) and the kitchen will be white and blue.
So I am not overly heartbroken that the crown molding won't pop other than by being glossy. If I have regrets, they're that I'm not imaginative or bold enough to design something spectacular.

speaking of the sunroom, the kitchen

White and blue for the kitchen. It sounds fairly Dutch colonial, doesn't it? That's really not the plan, though.
The plan:
Eventually or sooner we want a hood. We (with the usual disclaimer about what "we" means in context of cooking) don't cook much in the summer because there's no fan. Which works. The other light switch is probably for that fan, currently functioning only to attract grime and spiderwebs. Maybe it's just a simple (snork) wiring problem, but a hood is a better solution than a ceiling fan.
We've gone back and forth on cabinets and countertops. If we get new counters (the extant ones are one-inch square white tiles, impossible to keep clean or roll dough on), we can't ever change the cabinet layout. If we get just new doors and hardware for the cabinets and paint their non-door parts, will that satisfy or feel like settling? If we go for entirely new cabinets in addition to new countertops, we'll have to use the kids' college fund. Or whatever.
But in the meantime, the blue and white. Blued white walls. Blue countertops. Stainless steel appliances. If new cabinets, maple. Unless those would clash with the floor. So maybe painted cabinets, either new or current.
This is the one room in the house I have no qualms about not looking Arts and Crafts. American Bungalow featured the kitchen of a madwoman, who doesn't have a dishwasher or full-sized fridge not because she doesn't believe in them but because they're not period. I recently read that the average Usan's favorite appliance is the...I don't even remember what it was, only that it wasn't dishwasher. I don't understand how anyone's favorite kitchen appliance can be other than a dishwasher.

in a nutshell

Today as we began to paint RDC asked what I would like to listen to. He is having great fun with his iPod: in addition to all his CDs he also subscribes to the audio version of Scientific American and gets either one or two audio books a month. He's already listened to Laurie Anderson read Don DeLillo's novella The Body Artist and is now on Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, also, ahem, not read by the author. I've heard some of it, when he's piped the iPod through the speakers in the kitchen to cook, and Hawking can be quite funny. Thank goodness. Anyway, I said Nutshell, because I'd probably have to listen to and read it a few times before understanding any of it so hearing only bits might not matter at first go.

"But I'm almost done with it," RDC countered.
"Great. I'll find out how the universe ends."

The trim is done. It might need a few touch-ups here and there. Also RDC finally finished painting his study's closet door (which has been off since that room went under the palette knife in June 2000). He got all panicky when he thought, this morning looking at the door, at its hinges and latch, that he had been painting one of the room doors.
Four doors stand in a vertical heap in the laundry room: two that we removed and don't wish to restore to the study and bedroom doorways, and two glass-paned doors that might have been Formigny's original exterior doors. The basement ceiling's not much taller than the height of a door, and the solid interior doors stood at the back of the heap (being not as pretty as glass); we moved the doors carefully. He looked at one of the solid ones, the hinges, the latch. We have a houseguest on Friday and RDC had hoped to have his study done by then.
"But that door's too wide for the closet," I pointed out. "It must be a room door."
We examined the suspect door, on sawhorses in the furnace room for months now. It was narrow. It, like all the interior doors, is two-paneled, the lower one square and the upper rectangular. He'd been mentally hanging the door upside down, with the knob four feet off the ground. He has this thing about the world being built for shorter people. Ask him about kitchen counters some day.
Anyway, I spared him from throwing no small fit about working on the wrong door. Now all that closet needs is a fetal shelf to have an inch cut cross-wise off its width so it can be fit as a shelf. And for us to hang a series of coathooks in the front landing (which will be next after the sunroom).

Nisou was telling about their kitchen, about timbering the walls and installing wood (!) countertops and reinstalling appliances and so on--all since December. This they do with two jobs and a baby and they don't even know Jessie. I am such a snail.

acquisition as homecare

It might be possible to have a house without accumulating material weight and outlaying oodles of cash but I have no idea how.

When Haitch first saw the couch, the first and for months only furniture in the living room, she asked, "And what do you do on the couch?" I cracked up.
"Um, you think about how nice a rug might be, or a reading lamp. You could listen to music," I might have added, because RDC might have put the stereo into the built-in shelves around the fireplace as soon as the tree came down last year.

In October--six months later--we bought the rug, and now we have ordered a bookcase and coffee table (it calls itself a Mini Mule Chest; a larger version is our bureau) and a chair. We should actually have them in three weeks. Also we bought wall lamps (which aren't on the site) for over the couch and a floor lamp (the taller one in the shorter one's finish) for next to the chair.

The wall lamps I am not sure about. Just because they came from Restoration Hardware does not mean they are all they need to be. I need to keep that in mind. Their cords will hang down the wall, which spares us having to wire and rebuild that wall but means that cords will hang down the wall.

We popped into Z Gallerie. Most of its stuff is too glitzy for me, though some is appealing. They had a violet velvet chaise longe a while ago that I lusted. But velvet attracts more dust than twill, shows it worse, and shows wear more: it would only make me sad. And it would look affected, as well as ridiculous with the piles of laundry it would inevitably accumulate. Z Gallerie has prints, including the two now in the dining room, that we occasionally agree on. But we didn't have measurements for the space over the mantel or the proportions for over the couch between the lamps.

Another measurement we didn't have was for our heating register covers. Right now we have brass covers throughout the house and we are gradually replacing any metal with brushed nickel or pewter. So we want these but we didn't know whether in 10" or 12".

We waxed excessive, I know. We opened an RH credit line for the 10% off lure and had a gift certificate from my sister and had a little bit of play money from RDC's bonus and a tax return, plus all the money I saved buying my contact lenses on the cheap. So really all this stuff was nearly free.

book quandary

When we first moved in together, in Storrs, we each had our books. I had two bookcases, one wee and one regular. We had a collection of milkcrates. The apartment had shelves built into an alcove, and someone had added a wider piece of wood for a desk which became mine; RDC had his own desk.

When you walked into the apartment (this is the one we call the tenement), RDC's desk stood to your left, then the bookcase, then nine milkcrates in a 3x3 square under a window. On the short wall, a double closet (with the bikes in front of it) and my desk with the wee bookcase. On the long wall, the kitchen doorway, the dining table (with Percy's cage), the bedroom doorway, two milkcrates as an end table, the futon couch. On the short wall, under another window, another 3x3 square of crates, and then along the rest of the wall, five columns of crates four high. Behind the door on the long entry wall, the television sat on another set of three crates.

We moved to Denver soon enough after marrying that we didn't marry our books until we unpacked here, and the first furniture we bought and built was bookcases. We used the dining area as an office (we didn't own a table; the tenement was semi-furnished): two tall ugly laminate bookcases and RDC's desk. In the living room, and therefore what assailed the eye when you walked in, were two short bookcases under the bar, Blake's cage, turn the corner, the opening into the hallway, a homemade bookcase, the futon, a bookcase, turn the corner, a bookcase, sliding doors to the deck, a bookcase, turn the corner, the television cabinet flanked by speakers, the external door.

And we didn't marry all the books. My usual excuse is that I didn't want Hemingway to Make Way for Ducklings with a shotgun and a dog. But most of them. Many of them. The fiction started under the bar, alphabetically at A, and wrapped around the room. We segregated my favorites and some Themes and picture books and poetry and plays and nonfiction and reference.

Then we moved into the two-bedroom apartment, bought a couch and a chair and had a fireplace in the living room, used the small bedroom as a bedroom, and arranged the "master" bedroom as a study. The only bookcase in the main living area was a short one under the bar for cookery and hobby books. It's how the space worked out, I told myself. It's not as if the living room was ever tidy and bookless anyway: there were library books stacked near the door to be brought home, and whatever either of us was reading strewn on and under the furniture. It would be different in the eventual house.

Except it's not. Right now when you walk into our house, you see one bookcase filled with cookery and hobby books that actually belongs in the sunroom (but the sunroom is being painted). Three shelves flank each side of the fireplace and a mantel spans that entire short wall. The shelves contain stacked coffee table books (an atlas, A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, Thomas Hardy Country, Medieval Art, A History of the Grateful Dead), gardening books (The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty, Dry-Land Gardening, the Sunset Western Garden Book), tour books (Seattle, Glacier National Park, England, France, Tuscany), back issues of American Bungalow and Wine Spectator, stereo components, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County collections, Pictionary, Taboo, Balderdash, Trivial Pursuit, Twister, binoculars, photo albums (all covered in Morris paper or, in the case of our wedding album, a gift from RDC's grandmother, kind of upholestered in white satin), and a tea chest. The mantel has plants and photographs and some tchotchkes and a miniature Rosetta Stone and right now a card with an image from the Lindisfarme gospels because ABW just wrote me about reading Tolkien for the first time.

(Hee! Kind of like Keats "On First Reading Chapman's Homer"! I'll have to tell her that one.)

I asked a booky someone what he would think walking into someone's house and seeing all this nonbook or maybe quasibook stuff. He paused. I hate the pause. The pause is one of those tactful things that I can't abide, marking time as you think of the polite while not dishonest thing to say. I called him on it. He decided that these might be interesting but not necessarily booky people.

He suggested some high-end porn, just to intrigue people. I could put out Torn Shapes of Desire, which would amuse me because of the online connection. In a nonporn vein I suggested Arkham Asylum, partly because of whom I was speaking with and partly because it's not what you would think of to look at me.

So now we'll have one bookcase, just one in immediate sight until you go into RDC's study with its tall bookcases or the bedroom with its stacks of books or the sunroom with its eventual shelves. I could say it's how the space worked out; I could say it's how we prioritized the space. I'm glad we have all the windows we do, even though they're so low we'd have to design and build cases to fit under them and it wouldn't be overly efficient to place anything over the heating registers anyway. I might wish we had removed the old heating system's register, which sticks out two inches and would require, upon its demise, the replastering of its wall. (When we painted the room in 2001 I think furniture was still such a pipe dream that we didn't consider its intrusion.)

One bookcase.

Fiction could start there, Edwin Abbot, Achebe, Alcott, Alexander, Allende, and that makes the most (or the most linear) sense. Breaking up the fiction between floors might be disruptive but could work. RDC doesn't like this idea because House of the Spirits, fr'instance, is in pulp and pulp is unattractive. I say dividing books by ugliness is not a valid sort criterion.

We could do a Selection of Authors: DeLillo, Hemingway, Kerouac, O'Brien, Pynchon, and Snyder are in his office, with a little duplication in the main collection. Their absence from the main collection doesn't bother me excessively: I don't actively miss Dharma Bums when I cast a dragonish proprietary eye over it. So that might work.

Also, a Selection of Authors could conveniently be Pretty Authors as well, since I have not restrained myself from buying every new Atwood and Byatt immediately and therefore in hardcover. Except instant book gratification also means that I have fucking Shelters of Stone in hardcover and the cliché of the compleat Harry Potter. I don't admit publicly to Jean Auel--if Clan of the Cave Bear sits among my favorites, the other three decently hide, and as soon as I notice that Shelters is in pulp I'll buy it again so I can donate the hardcover (which does not fit among the Hidden but does not sit between Maya Angelou and Julian Barnes in proper alphabetical order, no no no). Also except that Atwood and Byatt are Favorites and therefore next to my desk in my study with the Cynthia Voigt and Watership Down.

See, I had to write all this out. It reminds me that Haitch gave me a lovely Annotated Alice and I think that would work with my properly, Tenniel-y illustrated Alice and my improperly, lisa-illustrated Alice coloring book (also a Haitch gift) and Jeff Noon's Automated Alice and therefore Vurt and hey, Nymphomation looks vaguely pornographic, and there you have it, the beginning of a web of books, better than a selection or a range.

painting

I haven't been helping, but then RDC can work on the house over his lunch, and we've been eating so provincially early, soon after I get home from work, that there's no before-dinner and after dinner there's no natural light. Excuses excuses.

Monday he hung his study closet door. I can't remember how long it has been on sawhorses in the furnace room. I didn't finish painting the storm windows until June--June?--and I don't remember fumbling the windows and screens out of the coal room past a door on sawhorses. Say six months. It improves the room immeasurably.

And I love our doors. They're two-paneled solid wood, the lower panel a square and the upper a rectangle, they have glass knobs, they're handsome. Only four are hung: the study closet, the bathroom, the kitchen closet and pantry. We removed the study and bedroom doors and someone before us removed all the other interior doors: the hinged ones between the dining room and hallway, the living room and front landing, the kitchen and back landing; the swinging one between the dining room and kitchen; the probably gorgeous glassed ones in the arch between the dining and living rooms. We know these existed because we're the first to repair the hinge and latch scars in the doorways, and there's a mark in the center of the arch where a floor latch once held one door. But they're nowhere to be found; the only other doors in the house or garage are two glassed ones RDC thinks used to be the exterior doors. I think not, because who would be so profligate with heat and privacy to have glass doors? I could be wrong.

Yesterday he painted the sunroom ceiling. Today he intends to paint its walls. Then there will be pictures. And then there will be the hair-pulling out designing of the breakfast nook: the shelves, the table, the bench. And the building of same.

Just think, it took us six months to paint a door and me a full year to paint 40 storm windows and screens. Just think how long the construction of a breakfast nook might take.

We have to consider what we want. One, we're going to paint it in oil so it can take some wear. RDC pointed out how sensible this would have been for the mantel and built-ins, which we have scuffed while shelving books, shunting a photograph aside, placing a vase. Oops. Also, oil will stand up to a cockatiel better than latex and I mean this to be a casual, cockatiel-approved environment (unlike the more formal dining and living rooms). Two, I had said its table doesn't need to be as long as the original one because it needs to fit only two. RDC just suggested that if we did make it long, space by the window could be for parrot-safe plants. I like that idea. Three, lots of shelves. The top ones, which will be hard to get to, will be for plants as well, the middle ones for books--cookery and reference, I reckon--and the lowest ones maybe pigeon-holed for bills and stationery. Four, a bench, with cushions for bottoms and backs.

We have this great woodworking book that gives the proportions for different pieces of furniture: for how much space there should be between bottom-of-table and top-of-chair for ease of skootching into place, for how long a table should be to fit two or four or six people along its length, and stuff like that. That will be useful.

sunny the sunroom

The first time we saw the house, the sunroom looked like this. The lace curtains came with the house, so I know for a fact how difficult they are to open and surmise from what I know of the previous owner that she never ever opened any of them anywhere, even here for her plants.
A pair of scarlet saloon doors separated the kitchen from the sunroom, and when I first saw them I planned to paint them a more lisa color. It turned out that the lisaest thing to do was remove them entirely. I think they're in the coal room now but I might have ditched them. I wouldn't want to encourage some future encroacher's poor taste.
The woman's trashcan stood in here as well--through the saloon doors from where trash would be generated--in a faux Ethan Allen-y camoue that I considered immensely impractical. Also, it's garbage. Does it have to be pretty? But of course, she was merely squatting in my house which was mine and I would own, so naturally her taste was questionable.

In the nearly three years since, the sunroom has been mostly a storage room. We took the bedroom, study, and closet doors off their hinges before we moved in and here they lay for three months before moving to the basement. Before the bikes moved to the garage, they lived in here too. After a year or so on the mantel--maybe when we were going to paint the living room Real Soon Now--the trailing house plants moved to the potrack, which held no pots. I bought some hanging baskets and suspended potatoes and onions in them from the rack. The gateleg table lived in here and for two seasons supported seedlings in front of the east-facing window. (This year I'm going to buy young plants, though: last season's bought seedlings produced a lot more tomatoes than my grown-from-seed plants. Maybe one day I'll have a heatlamp to keep them happier and healthier.) The cookbookcase lived in here too, and gateleg table, the Dustbuster, the garbage can, and the Things That Needed to Go Somewhere Else, like the Bag of Bags (which occasionally I remember to bring to a plastics recycling spot) and the Bag of Dry-Cleaning Detritus.

Last winter, I began to remove the bracketed shelves and the metal vertical strips whose proper name I never remember that supported them. A lot of plaster and some brick dust came with them. And we finally--after 1.5 winters with heat pouring through the glass--bought cellular blinds. Sometime over this summer, RDC began to rebuild the windows. The broad, east-facing one opened, but its sash ropes were busted and we propped the window with a bit of wood. The narrow south window didn't open at all. I spackled holes and RDC repaired worse damage. This winter--another season of heat pouring through the windows--we began to paint (Benjamin Moore Butter, as I've mentioned.)

It's not done yet. Obviously. Before I can razor the windows clean, the sashes and mullions need another coat of white. And yeah, we paint all over the glass. The first room in this house we painted, the bedroom, has seven windows--four six-over-one, two four-over-one, and one eight-over-one. I taped each invidual pane. Four little stripes of tape per pane.
Never again.
So we paint on the glass and razor it off. I have yet--the dining room windows (40 individual panes), the living room windows (four six-over-ones plus two six-paned apertures), the study (two six-over-ones)--to regret this.
Then the potrack goes back up and the copper pots on it. Perhaps not the plants on top now that pots exist. The cookbookcase needs to go in there this week, because we might get the new living room furniture earlier than we expected.
We're plotting the bench(es?) and table, the plans constantly in flux, bought or built, oak or painted white, two benches or one bench and shelves, though two benches could still permit shelves.

I am not really going to name the sunroom for a Baudelaire.

a reading lamp

It turned out that the two wall lamps we bought were too big to hang in a pair, and even just one over the length of the couch looked wrong, on either side or centered. So we hung one over an end, and it's wonderful. Its finish matches that of the overhead perfectly and even its finial complements the overhead's. A wall lamp with a 40-watt bulb instead of an overhead, however dimmed, is such an improvement, making the room cozier, not casting a yellow glare on the rug, being a reading lamp.

I know we need stuff on the walls. Another reason a pair of lamps wasn't as good a solution is that it meant the wall couldn't accommodate a painting or print.

I also don't like having three colors of accessory on the couch. I have no design sense, it's true. Yet another accessory with olive, blue, and plum in it? Or everything in one color? I lean toward the latter.

i love my house

Or, holy shit it's March.

When did that happen? I have the other half of the front garden to plan and order pronto. And I have to clean out the south half, to get the leaves out and cut down last year's growth. Some stuff, the low-growing penstemon and erodium, is already green. I'm debating using the ugly mulch from last year's TreeCycle under the cherry tree or planting squash there. Neither would combat the cherry shoots and the squash might give a ladder to the bindweed and the mulch would make the shoots harder to clip.

I finished the windows in the sunroom, took up the dropcloth, and put the cookbookcase back in there. I still have to scrape the windows but that's easily swept up, and the cookbookcase had to leave the living room because our new furniture arrives tomorrow. The terrible thing about a built-in breakfast nook? We have to build it in, meaning, we have to mar the floors. With nails.

I also turned the compost. This year I am going to get a second bin or maybe two and I must, somewhere, find a sifting screeen. I love that no eggshell survives a month but that the broccoli trunk I didn't chop up or surround with high-nitrogen matter is still intact five months later. But I need a screen to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

spring

Last week I saw a magpie flutter by toting timbers for its castle. The blue jays (which seem well-established in Denver now) are being raucous again. Yesterday I heard and saw a robin singing (sometimes they winter through, but not this year; also, apparently our robins don't winter here but those that do are from farther north). The starlings are caterwauling--odd, since they're birds not cats--and the seed drops more slowly in the feeder.

I might have gone to the gym immediately after work, but I would have spent the entire time fretting about Shadowfax. The gym does have a bike rack, but it's against a blank brick wall instead of ten feet to the right, where it would be in front of the gym's office windows, and that brick wall is extremely close to a bus stop, so that I would see innocent waiting-for-bus-ism as suspicious loitering. Except I wouldn't've been able to see it, because of the brick wall. Hence the fretting.

So instead I came home and Blake and I worked on the front garden. I raked out its winter bed of fallen leaves, discovered new green on the lavender (the one plant that didn't grow at all last year) and on most of the other obviously happier plants. Today I have to call High Country Gardens to find out about how to trim my sophomore garden. (Blake's help consisted of commentary from the porch.)

the start of spring cleaning

and the regular weekly crap I almost never do on weeknights.

I could get used to this

Unfortunately, I probably won't; nor could I afford to. I dusted the living and dining rooms, whose horizontal surfaces had drifts of ash; I vacuumed the rugs and upholestery; I would have laundered the curtains if they had any chance of drying on the line; I washed the glossy paint of the hearth, discolored with smoke. I read some short stories; I tried to bake bread (without my kitchen chaperon, and a failure despite its being Donald Rumsfeld as I pummeled it); I cleaned the wood floors; I shoveled behind the garage in case we want to use Cassidy, I shoveled most of the patio, so the snow would melt into the earth instead of the brick; I set a five-gallon bucket under the corner of the porch that needs better gutters and dumped 15 gallons of meltwater into the front garden, sparing the house that much flooding. We walked out for coffee and read The Onion over mocha and vanilla lattes.

The two discolored streaks in the front landing floor are (I discovered today for the first time, almost three years in the house) come from tape. Someone taped what was surely television cable on the floor, between the hole they'd seen fit to drill in the floor, between the understair space where it entered the house through a basement window, and the living room. I had never noticed that the streaks were not permanent stains but dirt stuck to tape residue. Did people hate my house? Why would anyone drill through oak floors just for television?

They hacked holes through the floor for the new heating system too. The original air exchange has a wonderful oak grid; the floor in the dining room was built around it. Sometime later another furnace required another air intake to be cut in the living room in front of the window. This isn't particularly lovely, but it's inconspicuous. The current furnace's air intake is in the dining room, conspicuously in the traffic flow to the hallway, and under the unlovely metal grille the hole in the floor was cut without love or care. Sigh.

I'm still not sure about the living room wall. I can't believe that if the wall separating the living room from the front stairs is not original, more windows wouldn't originally been built into the exterior wall. The one small window and the ceiling light fixture suggest the wall is original; only its being drywall instead of plaster suggests otherwise but it might have been rebuilt after rewiring. I suppose when people build houses, they might not think about refinishing floors. But there's about a foot of floor in the stairwell between the wall and the railing along the staircase, a foot in which a floor refinisher cannot reach. That strip is discolored with age and a millimeter or two higher than the resurfaced area. I have no idea whether the floor will be able to handle another refinishing in another couple of decades. I hope so.

I can't claim that we've taken the best possible care of the floor ourselves. The very day we moved the furniture in, we marred it. The couch from the apartment became the downstairs, den couch. It had to go through the front door (wider than the back), through the length of the house, through the doorway between kitchen and back landing, and down the back stairs (wider than the front). The doorway wasn't quite wide enough, and the corner of the couch gouged a wiggling foot-long line in the floor.

I don't know what we should do in the kitchen. I don't want to tile or lino it but the wood is extremely sad. I need to get more or better area rugs for in front of the fridge and the dishwasher, and when the area rug in front of the stove is up--last weekend I hosed its pad and beat the crap out of it (that being my thing)--you can see that the floor under it is less worn.

chilly and damp

By the time we finally got up this morning, woke up, and breakfasted, it was almost noon. I love weekends. By lingering in bed so long I missed the best sun; I rolled Blake in front of the windows to watch and scream as I worked in the garden (because of the porch, he could only see me when I stood up). High Country Gardens said cutting back all the shrubby stuff was fine, and I am confident that that's what the Nepeta x faasenni and even the Agastache rupestris wanted. I also cut down the spires of the Salvia pitcheri but I am not at all sure that's what it wanted. I was to cut down the sage as well but leaves are budding on last year's growth. This is the same dilemma I have with the raspberry canes: buds on last year's growth. Did I wait too late to cut them down? Or will there be leaves but no fruit on those canes?

I brought in some kindling for the fire we'll start in a bit. My brushpile is just that, and with the addition of the cherry and pine branches, I should turn it over so the seasoned wood is on top. The blizzard hit cedars the worst; the deciduous trees didn't have leaves yet to hold a heavier load of snow and I guess cedars' denser needles hold more than slicker, longer pine and spruce needles.

Damn amputations. I recently watched "Gone with the Wind" and decided, Tuesday night in Home Despot buying a new pruning saw, that I would probably be as tormented as Dr. Meade performing a similar duty. But, I am gratified to report, his patient's terrible pleas did not pop into my head until well afterward, as I sat in my garden clipping shrubs (about which I feel much less guilty and worried about pain).

The sun gave up before 2, so in I came. RDC came home with groceries, so we can hibernate, and mineral spirits and cheap brushes so we can apply the linseed oil I bought should it ever be warm again (ha!), and some Widespread Panic (I knew it would only a matter of time for him). Plant catalogs and a fire and Animal Dreams await me. I love weekends.

a good day

I swapped out the storms for screens on three sides of the house. I don't particularly consider this more than halfway through, though, because the north side is the most annoying. The front's easiest because it all happens on the porch without a ladder; the south side is fine because the ladder fits neatly on the sidewalk; the back is fine because the ladder's on the patio and that's where the back door is. In contrast, the ground on north side of the house conspires with the ladder to break my neck, and I have to trot the windows around three sides of the house to hose them--waiiiiit a minute, one of the perks of getting the swamp cooler properly plumbed last year was that we have hose fitting there. Well, I still have to haul them back anyway to spare the living room my clumsiness, and the back stairs are wider and shallower than the front ones.

Something right has happened with the resistance training, because the wide windows (this isn't an Unfortunate Event, I promise) that have been tricky to handle before are not so tricky now. They're not heavy, but their width and the being on a ladder and the fragility used to be more difficult to juggle than now.

I cut down some raspberry canes, hosed all the storms down (the dust in the sills being black since it's primarily auto exhaust), polished and waxed (not really) the inside sashes, raked the north front yard clean in preparation for tomorrow's digging, washed and line-dried the living room curtains, hauled the patio furntiure to the "grass" there to hose and scrub it, and emptied the Hestia hearth ash into the compost. (That last is my fond name for the outdoor fireplace, a copper or copper alloy bowl in a frame we bought last summer.)

I figured the compost could do with a dousing, so I trained the hose on it to carry the ash into its depths. I heard rustlings from deep within and I figured the water was settling layers. Last year when I watered the trees with a spike, I was used to the water erupting at the surface a good reach away from where the spike penetrated. I figured something similar might be happening, but no. The rustlings became scrabblings from higher up, and two pairs of beady little eyes looked at me in apprehension before the mousiekins leapt out and away. I planned to turn the compost this weekend, but damn, there might be a nest in there. Why can't they nest in the woodpile?

In the middle of all this we went to the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. His paintings are fabulous, lush with color, vibrant with light, and reluctant to show their images. I was not so overwhelmed with his lithographs and pen & ink, because really he's a colorist. Boy was he a colorist. Initially he seemed like a cat person, but then in later paintings dachshunds appeared and I was happy. Also his earlier paintings are set in Paris, where he was a flâneur, a connoisseur of everyday life (we both read Edmund White's Le Flâneur after our trip last year); later ones are set in the country.

A new hall of mirrors has been installed in the ground floor of the museum. It reminded me, I said to RDC, of "Cube," except, as he pointed out, they're not moving all over trying to kill us. You slip booties over your feet--or I did both of us since RDC is gimpy these days--and enter at the right aft end of a 30-foot passage. All the surfaces are mirrored, so above your head you can see yourself underfoot. It's pretty wild. Then you exit on the left fore end--it's shaped like a periscope--and scamper into Bonnard.

We had wanted to have tea at the Brown Palace in the afternoon, but they were booked, the lazy sows. So we ambled down to Larimer and the Del Mar Crab House where we had oysters and a crab melt for me and a soft-shelled crab sandwich for him. I don't understand why soft-shelled crabs come in sandwiches. They're already breaded. Also, a soft-shelled crab fits on a hamburger-type bun but this one--"Why do they serve it on a hero bun?" I asked, and then shook myself. We had just passed the gyro cart, so maybe the sound was in my head, but I even call the things you get at Subway grinders, not subs, and heros--I have no idea where in the country they're called heros. Somewhere, though nowhere I've lived. Dunno where that came from.

I ordered my plants from High Country Gardens. They'll arrive in the days before Mother's Day weekend, a fine time to plant. I'll have that Friday off again. So that's done. They're all low-water shrubby type things, and I hope I chose a good variety of colors and bloom times. The one bit that scares me is the vinca I ordered for the easement. The description says it's an aggressive spreader and shouldn't be planted near anything else, which makes its insular position in the easement a fine one, but I don't think we're allowed to erect any kind of stakes and a string fence to protect it in its infancy from people getting out of their cars (we plan to gravel the two feet closest to the street), and planting it means opening up the groundcloth which might mean an onslaught of bindweed.

I am going to go find a good movie to watch while I iron the curtains. That'll be the last remnant of the smoke-filled house incident gone.

a start

I approached the front yard with a shovel and a hoe and a swan rake, actually wearing boots because I anticipated a boot-on-the-shovel method of digging.

Oh-ho-ho.

I might have been better off with a sod-cutting plough. I did maybe a third of the area I intended before the hoe broke. I worked for a while with a fork and trowel before stopping. I'll attempt the rest tomorrow after the epoxy dries the hoe into one again. I hope.

I noticed another branch off the evergreen and one cracked off a plum, and just now, when I'm quite Done for the day, looking out the bedroom window, I noticed another small one broken off the cherry tree. Lest anyone think my beating the crap outta my trees was in vain, I should point out that these broken branches were higher than my reach, unless they were on the evergreen, which I ignored, or the cherry, which I forgot about. So I hauled a bunch of plum branches to the back and started cutting them up for the brush pile I mistook my left forefinger for a branch and decided I was too tired to see or cut straight. So I stopped.

RDC oiled the patio furniture and it looks miles better. And I finished swapping the windows. Last night I melted the care tag on one of the curtains into the iron, so I rehung the washed living room curtains wrinkled. RDC suggests either melting or sanding the polyester off the iron, since isoprophyl alcohol won't touch it; I favor buying a new iron.

I finally hung the new birdfeeder. The birds have already decided that the New and Different is not a threat and I can't wait for a squirrel to try it.

hard work day

What I mean by Hard Work Day is the picture book Alan Arkin (the actor) wrote about his son, but it seems the edition with the real illustrations is out of print and it's been reissued with new (i.e. wrong) illustrations. So no link for you, OMFB.

I ripped out the rest of the front yard, out to the tree and down to the sidealk. And you may ask yourself, even if you haven't been listening to Remain in Light, well, why did you do this? Okay, that doesn't go into the rhythm of "Once in a Lifetime" so well.

Last year I used a rototiller, which involved two trips in one day to Home Despot--a farther one than our usual, with a rental center--the return trip being mid-afternoon and therefore interminable, gasoline for the rototiller and us to breathe, nearly ripping out the sprinkler heads (do we know where they are? we do not), and, let's be honest, my getting RDC to do the actual rototilling, because that thing was a lot stronger than I am and clearly in the Hot or Sharp Category.

This year RDC has a wonky knee and I might be stronger than last year but in principles as well as physically and if I despise snowblowers leafblowers snowmobiles and jetskis I shouldn't cop out with a rototiller either. Also the sumac tree's roots are right on the surface. I'm not overly fond of the tree--its bark and inedible fruit are both orange--but it's a tree so it stays.

I have seldom wanted to be Dr. Dolittle's next Tommy as I did today. Not that talking to moles would have helped. I don't think Colorado has any. I don't need to add one to my list of quasipets--the invisible, cocker-spaniel-sized elephant, the hypothetical dog, and the eventual goat. And the penguins. So I did it. I am the human rototiller. Except I overturned maybe two inches instead of six.

Then I cut more deadweight from a plum tree and trimmed all the deciduous deadfall to fit neatly into the brush pile. That made me feel vaguely like SNL's Anal Retentive Chef but really that pile can't get any bigger than it is. Since it was all dead I didn't have "Gone with the Wind" in my head either but the Grinch, from when he saws bits off Max's antler.

I also hoed the vegetable and south gardens, added the leftover edging from last year to the new garden, dumped all the clots of grass from the front under the cherry tree in what I'm sure is a very attractive manner, and brought the last of the cleaned storm windows to the coal cellar while bringing most of the firewood back out.

I'm tired.

contrast

Yesterday we each put in twelve hours on the house and garden and bikes: I ripped the sod from, added spent garden soil to, laid groundcloth in, and edged with brick one side of the north front garden, lay a path of stepping stones through it to the north side of the house, clipped cherry sprouts from under their parents, and cleared the last leaf, twig, and mulch debris from the porch and side gardens. RDC swapped the ski for the bike racks on Cassidy, and in the rackless interim, we made a Home Despot run for compost, brick, and the makings of a pegboard. Breaks from my sod-busting and -hauling were holding down the other end of pegboard and 1x3s.

RDC brought the last of the firewood back outside, vacuumed the back basement, emptied the shop vac (discovering a hair clip I'd been missing), and fortified our bike tires with Tuffy strips, of whose worth if not spelling I am certain of. When I scampered to the coal room to get my old Cannondale (where the Tuffies were), I admired the new lightswitch that doesn't spark or buzz or anything.

I was really unenthusiastic about ripping out the last of the front yard. I measured and staked the property line and if anything shortchanged us, but I absolutely don't want to impinge on those neighbors. I'll pull the south neighbor's bindweed when it gets too close to my garden, but not the north neighbors': they might find the bindweed flowers too pretty to kill. They have trodden on our downspouts while mowing our grass, knocked the "Please Do Not Block Gate" sign off our back fence while shoving unbundled, unbagged yard waste into the dumpster (last fall while I hoed out the vegetable garden, listening incredulously through the fence), blocked our gate with unflattened, unrecycled cartons, flouted the watering restrictions all summer long, and are altogether unapproachable. At some point I would like to ask them please to stop throwing water away, first because overwatering is wrong and emptying the clippings directly into the dumpster illegal and immoral, and second because my leaf pile is almost gone (my compost pile is hot! glory be!) and I'll need browns soon.

But I did it. I still have to edge, really delicately along the property line.

As dusk fell we put the bikes and tools away and showered. Mm, shower. RDC's other critical task had been lunch, which we ate around 3:00,* late enough that all we wanted now was dessert. I suggested walking to Licks, and RDC wondered if that was nearer or farther than the gelato place in Cherry Creek North (nearer) but after showering decided the corner store would have all we needed. We scampered out, debating flavors. We got two pints, because we're grown-ups and can, but mostly because he is a heathen who prefers Swiss Almond Vanilla to Mint & [Oreo].

We watched "Road to Perdition," which considering it had Tom Hanks was quite good. He didn't overact (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan). At the end of this sentence I am going to spoil the endings of both "Perdition" and "Ryan" to explain why it was good: his last words were not "Earn this." Safe now.

Besides ice cream we also bought a Sunday Post. So today, in marked contrast to yesterday, we got up at 10 instead of 7, it is cloudy instead of sunny, I actually read 100 pages of a book (I have ignored Book of Evidence all week because I wanted to read it in a big chunk) instead of browsing through travel guides, and we are slubbering around the living room with bathrobes and newspapers and lattes. Also we might go to the gym.

*Hey, that sentence could easily be misread as using "which" for a conjunction: "Task was lunch, but we didn't eat until three," instead of "task was lunch, which meal we ate at three."

productivity on a weeknight?

That's a new one.

I returned all my Paris guidebooks to the library and picked up about a gallon of coffee grounds from Peaberry Coffee--a good bike-sized portion. They will be an excellent source for my lasagne mulch. Getting raw materials in sufficient quantities to dedicate a spatch of garden to might be tricky.

When I got home I began to fuss with compost, frustrating Blake, who wanted me inside. RDC was wearing a collared shirt and was therefore Bad (collared shirts mean that Daddy Is Leaving the House and must therefore be Shunned and Yelled At and Avoided) so Blake was desperate. RDC put Blake on the kitchen windowsill and came out to say hi, and when we went back in, Blake was pacing back and forth on the floor of the back landing, squawking and whining his discontent. Poor little beast.

I changed into garden clothes, shut Blake into his cage with barely a cuddle, and brought him outside to help me in the garden. I took a last wheelbarrow of dirt out and began to double-dig. I think. I'm not sure if what I did counts as double-digging, but there were trenches and mixing compost with present dirt. And combing, to remove old root structures. The whole vegetable garden is soft again, for most of its depth. It's a step I didn't take last year. I also amended the south garden, much less diligently because it was late. I planted spinach, carrot, and bean seeds along the south fence, and squash plants under the cherry tree on the hopeful hypothesis that only weeds (zucchini is a weed) stand a chance against other weeds. I had been fed at some point, bison burgers with plenty of spinach and tomato and mozzarella, but mostly that was three hours of hoeing and digging.

Then it was dark so I stopped.

from beneath you it devours

We don't know what it is causing our basement floor to disintegrate but it has to be stopped. I am not going to speculate publicly yet, but that title was too good not to use.

in the garden

SPM was here when I got home from work. I came along the sidewalk slowly, looking for bindweed, as I do every summer afternoon, bounced Shadowfax up the two steps to the walk, and spotted RDC inside. I am glad I didn't blow him a kiss or flash him--well, the latter was unlikely anyway--because through the screen I didn't recognize the additional height that made the figure SPM, not RDC. He said hi and I realized my mistake, and then he remarked on the garden. He hadn't seen it for 2.5 weeks and in that time it really has taken off.

It is lovely, as a matter of fact and thank you for noticing. Some spaces need to be filled in and the nepeta needs more cutting but yeah. It's lovely.

RDC remarked that after the house falls over into a swamp we can live in the garden. Our cheery conversation with SPM concerned how to fix whatever's going on down there and how much it will cost (Blake's definitely not getting a car when he turns 16) and how to vanquish an insurance company we anticipate to be reluctant.

After SPM left, I dragged RDC out to make him repeat SPM's compliments. He thought we (read I) could remove the groundcloth, as there's not a bindweed problem out here. "There's not a bindweed problem because I look for it every day," I told him, as with perfect timing I spotted quite a long vicious parasite winding up a penstemon strictus. The groundcloth stays.

As we inspected the catmint cuttings, wondering if they'll survive, and looked at the emerging flowers on the penstemon pinofolius (yellow, flame, coral, a welcome sight in my blue and lavender and white garden), and plotted for more thyme, and wondered how high the salvia will grow this year, RDC noticed a moth feeding on the catmint. We watched it for a moment. "That's a hummingbird!" we realized together.

I think it was our first summer here that I saw a hummingbird in the large, anonymous bush on the north side, also initially mistaking its wee brownness for a moth. But it was a hummingbird--and I haven't seen one since, until this one. I've known from the start that bees love the catmint, which makes me if not RDC happy. It is listed as a hummingbird attractant. And it is! This makes me so happy.

Not all wildlife makes me so happy. As I type this the next morning, I'm listening to a squirrel in the nectarine tree, sounding like nails on a chalkboard, gnawing on the fetal fruit. Little fucker. There are dozens of baby plums that they'll destroy next, and then they'll work on the pears. We watched "Amy and Amiability" last night, an excellent "Blackadder" episode even if it didn't feature the Shadow killing their excessively tailed selves. I am becoming Anya, squirrel-wise.

immorality

All right. I accepted that I could never destroy the brush pile, even one created by the detritus of only seven trees, as quickly as it could generate itself. Not, she muttered darkly, with three-foot snowfalls. The city is picking up branches, but it doesn't say whether the amputations go to the landfill or to mulch. Probably to landfill, because people can bring their own stuff to the city nursery through the end of this month. Over the past two evenings I have extracted the largest, most useful wood and bundled the rest. Whatever I cannot fit in the car at once, I will leave by the dumpster. I admit it.

In 2001, with an eye to do more gardening than just the vegetables, I fetched myself a Cassidy-load of mulch from the TreeCycle mulch giveaway. It was good mulch, and so last year RDC and I borrowed a small pick-up truck and went back for another load. I mulishly insisted on filling the thankfully small truck bed even when I saw that this mulch sucked. There were whole branches of Yule trees, chopped not chipped, there were quantities of needles. That crap has sat in my backyard on a tarp for a year, where it has served to discourage (though not kill) the bindweed under it.

My other unethical measure, then, has been finally to bag up most of this pointless, pointy stuff. I'm going to bring it to the City Nursery as well. But not all of it. I pitchforked through it, sifting the big and most of the little chunks out. I am going to use the needles in a lasagne composting bed I am going to try, these needles plus those from the two branches the evergreen lost in the blizzard.

Two unstoppable forces rule my yard: cherry sprouts and bindweed. I had known that the garage is surrounded on the three non-car sides by a couple of feet of gravel, but I didn't know until I shifted the brush pile away from the garage and clipped the cherry sprouts that have grown up through it that they first were growing through two layers of black plastic as well.

Is it okay that I love my cherry tree but hate its sproutlets?

tuck-pointing

I told RDC I didn't care what the mortar looked like on the north side of the house, since you can't get far enough away to have any perspective and it's not Curbside Appeal etc., but the new mortar in the garage is so vastly different than the existing mortar that I retracted that. And you can see the north side from the street, after all. One of the things that justified Guy the Tuck-Pointer's rate two years ago is that he color-matched the mortar. You can see where his repairs are to the porch and front of the house, but they're not glaring.

But RDC is working on the inside of the garage, so that when the house falls over into a swamp we can live in there. Also so that the garage itself doesn't fall over into a swamp. Also because you can see through it in a couple of places, by the person-door where someone wired it by hacking out bricks apparently with a sledgehammer, and on the back corners where no one cared for years whether the gutters drained properly or the creeper was demolishing brick and mortar in its relentless climbing.

This weekend he did the short end opposite the car-door. Once upon a time, someone apparently drove a car into the garage and tried to keep going, perhaps overestimating the building's length. So there is a concave section. Or there was, before his repair. In four hours Saturday he did a smaller section than he did in three hours Sunday: he got the hang of it. And maybe the mortar will dry paler than it is now. Because I don't want a charcoal-grey striped house.

I am really glad we have a new garage door, since that allows for a garage-door opener (English really needs some new words. Is there a one- or two-syllable word that could communicate that concept?), but this weekend I saw a garage with its original, glassed, bay doors. Very pretty. I am not so dedicated to the house As Was that I want, say, a coal furnace or a smaller fridge; I like admiring the pretty while I get to live with the practical.

what I got done

It really doesn't feel like much now, but I did get stuff done:

I vacuumed and swept upstairs, including under the rugs. Getting under the dining room rug is vital, because dirt--real, sandy dirt--sifts through rug and mat and accumulates around the perimeter. If I am not careful about that, that dirt will scar the floor. (The structural engineer said, upon entering the house, "Great floors!") I vacuumed the upholstery and dusted everything. Having the windows open means the windowsills are filthy and the dirt is black instead of the winter grey and brown.

I tidied up the entire basement. I'll have to take it all out when the work has to be done, but I'm glad to be tidied up and have everything back in place in the furnace room, the cool room, and the cave. And I cleaned the bathroom and the water closet (I call it the water closet because damn it, it is: a closet-sized space with a toilet in it), their semiannual acquaintance with cleanliness.

Then we went to a party.

but the third one stayed oop

Okay. The deal with the house falling over into a swamp is this: calcium sulfates in the soil chemically react with the bonding agent in concrete, disintegrating it. Apparently this is a big problem in California, where foundations are now poured exclusively with type 5 (sulfate resistant) concrete. The structural engineer who confirmed the diagnosis we had come to on our own with web research said ours was the worst case he had seen in Denver. He knows of cases in Park Hill, immediately to our northeast, and in Montclair, immediately east, but he's more familiar with its happening in Highlands Ranch, the massive, soulless suburb in Douglas County to the south.

The basement floor is not structurally necessary to the house's remaining intact. The three supporting columns supporting the upper structure are, and two of them are severely chewed. One, behind the furnace and hot water heater, we had noticed; the other, behind a seasonal rotation of screens and storm windows in the coal room, we had not. The third is in my study, and our current hypothesis is that my study is sunken a step below the rest of the basement because someone already dug out some bad soil, installed a vapor seal, repoured the floor, and installed a steel supporting column.

Replacing the other two concrete supporting columns with steel is what we have to do. So we will do it.

The other two problems, ppor drainage on the north side and the resulting uneven settling of the house in the northwest corner, leading to the porch separating from the house, are in the engineer's eyes in more immediate need of correction. He and RDC brainstormed a fix for the porch that RDC can probably do himself, and discussed what we need to do for the drainage--which he said was better than many bungalows', though still insufficient--and that I can do.

So we will do those too.

the ball and chain

No, really I love my house. It's just that sometimes it warrants escape. We were going to work on it both days but we might play hooky and go bike up in Fraser tomorrow instead.

So I raked out the big stupid chunky mulch and spread some better stuff, though I still need to do a Home Despot run for more mulch and for stakes. Also I don't think groundcloth and mulch is best for the vinca to spread with. I wonder if pine needles--or sunflower seeds, hm--would suppress weeds enough while still enabling the vinca to spread from below.

The city's digging up the city and I have got to order fill before it gets to our street. If I have two cubic yards delivered on Friday, hopefully that will be in time for delivery to the street, the side of the house that needs it, rather than to the alley, which would be way more extra work than I want to take on.

Then I went for a swim.

Meanwhile RDC installed a steel-reinforced beam to the roof and added a vertical buttress as well. Evenings this week I am going to remove all the rock etc. from the north side and prime and paint the new wood bits. A lot of the bungalow porches have, or had, windows or at least glass on the north side, so you could sit on your porch somewhat protected from wintry winds. I figure the vertical beam will look like that. I hope. Rule the first: no paint on the brick.

Afterward I weeded some of the backyard. Whatever it is that looks kinda like a dandelion but isn't must be on speed: its stem is nearly a trunk, nearly wood, nearly an inch in diameter, and I am barely exaggerating.

And then I dug out the sprouty shrubby stump. I want the raspberries to expand thataway, is why it needed to leave. I couldn't quite bring myself to wear boots when it was over 80 but Tevas were enough to stomp--I first typed "stump"--on the shovel with. I dug and sawed through roots and dug and stomped and pried and finally flourished it above my head, Perseus-like. Blake did not turn to stone, and the only snake-ish things were worms, and it wasn't that ugly, but I was glad to see the end of it.

back on the bus

A Jamba Juice is embedded in our grocery store, and today I got a most excellent large haul of vegetable pulp. The clerk thought I was insane but I can deal with that. After supper (kale and roasted garlic and tomatoes), I finally spread new mulch on the easement, did not add stakes or s because Home Despot had none, and called that done. Until gravel. I weed-whacked the backyard and combed all the bindweed smooth with a rake. In not quite four square feet, I spread the vegetable pulp, covered that with a thorough if thin layer of sunflower seed husks, and layered pine needles over all. In the next square I'll use coffee grounds. Even if the layers turn to sticky mush, no more, if they act as a weed suppressant that will make me happy.

raspberries!

Today the harvest began in as much earnest as I expect it will muster. Since Friday I've plucked a couple-three berries from the canes per day. Today I nearly filled the bottom of a cereal bowl with perfect red raspberries. Enough to make a teaspoon of jam.

Also the cherries are about a week to ten days from being ready. Maybe more, but not much more.

RDC thought the vegetable garden was doing better this year with its infusion of compost; I had wondered whether the lesser sun has made the tomatoes grow more slowly. The yellow squash is on its own now; the cucumbers are sticking it out; no sunflower seed sprouted; maybe three of the several spinach seeds are now a plant; I see no carrots; four bean plants are growing. I planted most of those seeds too late, and all of them got snowed on almost immediately and I also abandoned them for a week without watering. Three of the squash plants I seeded under the cherry tree are up. Thanks to the squirrels, there's not a plum left on the tree; the nectarine put out few blossoms this year and has a correspondingly low number of fruit; the pear has many many many baby pears, perhaps enough to survive the rodent onslaught.

Every year it's an experiment.

one huge mudpie

One of the reasons the house is falling into a swamp is improper drainage. Today I took the first step in correcting that by receiving five cubic yards, 2.5 tons, of dirt, tipped into the street against the curb in front of the house.

Now then. The city pools close in the middle of August when the lifeguards go back to school but the pools do not open in the middle of May when they leave school. Why? It's a mystery. No, they open in mid-June--last Saturday to be precise. I swam Saturday, we went mountain-biking Sunday, and then Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the only post-work lap swim times, there were thunderstorms (or at least a tiny little smidge of rain three miles away that we had to be protected from) so swim was canceled.

So today I was all stoked for a noon swim--there is a noon lap swim every day, although the adults who want lapswim generally have jobs that prevent their taking advantage of it, and why do I live in the land o' no lakes again?--so after the dirt's 11:15 arrival I barrowed only three loads from the great big pile before biking over to the pool.

The great big piercing blue sky that Denver generally has all day clouded up fast as the dozens of littl'uns vacated the general swim. In ten minutes the overcast was complete. I swam .7K before we were whistled out, and for goodness sake, a thunderstorm in the middle of the day? That just doesn't happen here. I shucked my suit, regained my shorts and (white) tank top, Tevas and sandals, and biked home as fast as I could through pouring rain, gusty winds, and maybe some thunder and lightning.

My great big pile of dirt in the street wanted to swim away already. Denver might not get a lot of rain, but it really enjoys its downpours. I grabbed tarps from the lasagne mulch in back, from over the leaf pile, from under the brush pile. I dug a trench through the dirt for the lake that already had formed on the upstream side to drain. I hastily reattached all the long gutters that're supposed to divert the water from leaking into the basement--those I'd removed that morning so the wheelbarrow could get through.

I dashed into the house to swap sunglasses for contact lenses and sopping wet white--though muddy--tank top for something more practical and opaque. Just as I emerged, the rain, true to Denver form, dripped to a halt. It's rain, and I cannot resent it. But I maybe did give the sky the stink-eye a couple of times.

So my next barrow loads were of mud as I tried to buttress the pile from further erosion. My gloves were soaked from the lake and the stream and the ditch, so I shucked them. But when my shorts had got so filthy I could no longer wipe the mud onto them for a better purchase on shovel or wheelbarrow, I gave up.

I broke for dry clothes and a sandwich over a few minutes of "Sense and Sensibility." I have really worn a groove in it--it crashed twice and I restarted Moondshadow, taking that as my hint to get back to work. Twice more in the afternoon, thunderstorms passed through, though only with showers, and I took the second rain as a signal to stop for the day.

So here I am, in warm sunlight, on my porch swing, listening to Crosby Still & Nash and now the Waterboys, eating cherries, and not reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

I am loving this summer.

done

Five cubic yards of fill, 2.5 tons, in three steps, 20-21 June, 29 June, and this evening.

When RDC came home the 30th, after a full week away, he asked why I had not moved all the dirt. I had blocked out my frustration with the project in the intervening 36 hours and forgotten why, exactly, I had stopped. "I was tired?" I guessed. Wrongo. I remembered as soon as I started again. I fucking stopped because there was no more fucking room on the north side of the house. I did not order five cubic yards, no. I voted for three. Three, I grant you, might have been inadequate, since all but one wheelbarrow-load that landed in the raspberry patch is in fact on the north side. But five has taken some trampling, and some gentle grading of the slope on the north front, and quite a bit of fill against non-tarred bricks, where it cannot stay.

When we started this project, you could see two tiers of black, that is tarred, brick on that side of the house, where bad drainage had gradually eroded the soil. Or, I should say, not before we started but after I had removed all the stone previous owners have tried to improve drainage with. Certainly dirt should cover those two layers, but no higher. I worry about the grading, whether it's sufficient to keep rain, should any fall again, from the window wells.

I should also say I don't know how dirt solves the problem. I understand about grading, about sloping the dirt primarily toward the property line but also from back to front. But dirt, even clay dirt like this, still is water-permeable. Water still drains down through the soil. It just has to go through more soil before eventually finding our foundation with its probable crack. Yea. If it had been just RDC's brilliant plan I maybe would have objected, but since it was the structural engineer's I credited it.

There's been no rain to test anything since 20 June. We'll see.

This might not be the final step. We still might need to dig a ditch.

not much

I swept the front walk, finally, cleaning up after moving dirt from here to there. I was going to stretch groundcloth over the fill, but RDC thinks it's not distributed properly yet to which I say "Here's the rake." Otherwise I weeded the backyard and garden. Damn, I hope buffalo grass is determined stuff. Otherwise I don't know how it will ever scratch a roothold among the crap back there. There's some plant I hate with dandelion looking leaves but with pokers and teeth on them, that irritate my skin. Bachelor's button, which is not a weed because it has a pretty flower. Ditto dandelions. Fucking bindweed. Some other damn thing I call chicory for no reason other than my near-total weed-name ignorance. I clipped zillions of cherry sprouts and some hammocky sort of weed that grows even more like a weed than a regular weed and if you leave it alone often becomes an extremely weak, falls over in the slightest wind, tree.

Anyway it's all gone now, every single bad plant, killed with handclippers because I hate the (rechargeable) weedwhacker.

garden

I finally emptied the camera. The garden in June, soon after a rainstorm. Obviously, because otherwise the columns' white paint is never so clean as to be so blindingly white.

Now, everything then in flower has faded and the sage and the agastache are coming into bloom--it needs other mid-summer blooming plants to balance all the spring stuff.

There at the near corner, in the blank spot you can see where the lavender has only doubled in its two years, where everything else has grown exponentially.

fowl

Today after my swim, after pad thai and Life on Capitol Hill and a peach for lunch, reading, as I had eaten, on the porch swing, glancing from time to time at the garden which is now in its late summer blooming of sage and agastache, I saw our hummingbird again.

Bright green, with a black tail, it zipped here and there among the flowers, sipping. I stood up to see better and called in to RDC. It makes me so happy to have attracted such a bird with natural growing things rather than a feeder.

I replaced the broken bird feeder. I should have tried instead to replace its springs. When this one snaps I'll do that. The squirrels had really enjoyed the two weeks of the old feeder, but I was happy to disoblige them. The other day as I came into the kitchen, I saw the winged regulars arranged along the branch, all facing my house, not the neighbor's, the way they do when I haven't filled their trough. When I got to the window and looked down, I saw why: a squirrel was back on the feeder, trying to figure it out. I rapped on the window and it fled. Too bad the trees don't come with the same sort of anti-squirrel device: the fruit, what there is left, is near ripe, and the ground is littered with more premature fruit than I thought was on the trees to begin with.

Also, RDC called me at work to tell me the peregrin falcon made another appearance. It was Blake who told him, of course.

emily

When I got home from work and plucked a summer squash and some tomatoes, the flower hadn't opened; two hours later, back from sushi, as I raised the shades and opened the window, there it was, brave and solitary. I raced out to it and admired it and kissed it and damn, it's not a real sunflower of the seed-bearing type so I hope squirrels leave it alone. I wasn't the brightest bear to plant it way in the back, where the tree--not a Tree of Heaven, despite its growing in the alley and my wanting it to be--shades too much. Also there's the creeping stuff--Virginia creeper? I'm not sure--that is growing up from the fence into the tree and that I haven't torn out, giving yet more shade. Next summer we'll have an additional bed, against the garage, with sun almost all day, for tomatoes and cucumbers and sunflowers. The original bed will be for crops I am not so in love with and also that don't need quite as much sun, like squash and beans, but I should still rip down a lot of the creeper.

This variety is the sort that produces several flowers per plant instead of just the one big one. I doubt I'll name the rest but this first one is Emily.

weeding

A satisfying evening in the back garden.

The other day on my way to work, cars parked innocently along three blocks worth of curb had yellow paint sprayed low down along their sides, as if the passenger in a car had activated a spraypaint can held idly from a dangling arm. I really need to learn to put Cassidy in the garage. The first step is replacing all the stuff I had moved for the masons, the hanging shovels and racks, the now-unneeded 80-pound bags of cement (which I could lift, tentatively because the bags are mere paper, and carry), the supply of shingles now increased by the stack I found buried along the north side of the house as if they were proper drainage material, charcoal and birdseed and the camping stove and white gas. So I did that first.

In 2001 I ripped out the daisy-like maybe-mums that formed a solid bank of white for two weeks midsummer. In 2002 I rototilled along the south fence where they grew. This year they came back stronger than ever. They bloomed in early July or so, crowding out the spinach, beans, and carrots that I'd planted from seed and the blue-eyed grass and delphinium that I'd planted from seedlings. Now I ripped it all out again, too late, probably, for the cucumber plant that survived the crowding really to come into its own (it has fruit, thoroughly green but stunted in size).

I collected a huge pile of these ex-flowers, but what to do with it? Laced with bindweed, it couldn't go in compost. I barrowed it round the other side of the house and shoved it under a bush where we still need some fill. This is delusional of me, I know: the bindweed will survive. But most of the pile was regular plants, and I can't throw out regular plants. Neither can I maintain a compost heap hot enough to kill bindweed, however.

All the plants along the south fence reach for the sun, leaning over those plants on the lawn side of the two-foot-wide strip. So I've learned: next year, along the fence, I will plant stuff that likes shade and doesn't crowd, and along the grass border, stuff that likes half shade and doesn't crowd. Vegetables get too little sun there, though the spinach did okay in the short period between my realizing it wasn't a weed but then forgetting its existence.

I checked the lasagne mulch. I layered sunflower seeds, coffee grounds, vegetable pulp, and pine needles in a two-foot-square patch, with a plastic tarp folded into four plies on top and the square metal foot of the former patio umbrella on top. Despite that weight and dark, bindweed was growing up through the husk- and needle-mixed dirt, but the dirt is good loam. Next time, less husk and needle and more grounds and pulp.

Whatever kind of plum tomato I planted this year did well, unlike the previous two years, whose plants produced few fruits and those deformed.

I used the swan rake to comb the "grass." All the weeds in the "lawn" are bindweed, and the "lawn" is more bindweed than grass. I combed and combed and collected a large pile comprising almost solely of bindweed. This I dumped in the alley, on the theory that alleys need love too. Somehow. I couldn't quite put it in the dumpster, though I suppose I should have.

I don't remember what kind of squashes I planted under the cherry tree and I didn't mark them. When I saw one fruit setting on one plant, I plucked the other blossoms on the theory I only need one pumpkin and that one would grow large. But maybe this plant was of pie pumpkins? Because that one fruit, while undeniably a pumpkin, is small and orange already, while last year's mystery squash didn't turn orange until it was large. So if it's a pie pumpkin, just the one is not enough for a pie. I could maybe make pumpkin bread though, since I don't like pumpkin pie. Another squash plant didn't survive the trampling the masons gave it, it being apparently way too much trouble to walk around, and the third, by far the largest plant at eight feet or more, has lots of blossoms but only now just the beginning of a fruit way at the end. Whatever: at least I was right that squash plants would vanquish the weeds and the cherry sprouts in that area.

Plus I picked the first of the second crop of raspberries. These are on this year's canes, while the first crop came from last year's, and they are bigger and juicier and sweeter than the first. Mmm.

I worked for almost three hours, from when I got home until it was too dark for sunglasses and I was too dirty to go inside for regular glasses.

getting stuff done

A satisfying day, though not without its frustrating elements. I woke well before dawn, which I am sure has something to do with my not having had a lick of exercise since Wednesday, and since before that if you don't count, as I shouldn't, bike-commuting. The Parrot's Theorem was waaay out in the dining room in my backpack and I don't do well reading stuff I want to think about when the point of my reading is to go back to sleep. I lay restive and grumpy for a while before remembering I had Nobody's Fool on my bedtable.

It's there because RDC got it for his latest audio and I'm listening to it too and I always like to have the book with me as well if I can. I've mentioned before that repeated readings will turn up faults, and I noticed another one: sometimes Sully has a watch, sometimes he has not. Does it matter? Nope. Luckily RDC doesn't mind the voices. Sully sounds gruffer than I imagine him, but gruff probably works for a 60-year-old smoker. It's Mrs. Peoples's voice that grates, because she's made to sound like an old biddy. But he likes the book, which means that we can stay married. Hey, another thing to add to the marriage articles: Thou shalt like Nobody's Fool and "Sense and Sensibility."

Speaking of which, I just reread Persuasion because sometimes you just have to. It struck me (for the first time?) that this is the only Austen book in which you don't know the protagonist's dowry straight off. Fanny Price has nothing of course; the Bennet and Dashwood girls each have one thousand pounds, which is piddling; Georgianna Darcy and Emma Woodhouse each have thirty thousand pounds, which I expect would be the upper limit for the untitled gentry; part of the excess of Sense and Sensibility is that Miss Grey has fifty thousand, which is also the fantastic amount Elizabeth Bennet teases that Col. Fitzwilliam should require unless his older brother fell ill; I don't remember how much Catherine has. But how much has Anne Elliot, daughter of a baronet? Austen doesn't say until the last chapter, when we learn that of course her spendthrift father can give her but a fraction of the ten thousand which is her due. It was interesting to me that this important fact was left so late, but Austen's point is that Anne and Captain Wentworth are past all that thanks to Wentworth's success. His booty earns him an annual income of only a thousand pounds, which doesn't seem so grand, but that's Elinor Dashwood's wealth, so it's probably adequate.

Persuasion is so very satisfying. I love the changed 23rd chapter because it gives some sense of Mrs. Croft's delighted hope, in which her fluttering makes her satisfyingly reminiscent of Mrs. Gardiner's not so subtle voiced wonderings.

But it was Nobody's Fool I read this morning.

So I read and maybe dozed fitfully and didn't get up, if you don't count RDC's alarm going off at 7:00 and my sister calling at 8:15, until almost 9:30, when I finished the book (again). So I figured I had wasted the day. But I had not.

This is what I got done: two garbage bags of clothes, mostly RDC's, and one of shoes, also mostly RDC's, one flatbed scanner, one 5-disc CD player, three other electronic pieces whose identity I forget, one Brother Electronic typewriter (from 1986, a high school graduation present from my father), one box assorted household goods (a drill, various books, some pots and pans), and one pair extra-torture ski boots, are now in their new charitable homes. The clothes we thought fit to wear are about two-thirds what came out of RDC's wardrobe; the rest became rags or trash. He weeded! Even a Jerry Garcia design tie, which I think now maybe should have gone into a box of souvenir clothes.

When I added his retired tie-dyes to this box, I weeded out some of mine: I kept concert shirts for Joshua Tree and Unforgettable Fire (I am not made of stone), but I ditched my UConn Co-op staff shirt and one from the UConn Women's Center and another from the Ivoryton Playhouse. The latter two, being half polyester, I never ever wore, and the first I wore only at work. Breaking the crippling cycle of nostalgia, that's me.

First stop, get rid of all that. Second stop, Belcaro Paint, ejected from the Belcaro neighborhood by the invasion of Home Despot. I selected some paint strips for the water closet, the back landing, and my study. I actually bought paint for the water closet. Third, a supermarket where I further divested myself of Bag Lady status by turning in my bag of bags, and accepted the 9% fee to get rid of almost $30 in coins. Now only parking-meter silver is in the car ashtray and only foreign coins and tokens in the change basket on the dresser. Wheeee! And while at the regular supermarket, I bought (with the coin cash) exciting things like bleach that we don't get at the elitist food store.

Then I checked out a store called, apparently incorrectly, Scrap 'n' Stamp, which had only scrapbooking stuff but satisfied my curiosity. Besides, I am going to do something Different for my Yule card this year. Then Home Despot, where I remembered some things but not others, and Wild Oats, where I scored vegetable pulp and a picnic that I brought to Cranmer (Sundial Park). I did not score roasted salted bulk peanuts, also not available at Whole Foods, which probably means not available anywhere in town, which means I have to use their peanut grinder, which turns out product inferior in both texture and saltiness to that which I made on my own.

However, my picnic was delightful. Wild Oats commissary usually doesn't hold a candle to Whole Foods, which makes more of its ready-made stuff on-site, but it had a New Thing that was wicked good, Veggie Tortellini. Zucchini, green beans, spinach, and cheese tortellini, in a hot-diggety-dog garlicky pesto. I read Ms. (the best of the selection at Wild Oats, and it really could spin less like a top than it does) and ate and watched a chocolate Lab catch a Frisbee tossed repeatedly for it by someone not entirely one with the Pet Concept: she held a towel to pick up and throw the drippingly slobbery disk, which diminished her range considerably.

I stopped at the coffee shop to pick up grounds, as I had arranged in the morning, and a Brambleberry Tazo because the having been awake for 10 hours already was taking its toll. Blake and I read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them on the porch swing until yellowjackets harassed him (have parrots died of bee stings? Do parrots, free or cagedly captive, get stung? I should have asked the vet), whereupon we adjourned to the couch, and later downstairs to facilitate napping. Also because Franken was pissing me off with puerile hyperbole.

In the late afternoon I re-emerged to lay another lasagne mulch: vegetable pulp (I acquired at least three gallons grocery shopping last night, plus today's) and sunflower seed husks and coffee grounds and pine needles on top. Inside, I scored wallpaper with the wheely-bob tool. Blake was on my shoulder at his insistence, which I used as an excuse not to proceed with the wallpaper solvent but instead to call myself done for the day.

There are two instances of wallpaper in the house: in the furnace room and in the water closet. The [a] kitchen sink is original to the house, so I don't know why the waste pipe from the sink is external to the furnace room wall (the dishwasher drains to the sink so shouldn't have required new plumbing?). Probably because the basement wasn't finished when the house was built. Anyway, someone drywalled around the pipe, so we have a rectangular tube angling along and down the wall. Later, the earth cooled, and someone decided that a nice strip of wallpaper border with birdhouses on it would dress up the pipe attractively. Three and a half years ago, I saw that and resolved to remove it immediately. Today I did: it peeled right off. Maybe I shouldn't've peeled it, but I peel sunburned skin prematurely. That bleeds, and my hypothesis is that since the wall doesn't bleed, peeling wallpaper off it can't be nearly as harmful as premature sunburn peelage, which hasn't killed me yet. Though it has scarred me, and peeling this strip left some backing on the drywall. I will practice in there with the solvent and to prepare for the water closet.

Which is, as I've said, truly a water closet. One of the Before pictures I took this evening (too late, since a section had already come loose plus it was dark out) is of my foot on the wall opposite to the toilet (I took it while seated on the closed commode.) That's how big the room is: the length of a toilet plus a leg by slightly more than the width of a toilet, and its ceiling is lower than elsewhere in the basement. Hence water closet. Tomorrow I dissolve and scrape and dissolve paste and scrape and wash and rinse and wash and rinse and wait. After the wait, I patch whatever I have to patch, and sand.

Then paint.

Somewhere, I need to find a sign to hang on the door announcing a W.C. I would look for such a thing now but the day's major frustration is that the airport is acting up, denying me internet access. So I think I'll go cozy up with some peanut butter toast, Pantalaimon, Blake, and Al Franken, and call it a night.

getting more stuff done

Distressing Blake mightily, I spent the morning in the water closet removing stripey wallpaper. The nozzle of the bottle of solvent didn't work, so I squirted the gel onto the wide scraper and slathered it on the walls that way. The wallpaper came off easily, but most of the backing did not. Blake nearly had laryngitis from shrieking and whining (anyone want a cockatiel cheap?) when I broke at noon.

More coffee grounds. Home Depot again, for another bottle of solvent whose nozzle I tested, and heating register covers, but not ceramics glue. Bloodbath and Beyond for brackets and a curtain. When RDC and I recently examined the back landing, he picked up a curtain rod I freed from the sunroom almost two years ago and wondered why we had never thrown it out. Aha, it turns out that I kept it on purpose, not because it could be ignored behind the vacuum cleaner, because it would come in handy today: I hung a heavy curtain between the den and the laundry room. The doorway used to have--a door. I wouldn't have a door again, but the back of the basement doesn't need to be heated. This curtain might make the room cozier, blocking drafts and holding in the warmth from the space heater.

I had lunch from Einstein Bros. bagels with a book that I brought with me. There are several new nonfiction books that look really interesting, including one on the Bounty whose author is doing a reading Wednesday, but I didn't indulge. For now. Instead I indulged in dogs, an unusual terrier mix with a curly tail and unterrier snout, and more time with more pettable English mastiff named Greta. Her human and I talked for quite a while--he's lived in Hong Kong and traveled all over Asia and nearly bought a cattle ranch in Ecuador and made for a pleasant hour of stranger-chat.

While we sat chatting, lots of other passersby wanted to meet Greta. She obviously loved all the children she met. One little girl commented, "It looks like Fluffy!" Which she did, in shape of head, besides that she had only the one head and a brindle coat. Greta's human asked who Fluffy was, and I told him Fluffy was a Cerebus in the first Harry Potter book.
The girl's father contradicted, "That dog's name wasn't Fluffy."
The girl and I protested that yes, the three-headed dog was named Fluffy.
Now, it turned out (eventually), that the man was thinking of Hagrid's regular dog, Fang, who is a mastiff, and Greta did look more like Fang than Fluffy, being a one-headed mastiff not a three-headed CGI. I can't fault the girl for thinking of Fluffy first, since it has more page and screen presence than Fang. I can fault the father for insisting that the three-headed dog's name wasn't Fluffy.

After they left, I told Greta's human about a recent zoo trip. I was watching a resident, not captive, gopher, because it was little and cute and right at my feet, instead of over a moat, like the ruminant in front of whose enclosure I stood. A series of passersby asked what I was watching. "A gopher," I would say. The majority, spotting the animal, would reply, "Oh, a chipmunk!" In the Crested Butte newspaper I read a column by a park ranger who's been stationed all over the Rockies, on the frustration of not being believed when she answered certain questions ("How big do deer need to be before they're elk?"). Ah, the tribulations of being a know-it-all. It might have been a ground squirrel at the zoo, though the lines of spots among its solid stripes really do indicate gopherhood.

Anyway, I got home and attacked the water-closet for another three hours. The two drywall walls were relatively well-behaved, though (nooo!) the toilet has to come out to do the wall behind it properly. The exterior wall is plastered brick or cement block, and wallpaper does not come tidily off plaster. I'm not done scraping yet, but nearly.

When we first moved into the house, we saw many traces of the previous tenant. She told us that the one thing she never got around to doing was painting. As far as the main walls of the house were concerned, this was true. But she decorated quite a bit. The chute cover in the coal cellar is the most obvious example. On field of blue bordered in green, painted in red, are painted a flower, her nickname, and the word "Boogie," which might be her son's nickname. The saloon doors into the sunroom were the same primary red, as is the edge of the hardwood floor in the back landing, as is the frame of the window in the water closet. Stripping the wallpaper revealed another instance of tagging. Just to be clear, the W.C. had been painted white, then someone streaked it (as if cleaning off a brush) with a mix of the blue and green of the chute cover, and saw fit to tag it with her name in white. The coal cellar, home of off-season window parts, painting supplies, and beer carboys, is easily ignored. But I have got to get that toilet up so I can paint the room properly, because there is no way I'm putting up with that name over my shoulder every time I need that facility.

blue

Oh, fine. Last night RDC asked what I was doing that Blake couldn't help with. I was priming, and primer fumes are bad. Also I was up a ladder. But I wanted to surprise RDC when he gets home. I didn't tell him. So he decided I had jacked up the house and was replacing the lolly columns. "You guessed!" I protested.

Tonight I told him. I'm painting the back landing. A really nice pale blue. Behr, because it occurred to me to do this quite impulsively standing in the middle of Home Depot, "Ocean Air." I pray it's not at all a shade of violet, though it might be a paler indigo than a blue. (I have never understood indigo's role in the spectrum. Is it there because "Roy G. Bv" is not pronounceable?)

The main wall has behaved thus far. Lots of tack holes in the drywall, but only tack holes, and drywall not plaster. Patch, sand, okay fine. It's not a pristine stretch, but it's okay. I primed and put on a half coat with a brush, and today put on a thorough coat with a roller. The stepladder can only go along a diagonal on the landing, and I have to lean way over the top to get the far corner, but it's not scary.

The interesting, slightly scary bit is the other wall, around the corner. The staircase starts down along the main wall, turns left, and continues to the basement. So the side wall is 9 feet plus the descending staircase tall: I set up the extension ladder on either of the first two stairs. It's a perfectly stable situation, not too steep an angle, the ladder on a tread against a riser where it can't slip, but the height is enough to cause painful damage to some of my favorite parts.

At least it provided more satisfying scraping than the water closet. It had been primed part way up, and brown--I thought the brown of drywall--above that. But as I scrubbed with a stiff brush and TSP-substitute, the brown came off, showing green underneath. I have no idea what material that wall is made of. It feels like plastic under the scraper, under my nail, but it sounds like metal. It's part of the built-out closet in the bedroom. The main wall is regular drywall, so why is this... green plasticked metal? Will primer stick to it, and paint after that? Lots of green still shows through after one brush coat. It looked neglected before, and now it looks shoddy. I have until Sunday afternoon.

ushering in fall

Either I am getting better at it or I overestimated the time it's taken to do windows in the past. It took me three hours to remove the screens, bring up the storms, bring down the screens, wash all the storms and the outside sashes, and hang the storms. This time I had Windex Outdoors, which attaches to the hose and has settings for rinsing and washing, and a squeegee, and I had already washed the outside sashes of the living room windows. However, I had to maneuver the screens and storms around the fairly precarious beer-brewing set-up in the coal cellar. And it's not as if I've been doing weights to ease the job of hoisting three-foot-wide windows (three: bedroom, sunroom, and kitchen) up the stepladder without breaking either them or myself. But yea, that job is done, just in time for Standard Time.

Friday was also the first day of fall, temperature-wise, with a high of 55. That made the inevitable ricochet of water off the windows and onto me not excessively fun on the shaded north side of the house. Today was cooler, in the low 40s, and the plan was to dig out the vegetable garden. Tomatoes are still ripening, and there's not been a hard frost yet.

I did take up the squashes, discovering three more croquet-ball-sized pie pumpkins hiding under the bishop's weed and culling the bizarre larger pumpkin from its vine. I figured it was the Casper variety, since it was pale orange from the start, but it hasn't whitened yet. I'm not going to carve it this year (a first for me) but instead see if I can do something edible with it.

adventures in home-ownership

Wednesday I broke from scraping the watercloset because I had to do some particular reorganizing in the furnace room right immediately then and no later. This led to an observation: "RDC, there's a leak in the hot water heater."

There wasn't a single leak in the heater. There were several. So much for the hot water, on New Year's Eve, with a prime rib and oven-roasted potatoes and chocolate mousse and wine and champagne to serve and clean up after.

(It did mean that we went to the gym right on New Year's Day, though only to shower.)

The plumber arrived Friday morning, zounds, with a new heater. He told us a few unwelcome things:

When we moved into the house, RDC added a pipe to the hot water heater. A gasket meant to vent in case of...something...was placed at eye level, so the escaping steam would boil your face off. The pipe meant only your toes would come off. Home Depot suggested a certain metal pipe to RDC as more cost effective, but the first thing the plumber said was that code required copper.

Denver code also requires combustion air to the furnace. He looked greedily at the outside wall--the one whose masonry we just had repaired this summer. Instead RDC suggested the coal chute. Now we are vaguely "Brazil"ian and have six-inch aluminum pipe from the coal door, strapped to the ceiling of the coal cellar, piercing the wall between coal cellar and furnace room, and basically facilitating cold air in and warm air out. Also fresh air for safer and more efficient burning in the furnace and heater, if you're into that.

The defunct heater had sprung leaks because the water pressure, as coming in from the outside, was too high, was the third thing. So the plumber also installed a pressure-reducing valve. Which I suppose will reduce our consumption, which is good, though I noticed the difference in the shower and I haven't even washed my hair yet. Watering will take longer, which is not so good, especially since I have to be much, much more assiduous about the trees if they're to stand a chance, according to the tree-trimmers.

This fall I added a curtain to the doorway between the den and the laundry room, which made it cozier-looking and -feeling, but does just about nothing to combat a six-inch aperture in an otherwise not at all airtight house. We closed the door between laundry room and workroom--the door I meant at first sight to remove but then opened against a wall and forgot about for the past nearly four years except insofar as to hang laundry from it--and rolled towels against its sill, but still. We hung a tarp in the furnace room doorway too, but we need a weather-stripped door. Soon.

So that was Friday.

Today An Official Measurer from Home Depot appeared to calculate the kitchen. Blake was upset at not meeting the plumber yesterday and today did meet the measurer, who was charmed (of course), and chatted with Blake on his shoulder: "I don't know what you're saying but I see you've got a lot to say anyway." We talked about vents and cabinetry and deepening the north countertop and narrowing the south one and what to do about the lighting and so forth. On his way out, the measurer noticed the plethora of cards on the mantel and said, "Your friends certainly don't neglect you," which made me happy. He touched the tree softly--yeah, I liked him--and put on his shoes to go. Blake squawked with abandonment and I told the measurer that he likes to be told goodbye; the measurer did so readily, understanding that the little things are important.

Then I took down the tree. All the ornaments to the couch, to be dealt with last. Streamer-garland down, lights unwound, skirt unhooked. I got the tree outside, the needles swept and vacuumed from inside and the needles swept though not vacuumed from the porch. (The tree will become mulch, courtesy of the city.) I had a mess of boxes from shipping this year, so I reorganized everything, which was fun. (The measurer paused in his work to observe of the Fractured Proverbs magnets on the fridge, "very tidy, all lined up." Yes indeed: the subject phrases are right- and the predicates left-aligned making a neat part down the line.)

I went through the cards, cutting pictures from greetings to fit in an album and writing on their backs, tearing fronts (images for homemade cards or gift-tags) from backs (greetings and new addresses). Then I went through the albums, adding all the photographs from the past four years, since we went digital.

Meanwhile RDC was devising and rethinking the breakfast nook. There was much sitting in dining chairs side by side to determine length of bench and facing one another to decide that only one bench would fit (two facing would leave no knee space) and sitting on a length of board propped on crates in the sun room to decide how deep a seat should be. The woodworking book says 15", which is not comfy. Eighteen in more like it.

Anyway, the hot water's back. Blake's cage is dismantled in the dishwasher, laundry's in the clothes washer, and I need to get back into the watercloset with a bucket of warm water and TSP substitute cocktail. Whee.

backyard

I finally raked up the cherry leaves, though I have to do the whole lot again. Also I thoroughly cleared out the former gravel bed on the south side of the garage for a new vegetable bed. It was so warm that Blake came out and helped me.

another

Another before and after, thought this is a before and middling instead of middling and after.

The paint wants a second coat on the walls and trim, though I think that of the ceiling is okay, and the window wants scraping. It's a lot pinker than I planned, though I still like it, but it clashes with the adobe-hued floor. A rug would be nice, if I could find one to reduce instead of emphasize the clashing.

Another coat on the walls and trim, the window scraped, floor moulding, a new lightswitch and light fixture, a curtain and rug, and, of course, a new toilet, and then it will be done.

Oh, and a door. The door will be flat white, like the ceiling, unless I can find some eggshell white. (The arch between living and dining rooms is flat white, and I should get some eggshell white to do that, plus this door.) It's on sawhorses in the furnace room waiting for its next coat. And a sign for the outside of the door, a W.C. sign.

Three months for a room smaller than a closet (and it's not done yet). I am smokin'.

P.S. Tex said the wallpaper and curtain looked like they were out of "Leave It to Beaver."--21 January.

P.P.S. This morning I took my box of 96 Crayola crayons into the watercloset. The closest match to Benjamin Moore's 2005-50 "Pink Eraser"--which looked so attractive and reasonable on the swatch--is lavender (bottom row, eighth from the right). The W.C. is darker than Crayola's lavender, but that crayon matches the tone and hue if not the saturation. --22 January.

crown molding ledges

Today's acquisitions: one (1) new toilet, Eljer "Savoy" model, which name cracks me up--and the other model was "Patriot," which also cracked me up, one (1) toilet seat, one (1) wax seal, one (1) extra wax seal, and one (1) package of four (4) toilet shims; two (2) eight-foot lengths of pre-made molding for the watercloset; four (4) bulbs for the lamp in the den, 40 and 60 watts; several (x) painty appliances; and two (2) crown molding ledges that we hung, with frustration at the stupid mounting system but no snapping or swearing, in the dining room.

I asked Haitch once if the dining table was too big for the dining room. She hedged that it was the right size for a dining table. It seats six without its leaves, and there is no space in the room for a handy bar or sideboard. One corner has a six-foot corn plant, another presently has a fern (exiled from the sunroom for the interminable building of the breakfast nook), the third a door, and the fourth has the buddy cage on the buddy stand on the buddy rug.

So now we have two ledges. They don't hold anything really useful, like glasses and decanters, but they could as occasion demanded. Right now they hold pretties: a platter we were given for Yule, a plate RDC brought me from Ireland, the champagne glasses we had at our wedding, the bread plate I made at Color Me Mine, another plate friends brought us from Italy, and a copper plate with a Pacific Northwest-style orca hammered into it.

We weren't in the mood to deal with the toilet, which means we have to deal with it one of the next four evenings or have a houseguest with just the one.

kitchen plans

We are doing the kitchen. Packing its contents, removing the tile, getting rid of the dead downstairs fridge, bringing the working fridge down, setting up some small appliances downstairs in a temporary kitchen so also doing something about the utility sink so that it turns off without nine billion psi of wrist-wrenching pressure, removing the cabinetry, removing the countertops, repairing the walls, removing and hiding the dishwasher, disposing of the range and sink and insinkerator, buying and installing a hood, (paying someone for) installing new cabinetry and countertops, installing a range and sink and insinkerator, reinstalling the dishwasher, repairing the window, painting the walls, tiling between the countertops and cabinet bottoms, and possibly buying a new upstairs fridge. And doing something about the lighting.

We have a plan and the beginnings of a timeline; we have chosen cabinetry and countertops and hardware and wall color but not tile; and we have four months before it gets too hot to work inside.

Yesterday we chipped off the first three tiles just to see how it would go. Today I chipped off several more before dinner. While I cleaned up after dinner, Blake continued helping. I will remove tiles starting on the north wall with tools, and Blake will continue working on the south wall with his beak, and we will meet in the middle. I think "middle" will be "one tile east of Blake's starting point," but I appreciate his effort.

progress

I started packing the kitchen, just a little. The china, into a sturdy plastic crate with lots of poppy stuff; the cookie and cake stuff like the spritzer and cutters in the box the sander came in; and bundling stuff like milkshake glasses and my grandmother's sugar bowl and creamer into one cupboard for when I get more boxes and packing stuff.

RDC applied a last bit of joint compound in the stairwell; when it dries I can sand it all and finally prime and paint that.

We got a quote on the cabinetry installation and, with that, now know the basic major expenses. "Minor" expenses are the hardware for the cabinetry and the tiles for the backsplashes and any under-cabinet lighting.

I still haven't replaced the watercloset door or razored the window and the trim still needs another coat plus I got some color on the white ceiling, but nevertheless I feel like after a pause of many months--since the gardens went dormant for the season--we are finally making progress on the house again.

again with the progress

I sanded the front landing in a respirator and safety glasses, swept the walls once, hosed myself off (my eyelashes were white), puttered about for a while while more dust settled, swept the walls again without the respirator or glasses, hosed myself off (my nosehairs were white), read, then damp-mopped the surfaces, then scrubbed them with TSP-substitute.

Tomorrow morning, the first coat of primer.

Also, in my brilliance, I painted the outside of the watercloset door in semi-gloss and the inside in flat (not even eggshell) white. When I do the trim in the landing I'll gloss the door. Define it, you know. I did razor the window clean. And we replaced the toilet, seating the new one much more thoroughly so it doesn't wobble. I hope I never have to replace another toilet. The wax seal between toilet and waste pipe gets extremely nasty over time. The first layers come off on the scraper like fresh earwax, pliable and not overly gross, but the inner ones are like the big chunks of dried earwax that that mouthbreather in third grade always had, that he could make a Bernie Botts' Every Flavor Bean out of.

But it's done for this time, as of Tuesday night, and the current project is not repellent at all, and I am showered and shampooed and cuddled in fleece and making dinner and probably will finish She Is Me tonight.

one coat

I laughed at us after a couple of weeks in the house for having such unrealistic plans of painting both the study and the bedroom in one weekend, our first. Nevertheless I somehow still had the idea I could put two coats of primer in the landing today. RDC disillusioned me of that because primer needs 24 hours between coats. Nevertheless I didn't expect it to take me over three hours to do a 3'x7'x9' space with one doorway and one window. The stairs made for more reaching, and the banisters made one length difficult to reach.

The trim, of course, will need a zillion more coats. Not even the raw wood of the new floor mouldings need as much primer as the damn gunmetal gray of the window and door mouldings. But this does mark the end of the gray, hooray.

sparkle

For the past several days the floor lamp in the den has flickered. Occasionally. Somewhat. Was it the new bulbs? If we abandon the pretext of additional nontelevision entertainment, we turn off the floor lamp and on the Anglepoise* clamped to the bookcases on the back wall, because the den must have some light even when we're just watching television because Blake is afraid of the dark. Except the Anglepoise flickered too. It's allowed to die--my mother gave it to me when I graduated from high school in 1986--but it's not as if lamps have a hard life.

* I don't know what this sort of lamp is called in the States. In Possession, it's an Anglepoise.

To avoid the Scary Darkness, I usually turn on the glary overheads with the switch at the top of the stairs, descend, light the floor lamp, and douse the overheads with the switch at the bottom. Tonight for the first time in a while, because it was still light when I spelunked with cockatiel, cockatiel tray, laptop, and decoy book, I didn't bother with the overheads but turned on the lamp and then plugged in my iBook. Flicker fade flicker fade fade fade.

Aha. So I decided it was that outlet. Except both lamps flicker when you plug anything--even a cord without a laptop at the other end--into any of the three outlets on that wall. The circuitry dance commenced.

Now. The den is at the front of the house, downstairs. The bedroom is at the back of the house, upstairs, and the bathroom is next to it. The circuit that controls four of the five outlets in the den (there might be a fifth behind bookcases) and two (but not a third) in my study, but not the overheads, is also the one for the bathroom (all) and the bedroom (overheads and two outlets but not a third). So we can't keep the circuit turned off, but there might be...arcing (for clarity's sake, that should be "arcking," like picnicking and singeing, n'est-ce pas?). That's bad. And difficult to diagnose. And probably requires a certified electrician to fix.

Also we've been trying to figure out how to install a