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 hood in the kitchen. There's not a spare circuit in the junction box. Is that what I mean? what used to be called a fusebox? The range, being gas, doesn't need its own dedicated circuit. Maybe the hood doesn't either. That's just the electricity. Construction-wise...the hood will require cutting out a square of lathe and plaster, nailing 2x6s between the studs, drywalling a patch on, and screwing the hood into the 2x6s.

Also, the walls under the tiles are a fusion of glue and crumbling plaster and backing material and I don't know what else. So now we're hypothesizing granite up the walls for a backsplash, instead of tiles.

And the kitchen might be the lesser of the current house worries.

What have we got ourselves into?

spring

Now that's a day. It's spring, though it will be winter again before summer. I cut down last year's growth in the front garden, raked out leaves and spiny shrubbery, peeled back groundcloth, scratched Yum-Yum Mix into the soil around each plant, and remulched. It's lovely and green and refreshed now. I cut down the peony skeletons, moved a winter's worth of compost into the vegetable garden, shoved all the front garden debris into the newly empty compost bin, and watered the cherry tree. Also I did what I should have done from the vegetable garden's first winter: covered it with landscaping cloth. It's black and water-permeable, less conspicuous and better for the soil than the blue plastic tarp I have previously used. And the air was clear and warm enough for the sheets to dry in only an afternoon, instead of needing to be halfway machine-dried and then line-dried for a full day only to smell more like city than like sun.

Tonight I am going to choose plants to finish the north front garden and figure out how to fill in the north side of the house.

kitchen

(It helps to know that we emptied the kitchen the last weekend in February: appliances, counters, cabinets, all out. The room was empty for a day, and is now full of ladder and shop vac and various tools and bits of lumber.)

I emptied the two kitchen closets, bringing some stuff, like trail mix and the popcorn popper, downstairs to the temporary batterie de cuisine, and stacking most things in the sunroom to keep the dishwasher company. We need to get acrylic sealer for the shelves, which are removable for only one closet. The other will be a cramped job.

RDC cracked the window removing it from its frame Saturday, so today I brought it and another window, broken in other circumstances, to the...window fixing place. He will finish replacing the window framing on Wednesday.

This is a large-item pick-up week, so I brought out the countertops, but ony the countertops. RDC has to cut down the old cupboards with the Sawzall to make the debris more compact for either large-item or regular trash pick-up. And I still haven't called the city about the appliances, and when we're done with this we'll probably have enough paint cans to warrant a hazardous materials pick-up as well. The environment lurvs us.

The cabinet people say that the cabinets can be hung over the holes, since they are nibbles mostly, rather than canyons, so we can perhaps begin to paint this weekend. Or at least prime, if we can patch the hole from the fan in the ceiling and spackle the usual dents. And we have an installation date for the cabinets, yippee!

another weekend o' productivity

Even if I've said this, it bears repeating that when I say "we," I generally mean the opposite of the royal we. I mean that RDC did it. That doesn't mean I don't do anything, though.

We rewired the kitchen to distribute the amperage more safely and sensibly, added a junction box in the attic to be wired eventually to another circuit in the breaker box, drywalled over holes we'd cut for the wiring and supports for the hood, patched the ceiling, decided to forego the track lighting for now because it was complicated enough to be affecting the timeline; swapped out the kitchen storm for the screen, emptied RDC's closet for attic access and rehung everything, primed both sides of the shelves--tricky because they're all slatted and prone to beading, not to mention requiring scraping and razoring of all the previous beading--and one side of the doors, swept out the kitchen (once), tidied up my study and the laundry room and the garage and the furnace room, did a lot of laundry, scrubbed the buddy cage, knocked together a couple of shelves to use my study closet space more effectively, read 90 pages of The Stone Raft (the dog showed up! its name hasn't been decided yet, either Faithful or Pilot), and listened to several hours of War and Peace. I did the things after the semi-colon. And we both went to Mezcal, a new restaurant! a good one! with atmosphere, and not nearly as low-rent as most of the stuff on our stretch of Colfax (such as the adult bookstore and arcade across the street)! that I like! that was hopping! and walked by a new, Climbing Tree be praised, bookstore; and we saw that a yoga studio is slated to open next to Witz coffee shop; and we watched "Holes."

Also I took two "West Side Story" breaks, half yesterday and half today, because Blake cannot help in the kitchen or with primer and was feeling quite neglected. The instant I sat back on my heels to gauge books on the bookshelf, he scrabbled from my shoulder to under my chin, clearly requesting snuggling and attention. This evening after his supper and some playing in his box, he returned to the under-chin spot and tucked immediately.

RDC's new headphones are amazing. I tried them once, and the sound quality was great, plus I heard no external noise at all. I saw RDC's mouth moving but heard not a damn thing besides Susan Tedeschi so assumed he was gaslighting me. He waved a bandana in front of Blake, who of course yelled, and then I believed. I could not use my iPod while scrubbing the cage so instead played "West Side Story," loudly, over the washing machine between me and the den and the jigsaw in the kitchen. RDC came downstairs after one tool or another while I jigged from here to there doing this and that. "What are you dancing to?" he asked, loudly over Robert Randolph or Moe or Umphrey's McGee or whatever he was listening to--all he could see was me prancing without aid of headphones. "The dance at the gym!" I replied, probably meaninglessly to him who, sadly, is not a "West Side Story" fan.

kitchen

I scrubbed the pantries and the walls and trim around them. The water that started out bright green with TSP substitue wound up gray with the grease of years. Also the paint on the trim of the sunroom doorway came off under the brush, because whatever genius painted the entire upstairs gunmetal gray did so straight over glossy.

Also I painted one side of the removable shelves in semi-gloss. Blake had had a hard day, frustrated by being alone in the living room with the music while RDC cruelly worked in the kitchen. Also lots of the tracks were recorded live, the cheers and whistles and applause in which always churn Blake's blood. So he didn't stop yelling until I had finished scrubbing and showering and took him on my shoulder while I painted in the back of the den. Of course he wanted to help me paint, which really he can't do, so he had to yell some more. I emptied a bookshelf and put his box on it, which helped somewhat.

priming

Tuesday I scrubbed the east wall and the two closets, and this evening I primed the wall and the more complicated pantry, the one without removable shelves. A previous occupant nailed shelves in place, about a third of the depth of the 18-inch closet. This leaves very little space for someone to maneuver. I should have clipped my ponytail to my scalp and worn a bandana over that, but I'm almost 36 so don't mind the occasional white hair. It's really difficult to scrub primer off knuckles, especially chapped ones. So whatever, I'm leaving it.

Blake was mostly well-behaved, sad but resigned. I got home from work and the daily Home Despot run before 5 and didn't finish until 8:30--the kitchen is the only way I'll ever listen to War and Peace--and he kept me company in the kitchen in his cage, eating his dinner and preening and settling into his fugue state on one foot until nearly the end, when he yelled his boredom and frustration.

No more bored than I was. Good grief. Two-inch, four-inch, and twelve-inch (in an alcove on the left) shelves, some made of unfinished wood, all of which but the bottom with a visible underside. I kept seeing bits I had forgotten, and getting primer on me from all sides as I spiraled down the closet.

Ptooey, what a chore.

floors

Somewhere in there we decided to refinish the kitchen floor. Thursday, besides coddling Blake, we sanded the floor with three different types of sander and three different grades of paper, sweeping and vacuuming and dusting after each step. (The family went to the Museum of Nature and Science.) Today we varnished it, and tonight we will tape resin paper to protect the surface during cabinet installation (tomorrow and maybe Tuesday), counter template-measuring, counter-installation, and appliance installation.

cabinets

The cabinets are in! They are gorgeous, of course. CabinetDude had installed most of them by the time I got home Monday but then realized everything on the north wall was 1.5" to the left of where it ought to be. He could move the two floor cabinets by himself but he needed his assistant to move the wall ones, so he finished up yesterday, moving the upper ones and installing the crown mouldings. The toe-kicks will wait until we finish the floors.

I opened them pet them and pulled open their drawers and yeah, it was well-nigh sexual.

They are so pretty. They have umpteen shelves, all adjustable, and I think several of the shelf boards will live in a remote upper cabinet because we need three, not four, shelves. One thing is now that we have tingle-worthy full-depth drawers instead of shelves in the lower cabinets, instead of only a half-shelf, there is no space tall enough for the three-gallon stockpot. Woe is me.

They are so pretty. They throw into sharp relief just how ugly the walls around them are, and not just the walls scarred from chipped-off tile but the main dingy gray ones too.

We should have painted the ceiling (and the walls) before they were installed. We can still paint the walls, carefully, but painting the ceiling over the cabinets to the point you cannot see any old ceiling paint behind the crown mouldings is going to be tricky.

The counter people measure today.

metamorphosis

I researched trees apt to this climate and compared them to what Denver Digs Trees was offering. This morning, faint with post-dream headache and armed with Pride and Prejudice to distract and soothe me in inevitable lines and between dogs (I met a Viszla named Ruby and a golden retriever named Tahoe), I bought a three-year-old (or older) hedge maple.

I dug a lovely hole as deep and twice as wide as the rootball. I broke up all the clods, sifted out stones, added some but not very much compost according to current advice, placed the tree, filled the hole, constructed a soil ring, watered and refilled the hole, and redistributed mulch. There. It wants more water than anything else in the front yard, but it's a tree. A tree resistant to disease, air pollution, insect infiltration, and drought; slow-enough growing to be less prone to blizzard damage; and a maple reportedly likely to grow interesting branches, so possibly eventually another Climbing Tree.

Its name is Gregor Samsa because I expect great changes from it.

winter crop

Last fall I planted layers of sunflower seed husks, vegetable pulp, pine needles, and coffee grounds. This weekend I harvested a lovely crop of compost. Some needles remained, but mostly I pitchforked only lovely moist dark crumbly loam into the wheelbarrow to feed Gregor Samsa and add to the soon-to-be new vegetable bed.

Also I pitchforked ants, whom I should probably thank for their work over the winter. The lasagne was alive with black ants. I found out this weekend at the Wild Bird Center when I picked up fourscore pounds of sunflower seeds that flickers can, in nesting season, eat 5,000 ants a day. So don't use ant spray.

And worms! I don't remember, when we rototilled the south garden and south fence two years ago, this many worms (except for that one garter-snake-sized one I named Arrakis). Probably because rototilling kills them. Though I didn't amend the front gardens much, because all the plants I chose I did so deliberately because they thrive best in lean soils, there are worms aplenty in its soil now. I expect that, even unamended, soil under groundcloth and mulch stays moister than soil under dead thatched grass. I hope.

virginia creeper

Our fence is covered in what everyone calls, and what might be, Virginia creeper. I like it because it's green and grows on its own and the fence isn't gorgeous, but the fence really needs to be stained or replaced or somethinged. So this weekend I ripped it all out. I meant to take a photograph of the pile of vines and of the tree-grade root structures; I didn't but they were both big and complicated and yowza. The short stretch of fence between garage and gate is in simple dirt, and that's where I got the roots; but along the rest of the back property line I have been piling all the rocks and gravel I find on the rest of the lot. This has certainly suppressed creeper and weeds, but it makes digging out the roots hard.

The next step is to talk to the spook neighbors. I say "spook" because of The Human Stain; I wouldn't say it if they were black. Which is contrary to Philip Roth's point. Oops. They seem not to exist, so getting permission to stand in their back yard and swab at my fence might be tricky.

We did brace the fence. An elm growing right on the property line broke out the curb between the lot and the alley, and is now pushing the fence into the yard. We cut out a low branch, straightened the fence as much as we could push it, and nailed a diagonal brace into place. The fence is upright and sturdier, but still needs the protection new stain will give it.

I am going to play Tom Sawyer. I am not looking to trade staining time for a dead rat with a string to swing it on, only to think of this job as play instead of work.

yet more virginia creeper

Considering size of the roots I prized out of the ground along the north bit of fence compared to the amount of vines, I know scads of tree-like roots must support the creeper along the main length of fence. Today I looked for them. This meant shoving aside all the stones and logs and bricks I have thrown in the long dead space between raised vegetable bed and fence over four years, and scrabbling in the corner through the slowly decomposing three-year-old clods from digging out "lawn," and on the short side of the bed shifting a faster decomposing two-year-old supply of pine needles from one side of its unshiftable tarp to another, to pull out and hack through various infestations of creeper and root.

I wasn't as successful using the pickaxe as a crowbar as RDC was. Maybe because of our strength differential, but also possibly because I had much less space to work in without hacking out the fence or attacking needle-compost or sinking the pickaxe into gravel. Excuses excuses.

My entire front, t-shirt, skirt, and legs, as well as my arms, was covered with dirt and mud. RDC asked if I fell. When I told him I was weeding, he asked, "With your shins?" But I was propping up the tarp of needles to get at branches and roots underneath.

I disinterred lots more worms and dug them new holes in the garden. Maybe I was scared of my soil when I first explored this house, but I prefer to think that I have made a more friendly environment for Lowly and Arrakis and their pals.

There aren't many worms in literature as namesakes. Who else besides Richard Scarry and Frank Herbert can I name my worms for? Does the Worm in James and the Giant Peach have a name? I think all those critters are just called by their species.

Also I took up the grouncloth from half the north side of the house. I need to place a plastic border along the property boundary to keep the neighbors' grass and weeds from infiltrating my soon-to-be bishop's weed bed. I might take up all the groundcloth and plant the bishop's weed in the way back and then take cuttings from the maniacal Nepeta x faassenii to fill in the front. That plant seems to scoff so at injury, and the front gets at least some sunlight in high summer, that I would gamble cuttings would would do fine there. Nepeta is the sourdough bread of my garden.

I am looking forward to planting my new plants. The other task of my weekend, staining the fence, not so much.

may to-do list

House:

mowing

Enough cherry sprouts had got big enough that they'd be easy to spot to clip by hand, but that entire section of yard was a foot tall so I weedwhacked most of it, clipping only some things like the weeds that look like monster dandelions on trunks of pure water and the cherry sprouts among the bishop's weed and carefully around the johnny-jump-ups.

If only somewhat better, the yard now looked shorter, and I looked at the other half. I prefer long grass, but maybe it had strong enough roots to be cut. This summer my primary task is Bindweed Vigilence. With kitchen drama this year, I didn't replace the grass, and buffalo grass is supposed to resist weeds once it's established. Fewer weeds in its soil will improve that resistance, and shorter grass means I can spot bindweed easier.

I had already raked the grass clear of everything I ripped out of the beds. Now I raked it twice, first with a leaf rake, and second a with a bow rake to comb the grass all in one direction. And then I mowed, such a pleasing rolling snicker-snick sound, first this way and then that. Either we don't have the right or enough grass or a reel mower cuts the blades differently or what I actually like is the smell of gas, because I didn't get that fresh-mown grass smell that I love, but it smelled pretty good. Even though much of it is four inches or taller, the lawn looks tidy and not bald: it's only May and the dead spots aren't yet in evidence.

I had previously read that cuts made by reel mowers heal faster than those made by power blades. This site's explanation is amusing: it says the reel mower was invented in 1830 and has been proven by over 200 years of worldwide use. What year is it again?

gardens

I planted 20 baby bishop's weed along the north side of the house, toward the front. The space needs another 30, say, but will have to wait until next year except for some gingerly transplanted attempts from the back. I dug big holes for each tiny plant to surround them with loosened soil, but I might have been too hasty. Last year I planted the vinca six hours after four inches of snow fell only because I was leaving the country the next day; this year I hope the bishop's weed will thrive as well being planted the day after a two-inch snowfall. But the vinca went into the unamended easement while the bishop's weed went into thoroughly compacted garden fill. The difference in the soil, dry under the eaves and soaking five feet out, was marked.

The north front garden should have enough plants in it now except for its slope, which remains barren. I planted three each of Centranthus ruber 'Coccineus' Jupiter's beard, Salvia farinacea Texas violet, and Salvia chamaedryoides germander sage. Shockingly, the first has red flowers, not blue or lavender.

As have the three Aquilegia formosa, red spur columbine, that I planted along the south fence. I hope they're hardy little plants that can beat up that daisy thing that is colonizing the back yard.

My thinking on weeds has changed somewhat. They used to be bits that grew on their own without care or water, and that was good. Now they take water from my deliberate plantings and prevent them getting established. That monster dandelion thing's stem is more a succulent trunk packed full of water. And I don't compost hot enough to kill their seeds--and I'm convinced some most weeds propagate from any smallest part, seed root or leaf--so all that water can't go into compost.

A few beans and and lots of spinach are coming up in the east vegetable bed, but no carrots yet. The south front garden is thriving, except for the Achillea ageratifolia Greek yarrow, which might only look scraggly, and one Penstemon pinofolius. The peony looks 11 months pregnant with octuplets.

I bought a two-gallon container of Caryopteris Blue Mist Bluebeard, whose name I just learned yesterday. Several form the beginning of a hedge along Dot Org's western boundary, and I admired them all last summer. No one knew its name, including one man who said very definitely that it was butterfly bush--despite its flowers having neither the right shape nor color. High Country Gardens sells the genus, I now know, and I had flagged its species for later, but the varieties it sells didn't bear enough resemblance to what I sought for me to connect them. Yesterday in Home Depot, where I did not find more of the round pavers I need for a path around the north corner through the bishop's weed to the spigot, I did find a well-established plant with a name and snatched it up. I haven't given up on the Cytisus purgans Spanish gold hardy broom against the porch, so I didn't put it there. I'll put it between the hedge maple (whose leaf buds still haven't opened--when do I decide it didn't make it?) and the pear, since that space is lonely without the piñon.

There is still so much to do: I long for tulips, but would they look out of place in an otherwise dry garden? I have to do something under the nectarine and pear, but whatever happens there has to be tough enough to withstand traffic under birdfeeders. I am leaving the porch bits empty for now, hoping the Cytisus purgans takes off and the Artemisia x 'Powis Castle' silver sage grows into its potential. I have to divide the catmint again, but I think it's divide and compost because if I divide and plant the divisions, it will divide and conquer the entire lot. It's like sourdough bread, always more proof. I love the wall one neighbor built and should have done the same before I planted the south side--I didn't because RDC worried about holding more water against the house. Building a wall now would mean sacrificing or at least risking the south slope's beautiful speedwell and stork's-bill and snow-in-summer. It's why I didn't plant the north slope this time. The north easement needs vinca too, and I'll take cuttings for it from the south side, which is doing very well, later this month.

I mostly know what I have to do; I just have to plan my projects. Next up to to scrub and seal the fence. Replacing the lawn will wait for next year. Maybe then I'll build walls--a reason not to plant the north easement this season, since that's where tons of bricks would be delivered. Eventually I must relay the patio, which is uneven and lacks, I suspect, landscaping cloth underneath it, and the walk, which is more chicory than brick.

new vegetable frame

The length of board we can lash to Cassidy, not the length of the space available, determined the length of the new vegetable bed. So it's 12 feet long, not 14. It's 44 inches wide, not 48, because of a sprinkler head that won't retract--why I don't just bust the heads I couldn't say, since I buried the system controls when I filled the north side in last year. And ha, my first instinct was right and I need 1.6 cubic yards of garden soil (no, I don't remember how I calculated it last time, only that I did it nine different ways of wrong first).

I figure dirt isn't sold by the fraction. I wish I had cooked enough compost to need only the one, because I'm not sure where I can tuck the spare 10 cubic feet of dirt. I did buy big pots for annuals on the porch columns, and I'll plant another squirrel climbing tree in the shape of a cherry tomato in a patio pot, but otherwise I think it will live in a heap in that triangle between frame and fence until I build up the front slopes into retaining walls maybe next year.

All the old cabinetry is gone except the drawers and doors, which have been on that bit of ground and are now within the frame doing their job as weed suppressants. By the time the next large-item pick-up week happens, that frame will be filled with dirt and seeds.

I wonder how long it will take for all the bindweed rearing ugly, hydra heads under all that particle board to grow through another foot of dirt.

hood

The hood is up. It is not wired or vented, but it is on the wall, fitting exactly between wall cabinets exactly as it's meant to. Also it is no longer on the living room floor.

I am not unpacking more kitchen because we are going to remove cabinet doors before to paint walls, and let us not dwell on the painting drama, and anything not behind a door will get dusty. But we can walk through the kitchen and use its sink and the dishwasher and if I finished painting their doors we could put stuff back into the pantries.

I was kinda thinking of having one utter Unveiling but no more. Two months is fucking long enough to wait. I will use each bit of kitchen as it becomes functional.

premature but welcome

Last night instead of, oh, painting doors and pantries, which really needs to be done, I (the dishwasher) washed and (I) put away a lot of kitchen stuff. I had thought this lack of kitchen was kind of okay, except I was sick of take-out and eating out, and washing dishes in a small bathroom sink is no fun. But I am so happy to stack up boxes and fill one big box with all the bubblewrap and papertowels and styrofoam bits I have used. (A friend of mine who's moving will appreciate them, I'm sure.)

I have hardly come to the last arrangement of things in cupboards. For now I'm enjoying having five shelves instead of three per cupboard, but I think at least one shelf will come out so I have enough vertical space for champagne glasses. And I am so glad we didn't get glass-fronted cabinets. I want to look at my cabinetry and counters but I am not so in love with my stoneware that I want it on display.

So that's what I did while RDC paid bills and Blake rocked out (he likes "Won't Get Fooled Again" but not "My Generation"). While RDC grilled yummy choppage of lamb, I planted my new Caryopteris [species?] and watered all my newlings and weeded scads of bindweed away from the rose bush I mostly ignore and the red-leafed shrub whose name I have no guess of.

I think for now I will fill in the remaining ex-pine area with catmint. I know it transplants well and I won't be sad to rip it out later. Except that I will be sad to have a yard full of catmint. Perhaps I'll see if cuttings of sage and agastache and lavender, all of which I like better, would thrive.

Or lamb's-ear. My neighbor has scads of it and has often offered it.

I love my garden.

gardening of an evening

Yesterday I watered the cherry and painted the doors one thorough coat, and I think that's all I did. Plus some playing in the kitchen. Today I watered the hell out of the raspberries. Also I cleared around the olive stump, which has been overgrown with bindweed and the two other, unidentified, main weeds since I ripped out the grass around it trying for for morning glory a couple of years ago--despite the thick of pine needles I naively thought would suppress other growth. I raked with the fork and dug out some of the not-clovery tree roots, and then pegged landscaping cloth all around it with flagstone over it until I get more chipped bark mulch.

I did the same on three sides of the new vegetable bed, which will be crawling with water- and nutrient-hogging weeds in a day or two. I swept the walk, out of which I cannot keep sand and weeds especially with the low spot right near the olive.

We ate off the grill at the patio table watching the birds attack the newly weeded old vegetable garden. One cock house sparrow took a dirt bath while another tugged out baby spinach leaves, the little fucker. Others feasted on the bugs in the newly turned soil. A flicker turned up after scoping the area more carefully than the sparrows and finches had. It went after bugs (I hope), flicking bits it didn't want to either side, for all the world like Blake eating his buddy chow, disdainfully flinging green beans.

Meanwhile, Blake himself was devouring enormous amounts of spinach. We had a pile for our burgers and he ate his way steadily through all of it, shredding it merrily while managing to get quite a bit down his gullet. We watched his wing muscles bulge out just moments later.

oof

Using unconscionable amounts of water, I blasted one length of the fence with a powerwasher. The ricocheting spray was not water-colored or even brown with dirt but black with city filth, hooray. I think the fence had never been treated at all. That was Saturday. Sunday I stained that whole length. I did two sections--a section being the stretch of slats between posts, whatever the technical term is--a cappela and bored out of my skull. I broke for lunch and did the remaining five sections with my iPod attached to speakers, much happier. And stained and sticky. When I prime or paint or stain, I am like a three-year-old with an ice-cream cone. It's a full-body experience.

Also this weekend I was RDC's gofer in the saga of Venting and Wiring the Hood. He cut a hole through the ceiling for the chimney, and an eight-inch crack opened out from the circle. Yea. So that has to be pasted up. Then the work in the attic began, which means emptying RDC's closet and kneeling carefully in dust and fiberglass insulation and cutting other holes and installing supports between joists and detaching the chimney from the previous, pointless ceiling fan and routing the hood's ducts to it and wireclippers and cowhide gloves sliced by jagged ends of galvanized pipe and of course, duct tape. After that the wiring and the thinking that the hood had a short and would need to be unmounted returned and haggled over and a new one remounted and then the big brain getting to work and the process of elimination and finally the discovering of a tiny nick in one wire right here and finally, whoosh suck whoosh, the hood working.

I am at least 15 pages behind in Ulysses and won't catch up until Tuesday at least, because Monday two cubic yards of planter's mix arrives and I am going to get in touch with my inner Stanley again. I wonder if I will be able to walk Tuesday.

tired

The dirt was supposed to arrive between 3 and 5 o'clock. At 5:30 I decided fine, I would paint pantries and doors. Four minutes later the dirt arrived.

Three years ago, half again as much dirt took over twice as long. I had the driver dump it behind the garage on the concrete ramp, even though I had realized the person-door was too narrow for the wheelbarrow. So I had to shove every barrowful up a steep, improvised ramp from alley to yard. This time I lay a huge tarp immediately in front of the gate and had the truck dump it there. My plank wasn't a ramp but level from yard to ribs of the heap, and by the time I reduced the heap, I just left the wheelbarrow in the doorway and shoveled up and into it. So it was much faster.

I thought I was going to have a lot left over for the two column pots and the patio pot and maybe some other planters. There's some spare, but not much. It's after Mother's Day, so I wonder if any annuals remain for purchase anywhere in town anyway.

creeper and fence

All of this lovely Virginia creeper I have destroyed this spring. I have no pictures yet of my progress in staining the fence. The length I finished looks much better than the undone parts, but next time I'm getting clear rather than cedar stain.

And these are my kinds of jobs. Using the powerwasher was fun: water, immediate results, and cleaning, as if I took a massive Bioré strip to the fence. Staining the fence was sloppy and goopy and brushing on a substance that is entirely more forgiving than paint. Shoveling dirt works too, at least in today's quantity: enough to be satisfying, not so much to be crippling, with a definite result, requiring only strength and determindedness and with enough of the latter not needing so much of the former.

I wonder how much creeper will have grown back by the time the fence needs its next treatment.

even more progress

Friday RDC wired the under-cabinet lighting and some of the outlets. Today we selected a refrigerator and I think decided on tile too. I painted the bit of wall behind the fridge, a shoddy job but behind the fridge, and again how I wish we had had the time to repair and paint the walls before the cabinets and counters and appliances, and finally finished the insides of the closets. Tonight I was supposed to have put another coat on the doors--oops.

Our range is in Denver. Supposedly. Somewhere. Our fridge is scheduled to arrive Tuesday. If the appliances arrive, the kitchen will be wholly functional and only cosmetic treatment--well, tile is structural too--will remain.

Hoo yah.

another spring evening

I set up the soaker hoses in the two box beds and planted more spinach and carrots in some bare areas. Blake got to eat some of the first baby spinach. I weed-whacked the jungle under the cherry tree and mowed the grassesque again and wondered whether Round-Up will be able to kill everything for hopefully next spring's grass replacement. By the time I planted cilantro in a small container, Blake had left off chattering and began to yell--because he can't eat cilantro so finds it pointless and boring, I decided. But before that, as I knelt in the south garden weeding, Blake and I were having our usual conversation: "You're a good boy buddy" with my usual response, "Yes you are a good boy buddy. Blake is a pretty bird." (I always reinforce "Blake is a pretty bird," because he has pretty much stopped saying it, though he mumbles or whistles it sometimes.)

Eventually from his side of the fence I heard my neighbor's voice: "Who are you talking to over there?"

"My bird. Can't you hear him chattering on the patio?"

"I hear a lot of birds." He put his head over the top of the fence.

"Yes, but Blake is the only one trying to speak English." I brought the cage over, held it up, and encouraged Blake to call Neighbor a good boy, buddy. This he did not do, but he did make his sweet little greeting chuck. I interpreted. Neighbor chucked back to Blake. Blake bowed.

I would be extremely glad to know that Neighbor is usually that unaware of Blake. I'm afraid that must be impossible, though, because Blake can shriek plaster from the ceiling in the interminable time I cruelly allow to elapse between his spotting me, from his post by the window, to when I get my bike put away and my bike shoes off at the back of the house and my body arriving at his door at the front of the house.

Recently I borrowed another neighbor's basset hound, not because particularly because he's a basset hound but because he is old and gentle and slow. I brought him into the house on his little pulley leash, and it's a damn good thing Blake can flutter and the hound is as slow as he is, because I didn't know how to work the leash. The dog pulled, and the leash released, and Blake fled as well as he could, while I bodily blocked the hound and got a slight friction burn on my palms from grabbing the cord instead of the handle. The dog was a lot more interested in Blake than Blake was in the dog, and whether that interest was gustatory or not, it was still expressed far too rambunctiously for Blake's safety.

So that didn't go well.

I'm damn glad I didn't try that little experiment with this next-door neighbor's dog--he's a Boxer-Lab cross and strong as a mule. And sweet as a burro, if you're big enough to withstand his affection.

a done bit

OMFB, the hood, with not exactly a parallel before shot to the left. Click to embiggen.

It's grouted (in the picture it's not) and gorgeous (in the picture it is). Yes, on the right you can see where RDC didn't cut a porcelain tile quite short enough and stuck it on the wall leaving not enough room for the granite tile above it so that he had to cut a sliver off the rightmost granite. To that I say, damn good thing the range has a high stainless steel back, and there will be no more tiling one wall in more than one session. Also, I say sssh. Imperceptible, right? The grease pencil lines we will scrub away.

I tried working with the trowel and thinset. It didn't go so well. RDC has noticed this time and again when I prime or paint or stain. With thinset, my usual method--seemingly to immerse myself in the liquid and then squirm all over the surface until it's covered--is even more problematic.

Instead I left him to grouting and took a branch from the cherry tree, covered with bugs or larvae, to the Botanic Gardens so the Guy Who Identifies Stuff could see it (he's not in until Tuesday). The shoots around the trunk have always had these masses on the undersides of their leaves, but now it's up the main trunk. Last year the tree apparently was quite stressed by drought and I don't know if that has made it more susceptible to infestation now. I dropped off the buggy twig and wandered around, blissing out on plants, falling in love with Pinus bungeana or lacebark pine.

When we first visited the Botanic Gardens, I remember that the xeriscape bits didn't impress me. It took me a while to find the beauty in silvery-gray foliage and smaller flowers. Silly me.

productive evening

How I do love long summer evenings.

On the way home I fetched DWJ's photographs*, returned the four children's books I borrowed Thursday, and picked up a bag of grounds from Starbucks. At home I changed, packed the car full of cardboard, and set off again. To Tri-R, to drop off what was maybe only half the cardboard but a lot of volume (the remainder is flat and maybe too wide to fit in Cassidy, the cabinets' boxes), plastic bags, and phone books; to Home Despot, for pavers and an additional trellis; and to City Floral, for ladybugs. Home again, RDC and I walked down to Heidi's for sandwiches.

* Talking with DWJ awhile ago, I spoke fondly of Rocky. DWJ is more RDC's friend than mine and I had not spoken to him since Rocky's death. I mentioned I had pictures of Percy and Rocky together, of Percy singing to Rocky (see? not all cockatiels are afraid of all dogs, you coward, Blake), and DWJ said that when he visits he would like to see them. Three minutes after I handed the phone to RDC, I had the negatives in my paw. So he can not only see but own them.

I moved the five round brickish pavers to the back, stepping stones between the brick walkway and the compost bin, and laid the new, faux sandstone pavers on the north side (I need two more). I weeded the raspberries and pounded another trellis into place to try to keep their prickers off the patio.

I hosed the cherry tree, mercilessly using the "jet" setting. This was "to disperse pests," as if aphids don't have grippy little toes and jaws. The Botanic Garden Ask-the-Expert dude said there was a pesticide that wouldn't hurt animals, as if insects weren't animals and leaving ambiguous whether it would hurt birds. I didn't believe him. He also said that aphids aren't dangerous to the tree, don't damage its vascular structure, and only suck out water and nutrients, likening them to mosquitoes on humans. Okay, but the more moisture and nutrients the aphids suck out, the less goes into the fruit or, more important, the roots. So I poured 1500 ladybugs onto the cherry tree, and I hope they have big, vicious, chompy jaws. Ladybugs and their larvae can eat several times their weight every day. Hop to it, ladybugs.

fuckity

The fridge finally arrived. With it, four sets of roller indentations and one dent in the newly refinished kitchen floor.

Hooray.

tiling

The tile is all on the wall. It is not grouted. But it is all on the wall. And that's what we did today.

compost

With a swan rake I combed the grassesque, unsnagging bindweed, and then with a leaf rake I groomed it, pulling straight tendrils of bindweed in hopes that I could more easily find their root ends. I combed and groomed and unsnagged and pulled. I did this in back and forth and to and fro. I raked out the half of the south bed where nothing has successfully taken root and weeded around the blue-eyed grass, columbine, thyme, and that other thing I myself planted but now cannot identify. I snipped baby cherries and weedwhacked under the cherry tree and along the walk. After the grass recovered somewhat, I mowed it, to little avail. I churned the more cooked compost, pitching near-loam from the trapdoor at the bottom onto the top. Then I dug leaf loam out from under the leafpile and added it to the south bed--well, piled it there, to be thoroughly dug in later--and added other leaves to the two compost bins. Finally I raked up all the seed husks and added them to my expanding lasagne

During this work, I discovered cat shit in my grass (without quite stepping in it), and discovered more cat shit in the leaf pile (nearly picking it up and adding it to the compost), and had a mouse leap from the compost bin and scurry over my feet. It was not until I was scooping, with bare hands, husks riddled with disease and coated with guano into the wheelbarrow, and spotted a limp sparrow.

RDC came to the window. "Did you just scream?"

"Yep. Look what I'm picking up on the rake."

So this afternoon I felt fleeting disgust and pity. But it wasn't until later in the day that I recoiled in horror and dread. I had no expectation of an extended swim but I had not packed a book into my backpack. (After I swam a leisurely kilometer, I read someone's Denver Post until RDC was ready to go.)

hard to believe

We began work on the kitchen again. Washing the previous kitchen rugs, which we weren't overly fond of but which would protect the newly finished floors, wasn't such a hot idea. They disintegrated, leaving behind quite a tide of filth in the washer. We acquired more drawer organizers and other even less exciting things and brought two boxes of stuff to Goodwill. We removed cabinet doors and scrim so we could paint walls, caulked around this and that, regrouted here and there, planned how to build a switchplate that would fit around the misplaced electric boxes by the sink, and refitted the soap dispenser. I--note the more accurate pronoun--put another coat on the pantry doors.

Blake is moulting so severely that in 10 minutes, the area surrounding his eight toes looks like Alison Reynholds made a snowfall and then cut her fingernails and emptied a down pillow in place. He's desperate to have his head pet but snappy because I inevitably hurt his blood feathers.

squirrels

About a month ago I began starving the birds in an attempt to be rid of the squirrels and pigeons (which do not count as birds). This was successful. I had to deal with grumpy sparrows for only a couple of days before they gave up in disgust, and I live with a louder and more persistent bird in my very house so their complaints were easy to ignore. I wonder if I taper off feeding in the spring (breeding time, but that's their look-out) and make them eat on their own throughout summer whether the squirrels would also vamoose and leave me some fruit. I doubt it: though the squirrels can find enough dropped seeds to make the birdfeeder a draw (they really cannot get into the feeder itself after a year's worth of attempts, hurrah!), fetal nectarines and pears might be even more appealing to them without those seeds. I think keeping the litter raked up might reduce the pigeon infestation. My one regret about killing the piñon is that it deprived chickadees of their shelter and therefore me of my chickadees. And I wonder if pigeons (or squirrels, ick) will be able to eat from the suet feeder my mother gave me for Christmas last year that I never bought suet for. That will attract starlings, which I don't care for, but also flickers and woodpeckers and maybe Denver's new bluejays.

not what we expected

The plan for today was to take the kayaks to Chatfield. We did that, detouring to the Apple store in the mall on the way because neither of us remembered the one directly on the way and remembering only when we arrived that someone who packed the car had forgotten our PFDs. (For once, the responsible someone wasn't me.) Violating state law there would have lasted about two seconds and, I'll have to check, cost us our kayaks. The boat rental area, which must offer them along with canoes and foul jetskis, was closed.

So we retreated, walked through the (our) park and up 17th Street to À La Tomate (which has been open more than eight months though not that we noticed until today) and had yummy sandwiches over newspapers, and came home.

Then I did tidying up stuff. The kitchen is winding down--we have only to paint the window sash, touch up the east wall/ceilng crease, rehang the blind, remount cabinet and pantry doors, replace scrim, and invent thresholds to cover border between newly finished floor and not--and I am so delighted that I accidentally on purpose prematurely put away supplies, which led to a larger project. I disposed of--in or near the dumpsters for the opportunistic or determined--crap that we'll never use, that was in the coal cellar or garage from before we owned the house and that we should have got rid of ages ago, and things that I wish could be recycled but which I haven't found a taker for. From the garage, four bags of Scott's lawn repair, scraps of real wood and lengths of particle board, many little seedling pots, odds and ends of kitchen tile. I stacked empty paint cans in the far corner for hazardous pick-up, sorted through odds and ends in the cabinet, stacked this and that better, used space more efficiently, and swept the floor. That leaves, after I bring the cardboard to recycling this week, only one thing in the car-space in the middle of the garage--one unstackable thing. But one thing is easier (for two people) and tidier to move in case of hail or blizzard. There.

Then I tackled the coal cellar. Useable segments are now not in the garage but the coal cellar with the remaining whole tiles; all the particle board and ugly shelving strips are gone; the painting supplies are in a box big enough for them so they don't spill out; gloves are clipped into pairs; brewing stuff is contained and off the floor; all the sanding stuff is together and all the plumbing; and sometime I am going to get RDC down there to tell me exactly which component boxes we still need to keep.

This winter, or Before My Mother Visits, I mean to refinish the much missed gateleg table. I would prefer to horrify her with a new cherry finish than with scars in the current mahogany (? so dark as to be nearly black) one. That needs to happen in the furnace room, which means that several of its denizens need to reside in the coal cellar for the duration, like the standing fans and the wet/dry vac and the coolers. And now there is room for them.

No kayaking. But I got to nest, or to clean my nest, and that's fun too.

better organization

We got new, 9 oz. glasses that are taller than the previous and therefore entailed cabinet reorganization. In each of two cabinets I had two very high shelves and therefore two very low ones. Today because of the new glasses I realized it makes sense to put all the tall stuff--wine carafe, coffee thermos, champagne glasses, red wine glasses--together in one high shelf and let the other cabinet have better spacing.

"The tall stuff" reminds me of when we moved and RDC was looking for a fishing rod and I told him to look in the box with the tall stuff--an umbrella or two, wrapping paper, fishing rods. They went together.

Don't you wish you were me?

up from sloth

It occurred to me to take before and after pictures of the house today. This is just to remind that I intended to do that. A before picture of the microwave would be too gross, and an after picture would tragically fail to include the microwave cart currently out of stock at the closest Target unless I did something insane like go to the two other nearby Targets.* A before picture of the dining table as an example of the mess would probably suffice, but an after picture would similarly fail to include new white tapers for the candelabra and therefore be inadequate.

Also, do you see what I am doing? I am not cleaning. I am typing.

I have houseguests on Monday, one Ukrainian whom I've never met and the other whom I've seen once at a wedding in the past nine years and who is more RDC's friend than mine and also someone else's ex-husband. I don't know anything about the Ukraine. At least previously if not currently extremely fertile soil. Kiev. Chernobyl. Odessa. The Endless Steppe. The Dnieper and the Dniester, because of Russian History to 1905. The Crimean War, because of a biography (for children) of Florence Nightingale. I'm not sure if it's Little or White Russia, though I know Belarus, which I cannot spell off the top of my head--no, I can, but not so confidently as not to check--is the other. Everything Is Illuminated.

I'm still typing. Meanwhile, Blake has been preening on my lap. He has finished dropping feathers and is now growing them in. I'm wearing RDC's navy terrycloth robe instead of my periwinkle fleece one, and I don't know how I can still be surprised at what he can produce, but there are strips of feather casings as long as my little fingernail. He's only little.

Oo, a list. Then I'll stop typing and do the list.

more cleaning

Next I tackled the television shrine. I took down all the CDs, which weren't that filthy, having been upstairs being ripped into iTunes within the past half year; and all the DVDs, some of which were dustier than others (in what alien world would we possess "K-Pax"?); and all the VHS cassettes; and all the books. Also I dusted and mopped under the extremely attractive crates that keep the electronics off the floor near the previously flooding corner. That was filthy.

The CDs weren't that bad. I allow some lapses from strict alphabeticalness, keeping Peter Gabriel, Genesis, and Godspell together and then Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. There wasn't much to weed, as that happened when we ripped. The DVDs also were okay, mostly because there are so few. Relatively few, maybe. I moved the books to the other side and took up more shelves with them, so the house and garden binders no longer block access to the how-to books.

The VHS tapes were a different story. I might have broken Blake's heart by removing so many from his shelf, but I can give him plenty of chew toys more appropriate than the cellophane from blank tapes or their cardboard slip cases. I kept some homemade VHS, since "Lisa and Rich's New House, Tour 2000" is for some reason not availabe on DVD, but most of them I trashed.

Whatever design genius built the television shrine didn't consider that inside corner shelves need bookends. Previous CD bookends were cassettes of the first albums I replaced on CD--Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Murmur, Disintegration, the merest essentials--and now I stacked VHS tapes in the corners.

Blake has almost the entire right top shelf and I will tape a length of cardboard to its underside so I don't have to scrub the lower shelves and their contents every week but must only replace the cardboard. He won't have VHS cassettes' shrinkwrap or cardboard slipcases to chew on but he has plenty of regular chewtoys. All I have to do is scold him when he chews on a shoelace or peacock feather or blowcard for him to find it fun. He loves to be naughty.

He fell absolutely in lust with the series of dustrags I used. Obviously these could not be his chew- or fucktoys. He whined on his shelf, he whined on my shoulder, he whined in his box (which I then upended to trap him, because with pets, that's legal, thank goodness, and what a pain in the ass), he whined unless in direct courtship with the rag. RDC came down at one point and had great fun playing single-handed monkey-in-the-middle with Blake, tossing a rag, letting Blake nearly catch up to him, and tossing it in the opposite direction. That's the reason for a housecleaner, so whoever's cleaning the house isn't someone whom Blake expects to accompany and command.

The CD selection is unlikely to grow very fast anymore, thanks to iTunes--I wish there were a similar service for film. But I freed up some space for more books on woodworking and wiring and, ahem, sewing. I am supposed to make cushions for the eventual kitchen nook. I laugh hollowly.

saturday

I attacked the house. Some parts of it didn't need that excruciatingly thorough a drubbing because I delivered that severe a treatment in my first efforts after we dismissed the housecleaners. They didn't do the corners or behind the furniture, but they kept the main areas more clean on a more regular basis than I have yet. Whatever.

I weeded my closet, clothes and shoes; I removed all the shoes and suctioned out gritty, dusty accumulations beneath and on them; I dusted, swept, vacuumed and mopped the upstairs; I polished the stainless steel in the kitchen; and my scrubbing the bathroom included emptying and cleaning and weeding the medicine cabinets. But I didn't launder and iron the curtains or empty the dead moths from the ceiling light in the living room. And as soon as a guest showed up I noticed a dancing shadow on the kitchen wall cast by a defunct cobweb in one of the recessed lights.

I'd met the Canuck before and he is delightful and enthusiastic and a good conversationalist; I hadn't met the other but he was sweet too and managed to contain British bewilderment at the size of our fridge and the steaks to polite interest. The Brit was from Norwich, which I eventually connected with Coot Club, and he showed me in the frontispiece map where he lives and sails. At one point Blake jumped to the floor to prance into the kitchen, where we were congregated, and I swooped him up safe from our feet and the giant Squash-You-Flat, who I think is one of the BFG's compatriots? The Canuck then asked if wasn't Roald Dahl also the author of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, which isn't offered even used at Amazon. AmazonUK lists it with author Mordecai Richler, but the Canuck barely remembered it and it has no reviews. That was funny. And then the Canuck made the mistake of saying that the first and last lines of Watership Down were the same, which they are not (though primroses appear in both); plus he called RDC a gourmand instead of a gourmet; and it was all in fun that I produced the texts to settle these points. Both the Canuck and the Brit scoffed at poor Noah Webster. Hmph.

It was a fun night.

windows and costumes

As ever on time-change days, I swapped the windows. I found a glass cleaner that, attached to the hose, makes this chore much less annoying. Cold hose water on the skin in sunny but 60-degree weather and Windex in the eye is no joy but is preferable to scads of paper towel and leaves fewer streaks. Hooray.

I pruned whatever kind of bush it is in the corner that in a high wind always makes me think the house is haunted by how rogue branches scrape either screen or glass. RDC emptied the swamp cooler for the winter. I would have continued in my filthy state to put the vegetable gardens to bed--it was only 1:30 and beautiful--but the Hallowe'en party was at 3:00. Three o'clock! for all the shorties.

Costumes were meant for kids (actually for the adults, most of the kids being too young to appreciate the holiday or to object to adorable get-ups), but I wore one anyway, inconspicuously: my regular gray french terry skirt and RDC's gray t-shirt and a home-made "Hello, My Name Is" label on the breast--my name was Earl. Earl Grey (tee).

The last time I saw Gethen was at JPM's first birthday party, when she thought I was a poorly haberdashed loon. This time we had a great time together. She is at one of those perfect ages, 3.5, and we compared belly-buttons and I tossed some sofa cushions on top of her and leaned back and her father asked where did Gethen go? and I asked JJM why the cushions had feet on them. She spoke of the advantages of cushions with feet instead of just the whole couch, and then of the advantages of giggling cushions. Gethen might not know quite the order of the letters in her name, but she does know which letters belong to it, so we spelled it out with alphabet blocks and sounded out my name too.

Her younger brother is adorably owly in spectacles. Little kid eyes are big anyway, but magnified because of hyperopia are bigger still. And Ditty, Jack and Diane's kid, is fun for seven months (I am gradually learning that people under 18 months old can be fun, though I maintain that it's rare). She was a pumpkin, interested in pulling hair (fine as long as she grabbed a fistful, but individual strands hurt) and peeling my label. There were a ladybug and a pig (when the ladybug lost her costume I had to ask which kid that was), a lion and a bumblebee and a monkey. Pynchon was the fleecey monkey, and Dexy and I dragged his crawly self back toward us, fleece offering no resistance against hardwood floor. We were demonstrating to Pynchon the futility of effort while he showed his determination in the face of adversity (which Dexy attributed to his mother). Then there was discussion of the age by which children can understand existentialism.

Later in the day I sat in one room petting Charley the cat, an excellent excuse to eavesdrop on a conversation in the next room I did not want to be explicitly involved with (it was political and heated; politics might not make me itch but heat does), though everyone knew I was there. Gethen came in asking if I would read her a story. We selected Parts, Olivia, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and I read with her in my lap, until she said her eye hurt for the second time. The first time, I looked in it for irritants; the second time, I called her father, who identified the irritant as Charley. Poor broken child. So we finished our reading in the uncatted living room.

Gethen should not live so far away. I can't recommend Parts, but I can Olivia (I gave that to the bumblebee upon his birth), and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? was new to me. It is great, with lots of detail, and anatomically if not chromatically correct dinosaurs. And that's what I learned Saturday.

clean

I didn't water the garden--the vinca looks like it wants it, which means the trees really need it--but the entire main floor of the house is clean. I repainted the top of the mantel and retouched several spots of sage, too. Also I repainted a stretch of trim in the kitchen where RDC spilled some red wine. Cheap-ass Behr paint: not just the eggshell blue but also semi-gloss paint stained by red wine that we immediately washed off?

White trim. I love its look when it's clean, but it's almost never clean. Dust accumulates in imperfections and can't be dusted away but must be scrubbed out with hot water and a soapy brush. A few times I vacummed the trim but of course the cheap paint readily showed abrasions from the attachment.

The longer days are affecting my mood for the better. Instead of hibernating--there ought to be a verb for diurnal behavior--I am motivated to action in the evenings.

I finished overhauling my files. I am really never going to reread my bluebooks again but I am absolutely not going to cull my college papers. I regret that I didn't keep things until fifth semester.

I added a few years of stuff to my scrapbook, which is just a pointless collection of ticket stubs and such rather than that thing with the butchered photographs and special scissors that I don't understand. I don't understand my pointless collection either, but it doesn't require butchery or pinking shears.

I can't wait for spring. I am going to drub everything and bake it in the sun and scrub the trim. And wake up the garden, except it's waking up on its own.

watering and waking

After I brought Blake to camp, I came home and spruced up the garden without any spruces. I let the hose run low and for hours on the nectarine and pear trees and another on the cherry, and I would have watered the two longer but the plums needed their drink but couldn't have it from the north hose, since that spigot hibernates. I cut down all last year's growth from the front, now that the weather won't be cold. I stacked all the semi-woody stems on the tarps in back where I'm trying to smother weeds and grass; I don't know what I'll do with them. It's time to start afresh with mulch so I think I will churn all the dead spines of sage and agastache and penstemon all down to mulch-sized pieces and return it to the garden.

Next weekend I will empty and turn the compost and maybe empty the vegetable beds and restock their soil with young loam.

mucking about with dirt

Ratty won't mind if I muck about with dirt instead of with boats, I am sure.

The next step, emptying the vegetable frames and mixing in the virgin loam and refilling the frames, won't be as satisfying ("I have made fire!") as scavenging a few cubic feet of rich black compost from my bins, but I figure I'll enjoy it.

I forgot to look for an electric leaf blower at Home Depot. Do such things exist? I refuse anything gas-powered for a property the size of mine but I think a blower is the only way to separate leaves from the heavier stuff I want to keep in the garden. And how long must I keep the groundcloth down? How long until the bindweed gives up growing yards and tangled, anemic yards of vines under there? If I ever can remove the cloth, I could scratch some decomposed mulch into the gardens too.

In the forecast: a big order of bishop's weed for the north side, vinca major for the north easement, thyme for the north garden slop, and maybe finally some bulbs. One crocus survived my mauling of the raspberry bed, but no grape hyacinths or tulips did. This fall I must do bulbs. But for now, High Country Gardens and fragrant blue and lavender blossoms and spare greeny-grey or greeny-silver foliage await. Wheee!

lying thermometers

I am such a coddled little Denver sunverite. This 40-degree, cloudy morning, I decided I would clean the house, which it needs only slightly less than the garden needs attention. After breakfast the sky cleared and I headed out into 50 degree sun.

I mopped the winter's filth from the porch swing, the capitals (they're really not), and the doors, then removed the screens from the security door and washed them and my are they more see-through now.

I weeded (grassed, mostly, for which I'm grateful) the bishop's weed on the north side of the house. I guess I should put a border along that property line. The next project was to hoe out the north easement to be ready for vinca, arriving the second week of April, but however non-strenuous the project is, it is also tedious and results in unprotected topsoil (which I could cover with a tarp, but that didn't work with my excuse-making). Vinca, I decided, is tough enough that the still mostly grass and not more tenacious weeds wouldn't pose a big problem for it. In the meantime I transplanted some new shoots from the south easement.

When I had finished with the north side (where I cannot be seen from the porch) and the temperature rose to 60, Blake had accompanied me somewhat, mostly chattering. But occasionally shrieking (two black standard poodles, a golden retriever), so I put him inside, leaving the cage door open so he could prance on the top or in his box. Soon I heard him yell and looked in at him: he was not on his cage, on his own windowsill, nor even on the lower sill, but on the sash of the actual pane, which is of course too narrow for him to perch on, and I took this to mean he wanted out again.

I was done with the front, and willing to break from my unHeraclean labors before tackling the back (amending the vegetable beds, separating the lovely black moist loam resulting from lasagne mulch from the sunflower seed husks that didn't break down as readily), and so Blake occupied one capital and I another, with water and Lonesome Rangers, Homeless Minds, and in less than 15 minutes the sky had clouded over again.

I could have, say, put another layer on: a short gardening skirt and a sleeveless tee is not an outfit I should feel entitled to wear on the last day of winter without chilliness. But if I were goosebumped, so would Blake be. So in we came to await more sun, which, three hours later, isn't going to happen. It is supposedly 60 degrees outside and in, but I don't believe it. Blake and I are on the couch waiting for snow, I swear.

We read, and had a nap (which I felt entitled to, having not slept well), and read, and someone's head got pet, and I am still freezing cold just because I am looking through the window at a cloudy sky, despite socks and a hoodie and yoga pants and the perfectly reasonable temperature on thermometers inside and out.

radish cure

I was getting a little silly and hoping that RDC would call me in for dinner by shouting "Oh, C.K. Stanley Yelnats," but he does not live his life quite so much by "The Philadelphia Story" and Holes as I do. What I was doing, not that our lot is big enough to require shouting, was putting all the dirt back in the older vegetable frame. I had first taken it out, shovel and hoe, and then begun to put it back, rake and sieve.

I never put the garden to bed this winter, and by this morning it was all over weeds which have probably sapped its nutrients. I hoed out stuff that I call chicory and spurge but whose actual names I know not. I shoveled and shoveled and finally realized I was in the ground below the frame: more than a foot deep.

A while ago I wanted to build myself a sifter, a sturdy mesh nailed to a reinforced wooden rectangle that would fit over the wheelbarrow: throw gobs of stuff at the wheelbarrow, and catch good stuff. That never materialized, though in my more determined moments I have been known to use such a mesh without benefit of frame (which might be how I go through suede-palmed gloves so fast). This spring I bought myself an English Steel Sieve With 1/2" Expanded Metal Mesh, which is nearly what I wanted but on a smaller scale.

So I sifted the garden. I cleaned the house, or some of it, and by noon I was outside. I worked until dark, accumulating a pile of clumps and pebbles and roots and shrinking the pile of dirt, and getting admirably filthy. I took a few breaks for water and to do backbends (I theorize that turning my back momentarily concave will undo the strain of hours of convexity), but not to eat.

When I ceased for the evening, I shoved my filthy hooves into my bluchers to get inside and to the shower. In the shower stall, I toed off the bluchers and doffed everything else, and sat on the floor, completely done in. A few minutes later RDC asked what part of the chicken I wanted. "Half."

I am going to need to break down all the chunks I piled to one side in order to fill the frame back up, even with the compost-loam I sifted in. The newer frame looms yet untouched, but at least it's smaller.

Sometime soon RDC is going to rent a rototiller to take out the remaining grass on the south side. I suggested doing only half the south "lawn" at a time, because I can conceive of manually tilling half but not whole. Nah, he said, he'd rent a machine to do it all. I think I am going to ask him to do the north side of the path, too. It won't do the cherry sprouts any good, but if he keeps the machine very shallow it shouldn't harm the actual tree roots irreparably, I hope. I'll lay groundcloth and mulch against bindweed this year, and perhaps next year expand the bishop's weed or even the zoysia.

spring spring spring spring lovely spring

After sifting in loam from compost and the original soil minus clumps and pebbles and roots, I still hadn't filled in the vegetable frame. After my swim I bought peat moss and mushroom compost, and today I will add it in, even though today is, gasp, overcast.

We read more about buffalo grass and zoysia and really how much water that much square footage of bluegrass would require and settled on tall fescue. I am still thinking of buffalo grass for under the cherry tree: unlike fescue it grows from roots so can repair itself; and under the cherry tree doesn't have as much traffic as the lawn area, which must withstand outdoor furniture, clothesline, and other traffic; and that is still the best place to grow squash because the vines can creep where they want without crowding either other vegetables or foot traffic.

Yesterday I swapped storms for screens, worked on the back yard for a few hours, made myself a smoothie and drank it on the porch with D.H. Lawrence, and then went for my swim. If I hadn't needed the dirt I would have gone on my bike. I love spring. The weather eked out about a fortnight of winter at the end of March, so I am even glad to see it.

yardwork

I repotted my new houseplant, some sort of variegated foliage thing. Otherwise, I emptied the other vegetable frame and started filling it in again, mixing it with peat moss, mushroom compost, and cattle manure. (The bag said "steer manure." Is the manure from castrated bulls very different than that from cows?)

Last year, when the soil for the new frame arrived, I thought it was different than the first frame's content. And it is. Either that, or its different orientation (perpindicular to the other) means so much less sun that its clay retains more moisture longer. Sieving the soil was much more difficult: either more clayey, or just wetter, thus much more clumpy, with some clumps hard as rocks. Those I threw back. Peat moss holds moisture too, but should make the soil flufflier overall. So I didn't sieve it all but raked what could be raked back into the frame, and I will break down the clumps and cemented sand later.

After getting up at the perfectly reasonable weekend hour of 8:30, resetting the clocks, having breakfast, and talking to Nisou for an hour, it was nearly noon by the time we left the house. After the gym and another Home Depot run (it must be spring: two visits on a two-day weekend), we returned nearly at 3. Three and a half hours of work in the garden, until dinner: a short day. This is not my favorite day of the year.

garden, ready for winter

When next I bring RDC to the airport, I'll stop by Tri-R on the way home with cardboard, junkmail, and phone books. I haven't found a place for plastic bags, though. Today I emptied the house of the latest crates of cardboard and paper, preparing for snowbound claustrophobia tomorrow.

I sieved more soil into the east vegetable frame and covered it well with groundcloth, and covered the garage frame as well. The several feet of yard next to the east frame where I laid the lasagne mulch I covered as well, because now that I've removed all the lovely loam, all that naked dirt will either fly away or be infested with weeds unless I protect it.

All this week I've left tools out: with 13% humidity, no dew, and daily work, I shrugged off that little chore. But today I put everything back, neatly, so tomorrow I can look out at snow, I hope, not made lumpy by neglected utensils. And the snow shovel is on the porch along with several hours' worth of firewood.

I cleared grass from around the ornamental sage against the porch. I don't remember which sort it is, and stupidly, I do not have my garden catalogued digitally. Artemisia tridentata? Something. RDC thought grass was choking it, but it's not: it is a slow grower, and it's tended horizontal to reach the sun faster than the porch's shadow would otherwise allow. Also I cut down a nasty, prickly succulent that was probably not on my easement but on the neighbors'. But it's a hideously prickly plant and probably had a pint of water in its tuberous root. So thlpbt to them if they minded.

Besides shoving all last year's growth from the shrubs and the peony not into but between the compost bins, and carefully filling the birdfeeder again, I didn't do much. The sieving took some time, but I don't feel like I got much done. I didn't dig the heavy-duty, recycled plastic bordering along the north side, and I didn't fetch faux brick bordering and start placing that. I didn't clip out cherry sprouts.

And I won't get anything done tomorrow either, other than, I hope, shoveling, and beating the shit out of my trees again. But at least I spent all the hours the sun was out, outside. And I found lots of worms and tossed them into the gardens to join their friends.

garden newlings

My plants arrived Friday. High Country Gardens ships of a Monday, and I like Friday arrivals. I don't plant until Saturday, so Thursday arrivals mean plants remain unplanted despite being in my care. Friday shipments are in boxes just as long, but it's not as much my fault. It's all about me, not about the plants.

I can't quite believe I paid money for more Vinca major (big leaf periwinkle) instead of just taking cuttings from the two-year-old plantings in the south easement, but what the hell. Seven seedlings and a few seedlings to start filling in the north easement. I did end up hoeing out the grass; I'll mulch it over to protect the top soil.

I weeded the north side of the house among the bishop's weed, and transplanted some sprouts from elsewhere, and began to dig a border along that property line. I don't know why the neighbors want grass, but I figure they want it as much as I want my pretty variegated dry shade groundcover. Except they probably don't want it much: the border protects the bishop's weed from the grass and vice versa, and also my plantings from the bindweed they allow to run rampant.

To fill in the north front, I planted--oo! 13 plants. I put seven Veronica oltensis (thyme-leaf speedwell) on the slope, because the two on the south slope have spread so very obligingly over their three years and their azure flowers in mid-May make me insanely happy. Along the north boundary, I clustered three each of Salvia dorrii (desert purple sage) and Lavandula angustifolia (buena vista English lavender). Because I am not the smartest of all possible bears, I didn't notice when selecting my plants that Agastache x blue fortune (blue fortune hybrid hyssop) is suitable for zone 6, not 5, so I placed the three of those along the south property line: the neighbor has erected a (fairly short and surprisingly inoffense) fence that will shelter them from some sun. Nearby I transplanted some sprouts from Perovskia atriplicifolia (Russian sage).

The Cytisus purgans (Spanish Gold Hardy Broom) I planted against the north half of the west-facing porch two years ago died in its first summer, and blue is better than yellow anyway (and three better than one) so this time I am trying Salvia reptens (west Texas grass sage) instead.

I can't think how I misread the plant description for Artemisia versicolor 'Seafoam' (curlicue sage), currently against the south half of the porch. It is lovely, but I want big plants against the porch and eight inches isn't quite enough height. So I will move it somewhere, I hope without killing it, and replace it with, um, something yellow: Ribes odoratum (Crandall's Currant). Also to be moved is a Penstemon pinifolius (pineleaf penstemon), which will look better with its siblings, among which lurks a big gap; also I am not unreasonably hopeful that the Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer) and Erodium chrysanthum (yellow stork's bill) will fill in that spot.

In the backyard, against the south fence where I allow less xeric ornamental plants, I planted more Sisyrinchium angustifolium (Lucerne blue-eyed grass) and three Pulmonaria longiflora (Roy Davidson lungwort).

I hope the frames are full of happy dirt and worms now. In the east one, I planted carrots, Romaine lettuce, New Zealon nigh-spinach, and peas. I can't wait to thin the carrots so I can feed tender little tops to Blake, who loves them. The north one will take tomato seedlings again, in mid May.

Pretty.

gonna need a bigger

Either in gratitude for my spendy order or because they know I'm a sucker, High Country Gardens offered me 10% off any additional order placed by 19 June. I did try to buy xeric tulips (did you know they exist?), because you can buy whenever for plants to ship later, but HCG is too wise for that. I am still going to buy a zillion tulip bulbs (from them or whoever) to plant this fall, even though I just bought yet more plants with the discount.

My overly enthusiastic spring pruning or the hail took out one of the two-year-old Salvia farinacea. Its siblings are coming up, and it still might grow from some roots, but hey, 10% off! Even though it's in the south garden that the white Achillea ageratifolia seems not to be thriving, the Lavandula x intermedia "Alba" will go in the north half because there is no white in that garden at all and only the foliage and ruby Centranthus ruber and peachy-orange Agastache rupestris relieve the eye from blue and lavender and violet (those pervese eyes that need relief from such colors). I moved the Artemisia versicolor into the main garden and it's still alive (two days without collapsing so far) and its hole against the south porch will be filled with Ribes odoratum, about 60 inches tall and wide. Supposedly it will set a currant-like fruit, edible to birds (and humans?), smell like cloves, and turn its leaves mahogany-red in fall. As long as its scent (clove) doesn't clash with the delicate hummingbird mint, redolent catmint, sage, and lavender, it and I should get along fine. Lastly, I splurged (relatively: each plant costs almost twice the median) on Symphytum grandiflorum because it's lovely and anything that can survive against the south fence, attacked by bindweed and receiving little sun, is something I want to try.

I told RDC we'd have to sell the house. The garden is just not big enough.

down is scary

When Shadow was young, she would not explore the staircase. Eventually, she tried it out, getting herself upstairs, but for a while we had to carry her down. Staring down those 13 narrow wooden steps, her urge to please could not overcome her fear of that flight, what with her big paws and puppy clumsiness. Finally, she did it, with me by her side should she slip.

We now possess a rooftop evaporative cooler, hooray. Sometime soon we will remove the window unit, and RDC's office will have more light (though not air: I have to build a screen for that window) and the side of the house won't have a burl poking out.

The plumber suggested a mineral block to suppress mold and so forth. I'm not the one afraid of heights, so clearly I am the one to climb up to the roof and set the block into the drip tray. I've been wanting to climb around on the roof for a while anyway, but I have never quite understood how you get from ladder to roof. The plumber said over the top, which I hadn't thought of before, and so today, I went over the top. (Please excuse the WWI metaphor.) It's easy to lift a leg from the third-highest (highest permissible) rung over the gutter to the not-very-slanty roof and, another suggestion from the plumber, to fall forward.

I did that, scrabbled up, removed one side panel (the downhill one, which is Wrong because you lift the panel down which means your weight goes down and the drop is down too), placed the block, and scrabbled backward toward the ladder.

I felt a lot like my three-month-old dog.

Stepping on the topmost rung is no good: it's not just that the safety label says not to, it's that weight on that rung could tilt the ladder and I had no reward like an intercostal clavicle to make it worthwhile. If you fall forward to get on the roof, do you fall backward to get on the ladder? Yii. I turned left, my right, stronger, dominant side to the roof, left hand on the left stile, right foot gripping the sole of my right boot, whole soul hoping that boot had all the gription it ought, left foot out yii out yeepers out to the second rung. After that I was fine.

sun, clouds, and rain

I bought some (not too many many) more plants because High Country Gardens offered me 10% off. They arrived yesterday, and today I unpacked them, and there was another 10% coupon. I'm wise to them now though.

Three of the five Achillea ageratifolia in the south half aren't doing so well, so I added Lavandula x intermedia Alba to that garden. That might not be such a hot idea: if the yarrow is failing to thrive, it's probably the Nepeta catmint's fault, taking over the planet as it's doing. Baby plants might not make it against plants in their fourth growing season. But Lavender Smells Good is my motto, and the garden needs some white to set off the blue catmint and purple penstemon, so I shoved those in. To give them some space, I halved a catmint.

Part of the occasionally xeric landscaping at Dot Org is a shrub that ÜberBoss identified as a butterfly bush. It wasn't--butterflies might like it, but it's not the same thing as Buddleia alternifolia. Last spring I saw a tub of it at Home Depot and snatched it up, obtaining both plant and name. And aha, High Country Gardens does sell Caryopteris x clandonensis, but the catalog photograph only shows the color of the blossom--blue violet, which I had noticed--not a single blossom's shape, and I was attracted to its scent as well as its color. Now three more have joined last year's shrub as newlings.

I think the Artemisia versicolor has survived its transplanting, and once again I cleared the bit against the south porch, including a two-year-old clipping of catmint that, like its brethren, threatens to take over the planet. I killed that entirely, feeling much guiltier about the worm I accidentally half-severed with the trowel than about the plant (catmint is the garden's sourdough proof, I am convinced), and placed Ribes odoratum, clove-scented currant, which, if it lives, will be a good size against the porch wall.

To the north garden I added three more Salvia farinacea. The impetus for the whole order was that one of the three-year-olds did not appreciate my overenthusiastic shearing this spring (that was the impetus; the justification was the 10% off).

Two of the brand new Salvia dorrii didn't make it, but the nursery will replace anything that dies before 90 days. All three Centranthus ruber are about to bloom, as is the Scabiosus; the Veronica oltensis is a riot of blue and the Vinca major is busting out all over. Both the Cerastium tomentosum and Erodium chrysanthum are beginning to bloom. The former abuts Veronica oltensis and both are spreading; I prefer the latter but suspect snow-in-summer is the more aggressive.

Gregor has new leaves, though it doesn't look as strong and its leaves are not as big as those of the neighbor's maple sapling. The rowan looks like it will set berries this year, which will make the winter's starlings and flickers happy.

In back, the Mexican sunflowers and bachelor's buttons are beginning to sprout around the olive stump, as are the Romaine lettuce, nigh-spinach in the vegetable garden, and peas nearby along the south fence. No carrots in the vegetable garden yet, and no squash under the cherry tree.

So far in the south fence are peas near the vegetable garden, and then the stretch where I'll expend water on non-edibles because they're in the shade of the south fence and benefit from that neighbor's enthusiastic watering. There are two spreading and three new "Lucerne" blue-eyed, three new Pulmonaria longiflora, three two?-year-old Aquilegia formosa, and the most recent order's big splurge of six Symphytum grandiflorum.

This morning I woke before 7 and read and fell back asleep until the phone rang. My father asked if he'd woken me, because it was 9. Nine my time, really? But I was out until midnight so maybe that's not so bad. We talked for an hour after that, so I didn't get outside until 10:30 or so. It was beautiful, sunny and 60 with cumulus clouds, but I had planted exactly one plant, the currant, when a stormfront rolled over. I put Blake's cage through the dishwasher waiting for the thunder and slight rain to pass, and tried to called Haitch's shower but I didn't have the right in-law's number and another in-law quite sensibly had her phone turned off, and did some laundry. The rest of the plants went much faster after the first, which had required the clearing of a grassy patch. At least it was only grass, not bindweed, and I hope the one tulip there survives, and I tried to spare the grape hyacinth. The Caryopteris x clandonensis required removing some sod as well, but I could do that bluntly with a hoe instead of restrictedly in the angle of the porch while trying to be nice to the bulbs. I should have smothered the grass to weaken it previously, but for now I hoed out some and lay all the detritus from the porch garden atop the rest for clearing later this month.

One more rain suggested a short break before I finished around 4. Blake and I had a shower, with him not sure at the start but soon enthusiastic, and pleasant blow-drying afterward (he loves to be blow-dried). Since then we've been preening and reading, and one of us has had his head pet a lot and the other has been sneaking snorts of freshly-washed cockatiel dust. Pretty much a perfect day.

tomatoes

Poor Blake. Yesterday he not only had a long day alone with me at work, but also suffered through a post-work errand to the plant store, where I bought some annuals, including tomatoes. So when I came home, I gave him dinner but then brought him outside, where he had to stay in his cage some more.

In the pots on the porch columns I put red flowering tobacco, Crayola violet-red pansies, white snapdragons, violet petunias, and, new to me, bacopa, with lots of small lavender flowers. I watered all the newlings again and observed new growth on the Agastache x blue fortune (planted 16 April) and the lack of death in everything planted since then. (I had already noticed the death of the Salvia dorrii, about which I must call HCG.) In back I planted several varieties of tomatoes in the north frame and a couple of cucumbers at the far (east) end of the south fence. I have another tomato to put in a patio pot and some basil to plant, but that's for later, because by this time, sunset, Blake had had quite enough, thank you.

We went in and showered and ate peanut butter toast and read, not Saramago but a reread of a trashy novel. Luxury.

restraint

I have got to stop. Yesterday at the grocery store I bought a pot of lavender petunias to hang from the porch beam and five more annuals to put into one window box. I don't even know their names or whether they're compatible. What I know is "Pretty! Shiny!" So I have one window box (on the porch wall) with two violet-flowering things on either side of, get this, an orange-flowering thing. The orange flower is vaguely daisy-shaped and not Koninginnedag orange but a softer hue.

I had promised Blake that I would be home right after the grocery run and that we would spend the evening together, but instead I subjected him to another 30 minutes of cagefulness. At least he likes to be outside--and doesn't understand that much English--and the next two days are supposed to be rainy and chilly so I will certainly not garden but instead clean the house. He doesn't like the vacuum and he is scared of brooms and mops and he falls in love with rags and he is not allowed to be with me when I scrub the bathroom so it'll be another fun-packed evening for him.

After the planting (and my sternly telling myself that that's it for the season, and droolingly anticipating fall so I can plant bulbs, so that the only difference between Formigny and Keukenhof will be scale, ahem), I took pictures of the house, because I love my house and I love my garden. I was on the other sidewalk to get the whole shebang in the frame when my new neighbor walked by with her dog.

"It looks great," she said, so of course I think she has fabulous taste. My garden is one thing I can readily accept a compliment about without thinking someone is being wrongheaded or just polite.
"Are you Name?" I asked, because I had only met her once before and wasn't sure if this was the new neighbor. Yes, she was, and I repeated my name. I didn't tell her that my guess that she is New Neighbor Named X was based on her dog, whom I did remember: black and white but pointer-furred and -shaped, named Dodger.

gardening

The two plants in the one window box are Heliotropium arborescens and Osteospermum "Orange Symphony."

My latest indoor plant (which I expect to die) is Exacum: sturdy green little leaves and lavender flowers with a yellow inside. Of the two plants with variegated foliage I bought last year, one has done well, and the other has died and its replacement is also not doing well. Is the pot cursed? Do you really have to wash a pot between plants? They live in dirt, after all.

Today was one of those maintenance days. I deadheaded the Exacum and hanging petunias, dug a border in along the north boundary and grassed the bishop's weed, mowed and weedwacked, and mulched around the Caryopteris clandonensis and Agastache x blue fortune. I moved the basil from pots into the north frame because RDC reminded me it dries out too fast in pots. And I put cages around the tomatoes, weeded the south fence, and raked up sunflower husks to add to the lasagne mulch (which is in serious need of greens): it did so well over the winter that the only uncomposted element is sunflower seeds, so adding more wasn't that bright.

It wasn't so stupid, either. Despite the cool, relatively damp spring and the good snowpack making this a good year to replace the grassesque with a more apt sod, we've been considering that it would be best to replace the patio and walkway before the sod, so the one process doesn't undo the other. So I have a while to cook another lasagne, and then the new sod will have lots of yummy new loam to nourish itself with.

Besides the mowing, I don't see a lot of difference. When you dust, you see a difference, but it doesn't last; when you weed, you see a difference, but it doesn't last. But if you don't dust or weed, you regret it. So tedious.

i'm back

RDC rebuilt the server, hence the absence. No spam!

We looked at the new weblogging software in the new operating system, but it would have required a subdirectory called /weblog/. And howevermuch this site has decayed into a log of my daily life, like a captain's log of weather and knots, it is, I insist, an online journal, and is not and never will be a weblog, not even in its URL.

The past two weekends we have done house stuff galore. I am working on a Project that I will unveil in due time. Otherwise, weeding, trimming, cleaning, baking. I washed and ironed the curtains in the living and dining rooms, the den, and my study. The ironing allowed some Buffy watching, which was fun.

The new server is in the closet-under-the-stairs, so I repacked all the Yule decorations to make room. Kind of. I have a stack of boxes in the way, hoping to block some of its noise, that only needs to be scooted to one side. The machine had previously on the other side of the wall, in the television shrine; now it's behind a wall but louder.

I got rid of a Cassidy-load of cardboard, junk mail, and phone books, and a bunch of stuff to Goodwill. I wrapped some hardware boxes in old plastic dropcloths and shoved them into the rafters of the garage. The books multiplied, and I put the tall ones--yearbooks, picture books, Tintin--on the lowest shelf of one case, where they're behind arm of the futon frame. The next step will be to add the last shelf to another bookcase, whereupon all the shelves will be set just a little too close for books to be upright. The real problem is nonfiction. I can't wait for the breakfast nook and its shelves.

The other cosmetic change was to remove the worn, ripped carpeting from the porch. RDC patched it, the steps, and the sidewalk steps. We wanted to paint the concrete, but the cracking was insane and the patches would show. So we'll recarpet.

gateleg

Beginning and During.

Ow. I used my new tool, which I want to call a mattock because that's a cool word that distinguishes the thing from "garden trowel" though unfortunately is incorrect, to dig out the grass in the north easement to place "stones," and in the south easement to dig out the fragments of flagstones I had previously used as a border. I guess I grip with my index and middle fingers the most, because I wound up with a blister on the ring side of my middle finger. For best gription, I used gloves to place the stones--prefab, concretey foot-squares—along the curb in both easements. Then I started stripping a table, and the taut blister popped (without my help this time, I promise) perhaps when mineral spirits dried out the skin just enough, and yowza, that hurt. So of course I trimmed all the dead skin away, because it could not protect the bed of the blister, and I am continuing to work with my hands, continuing with alcohol, so I have acquired as well a few slits in the exposed blister bed. Yum.

On the other hand, I did get a large mailing out with only one paper cut across the knuckle of my left pinky, and without aggravating the post-blister much.

The stripping is going okay, I guess. I have never used chemicals to strip finish before and the only time I have stripped (began to strip) a piece of furniture at all, I was a child and used sandpaper and gave up and to this day in my mother's house there is a bed table none of whose surfaces are protected by finish--except that of the face of the drawer--and have not been for 25 years.

Whoever last worked with this table had no taste. It is stained so dark it might as well have been painted black. The citrus-y chemical worked really well to lift most of that out. There are two half-oval flaps, a top a foot across, a drawer, and the legs. The flaps and top are fine. In fact they're lovely. I still don't know what kind of wood they are, but when wet--can you say wet when it's not water?--with mineral spirits, the color is lovely. The finish I cannot get out (three applications of stripper so far) I am calling "grain enhancements." The legs, though, the legs make me very sad. There are six fixed and two that rotate 90 degrees each to hold up a flap. The eight legs and attendant railings are turned, or look like it, so have waists and fatter bits and narrower bits and rings and they are not my favorites. The fattest part of any round section shed its finish fairly well, but the narrow waists and in-curvings that expose more grain, not so much. And they take so damn long, painting the chemical on, scrubbing and rubbing it out.

I am using up so many rags on this endeavor. The entire under-utility-sink cabinet in the laundry room was a pile of rags--clean, so hopefully no more a fire nest than a closet full of clothes--that I was going to, get this, fold before my mother's visit. (I folded the painting dropcloths tidily into a box in the coal cellar, instead of just heaping them on the floor.) Now I don't have to because I doubt they can come clean. It seems a pity to destroy RDC's worn to shreds "This is your brain on Rasta" t-shirt for this, but so it goes. Also we've been getting the Denver Post, no idea why, for the past several weeks, free to the door, but since The Chronicle of Higher Education is exactly the size of Blake's cage floor, I don't need the local rag. But whatever doesn't get recycled gets stripper with dissolved finish dripped on it.

After

The Saga of the Table began before my involvement. My mother had it from one of her grandmothers, I think the paternal one. When my sister moved to Boston, she was allowed to use it there but returned it before she moved to Aspen, though whether by my mother's request or my sister's choice I don't know.

What I do know is that when RDC and I moved in together, my mother lent us a lamp. She was careful to say it was a loan, and it was a lamp from my sister's abandoned bedroom that she surely did not miss in the 2.5 years we had it. I returned it before we moved to Denver because I wasn't going to bring a loan across the country. I was careful to return my mother's loan because even her gifts have been chancy: she suggested that the heirloom china she gave me at my bridal shower should not go with me to Denver, and if a gift was that susceptible to her whim and regret, then a loan was even more so.

I told how the thing came to be in my possession here, and how my mother first began to hint of its return here, and how when we bought a house with a dining room and acquired a dining table of suitable size and retired the two-person, dropleaf gateleg table, she was offended. Further gibes occurred when she looked at photographs of the house and later when I told her about the house falling over into a swamp: when I told her about the disintegrating concrete and support posts and lolly columns, she asked, "And where is the gateleg table in all of this?" I bitched to my sister about that selfish insensitivity, and I should have bitched to the transgressor, because CLH put herself (did I hint that I wanted her to do this? I hope not) in the middle by telling our mother how inappropriate a question about a single piece of furniture is in the context of the structural integrity of an entire house. She reportedly replied, "But I wanted her to know I was concerned about my table!" to which my sister reasonably replied, "She would have appreciated your having some concern for her house" without adding "especially on her birthday" or bickering about the possessive pronoun.

The table was stained very dark. I don't like dark colors except black in dogs and dark brown in eyes. I like wood grain. So I stripped the thing and finished it clear.

The table is handsome now. The leaves and top glow with mahogany--when I brought the top to a woodworking store, they identified it as such. Its turned legs were a bitch to strip--I discovered sanding floss, a wonderful invention--and where the shape cuts across grain, some stain remains, and that's true of the edges of the leaves and top too (but as with an old refinished floor, I'm calling that "character"). Also, a page about Victrolas makes me think that the top might be of red mahogany and the legs of brown, because they do look quite different.

Attractive or not, its legs are still turned, and therefore dustcatchers, and it's still an occasional table, though for what occasions I'm not sure. Now that I know how easy it is to dismantle, I might declare the project's aim not merely to improve the appearance of a piece whose purpose eludes me and whose design fails to thrill me but to furnish my sister's new house. But I will check whether my sister would consider the table merely a mathom. If I didn't find an occasion for it in my house, I can't assume she would.

garden, readier for winter than before

All I had in mind for yesterday was the semi-annual, changing-of-the-clocks weekend window-swapping. I brought the storms outside, removed the screens, and hosed the windows. Rinse, lather, rinse, for windows and storms; up the ladder again to squeegee and hang the storms; screens exiled to the coal cellar. Then it was time to enable the swamp cooler's hibernation. Getting on the roof led to cleaning the gutters (beginning to, anyway), and RDC trimmed the vinca so we won't have green icicles crawling around the sidewalk. I do not rake leaves until everything is down, except for trimmed vinca and the plum leaves within it. I brought the one barrowload of leaves in back, which led to raking the compost from a few weeks ago into the garden, and before that taking out the last of the tomato and pepper plants, and cursing the squirrels who have eaten more of my tomatoes and eggplants than I have, and finding an overlooked and therefore squishy cucumber.

When I dug the compost out of the two bins a couple of weeks ago, I just mounded the new dirt in the gardens; today I dug it into place. I covered the gardens with landscaping cloth and rocks, but the weeds have read different stuff about that cloth than I have because they still grow under it. I took up the cloth that covers about a quarter of the backyard and hoed and raked all that processing compost: it's very happy where it has coffee grounds and vegetable pulp but sunflower seed husks just don't break down readily.

After that I rolled the Russian olive stump away from the brush pile and commenced to sorting the pile. The spot underneath flummoxes me. Is flummox a transitive verb? Shit, Merriam-Webster labels it transitive but not also intransitive, which means I can't say "I am flummoxed." Poo. In the time Before, someone laid black plastic at the end of the garage, piled large gravel on it, bordered it with brick, and called it done. Cherry shoots and bindweed grow through plastic and gravel both, and I don't know how to stop them.

The stump has been in that very spot since June, when RDC noticed it wobble when a squirrel jumped on it. He plinked it with his thumb and over it went, and there it has lain since. My stepfather, when he was here, complimented us on our bench, and bench it is likely to remain because we don't have a chainsaw and the wood would probably bend a jillion Sawzall blades and I have noticed that sawing through something thick with a hacksaw gets old fast.

Anyway, I sorted the brush into kindling, tinder, mulch, and Mulchman Mulch. There's a fellow in our neighborhood who is trying to mulch himself to the moon, and last year's raspberry canes are not so much tinder as a waste of space. I started to throw last year's sagebrush in the discard pile as well, but I snapped one branch and decided that as tinder it's pointless to fuel a fire but excellent for fragrance.

Then I was done. The last day of Daylight Time, and I hope I savored it adequately.

raking

As I was getting ready to start raking, I remembered I hadn't charged Dandelion and it was only one-quarter charged. While I brushed my beak and hung laundry on the line and did everything before seizing the rake, I powered it. My goal for the day was the front and sides, but I had just about finished the back as well before the music died. The yard needs a fine combing, and the gardens keep their leaves for insulation until spring, but overall I had a satisfying work day.