Category: Houseblog

Adam notes that he was hard at work this weekend too. Sounds harder than the stuff I was doing:

… we attacked our overgrown and uncared for backyard. We cleared out blackberry bushes and weeds as well as a dump pile that included 5 sections of fencing, a christmas tree, and a trampoline. In total, we filled 20+ yard bags of waste. We also discovered that there’s a 10′ x 15′ concrete slab out back which is now the future home of a shed or patio.…

Yikes. Reminds me of a time in college when some friends, in their annual cleaning of a house they had rented for several years running, decided it was finally time to clean out the back yard. After bushwhacking all the ivy and other plants back, they found that there was an entire terrace that had been hidden by all the overgrowth, complete with steps.

Ah, late spring/early summer blockbuster time. As for the last few years, it’s the time that you’re not afraid to admit to friends, co-workers, and even your wife that you’re still a comic book geek at heart. X-Men 2 (I can’t quite bring myself to call it X2) was excellent last night. Though afterwards I was sad (not for the first time) that I let my collection (which included, in addition to complete runs of various mini-series and spinoffs, included numbers 94 (in which Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus made their first appearances, and Wolverine joined the team), 95, a handful of issues between, and then numbers 135 through about 225) go shortly after graduating college. —Sorry; geek off. (But there was something so fascinating about picking up the comic for the first time around #171, then going back and learning where all these friends had come from and where they had been. It helped that my first job was in a comic book store.)

So. Bricks. We’re about halfway done with our job, and our full pallet of bricks. There was one scary moment after we did the ramp from the driveway to the section we had already bricked in by the recycling, and started the section from the gate to the side garage door. And then I realized that the bricks were about an inch too high for the gate to close. We had done the new stretch at the same height as the other sections, but it was too high. Swearing, I had to dig out the bricks under the gate path. So now we have a bi-level path. At least until tomorrow. I’ll have to look at it again in daylight and see if I can live with it.

But it’s not all dusty and hard work. We have roses coming into bloom. And irises are starting to come out.

It’s been just about long enough since our last brick excursion that we’ve forgotten how painful it was. So we have another order in to finish the job. When we’re done, we’ll have a complete path around from the driveway to the back patio, which is perfect because it includes the major accesses for the garden and the recycling.

Man, I’m boring. How boring? Just put in a composter last night, that’s how boring. But I’ll be a boring guy with the best vegetables on the block. The herbs are growing like wildfire too.

Tonight, though, the X-Men movie.

—Oh, and Esta: impressive stream of consciousness. But I have to disagree with you about one thing: as much fun as it was to mow over the mint, the best part about mowing the lawn each week was always stopping.

…has two cut-off valves. One cuts off water pressure from the main line to the filters. The other cuts off water to the whole sink and faucet assembly—apparently, and to the filters as well, since the two valves are joined for some insane reason. Meaning that if the filter line is cut off, but the faucet is running, pressure will force water through the line to the filter.

And if you’re running the faucet to clean the cups under the filter, which you have removed for this purpose and to replace the filters, the additional back pressure will push water out the top of the filter unit and flood the area under our sink.

Needless to say, this was one of the quickest (and dampest) educations in plumbing I could have gotten. The mess is cleaned up, except for whatever leaked through the bottom of the cabinet and into the unreachable floor space to feed molds and mildews, and I’m onto step three, which is cleaning out the whole system with a mild bleach solution for fifteen to twenty minutes.

Which, by my clock, is enough time to drink a beer and ignore the whole mess.

All griping about being pigeonholed aside, I had a pretty typical weekend—which, here at JHN, means home improvement.

Friday night was the hardest working part. I came home early to investigate an apparent washing machine meltdown. Sure enough, the machine is leaking lubricant out from under the drum and reliably leaving oil spots on part of just about every load. Given that it’s old (i.e. came with the house) and cheap, I think we could probably get a new one for not much more than it would take to repair it. Sigh. Guess we’re off to do some shopping this week.

Anyway, after our washing machine diagnosis, we spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening in the garden, digging up the last three garden boxes and planting herbs (three kinds of thyme, savory, marjoram, rosemary, dill, oregano (in its own pot in the garden box), mint (in its own pot on the patio, far away from everything else), and camomile. Basil will wait in our indoor greenhouse until warmer weather comes; ditto parsley and cilantro. Our sage plant survived the winter, and the existing rosemary is positively thriving), Walla Walla onions (which appear to be the Pacific Northwest’s answer to Vidalias), and rhubarb. In the other beds, we have spinach, peas, and fava beans emerging. Our tomato seedlings continue to worry us inside, but with something like 30 seedlings we will probably have a few hardy volunteers to plant before too long.

Saturday, we tore up the turf inside the new bed under the cherry tree, trying not to tear up the cherry’s roots at the same time. We’ll start ground cover in the bed soon, and probably fill in the rest with pea gravel so we don’t have to worry about decaying bark mulch turning the soil too acidic or providing a haven for weeds. We also assembled landscaping ties in our front bed: two ties high to keep dogs from wandering onto the bed and defecating (sadly, a repeat occurrence). Two ties high means we had to fasten them together. I wanted to use steel bracing plates, but the gentleman at Home Depot suggested long landscape tie screws. “Sounds good,” I said. Heh. —Two stripped sockets (5/16″ and 10 mm), one nearly stripped box wrench, and a new drill later, I finally got all but one of them in. I managed to get the last one worked in halfway, but so tightly that I can’t loosen or tighten it any more. I think I’m going to just get a bolt cutter or a file and lop off the part still showing above the wood.

Thus endeth your Houseblog update for today.

For those scratching their heads and wondering whether Lisa and I have lost our minds, what with the bricklaying and so on, I would like to report that we don’t always do everything ourselves. Case in point: yesterday we had a tree surgeon out to remove some damaged branches from the enormous evergreen in our back yard. The branch removal mostly got the lowest hanging branches, which has the not entirely coincidental effect of making the back yard a lot brighter.

This weekend, in summary:

• Friday: Thanks to Dave, about a thousand hits to the article about Apple and Universal (more on that in a minute). That night: dinner party and wine tasting (thanks, Catherine and Peter!). Guests stayed until after 1, laughing and talking.
• Saturday: brick laying (what a fabulous way to follow up a wine tasting party!). We dug out a pine-bark covered path, laid in sand, put the bricks down, poured more sand over the path, and swept the sand down into the gaps between the bricks. Then we both felt a disturbance in the Force: as though a thousand back muscle cells cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced. Afterwards we went to a friendís cocktail party and reawakened the muscle cells, only to put them asleep again with some great sangria.
  
• Sunday: laundry and more bricklaying, this time the muddy path between our fence and the brick pad where the garbage cans rest. Then a quick trip with our friends to Molbakís, where we bought dill, marjoram, thyme, basil, rosemary, mint, camomile, and oregano for the garden. Then lawn mowing, grass seeding, flower plantingÖ and near total collapse, before rallying to make angel hair pasta with shrimp in olive oil and lemon, salmon with Thai herbs, asparagus, and new potatoes. Followed oddly enough by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Oy. I think Iíll give my second career as a garden maintenance guy a miss.

How was your weekend?

Well, the Great Bricklaying Experiment continues. Yesterday’s work was mostly rained out. We completed most of the other projects, including bricking out a new bed under the cherry tree where the grass has stopped growing and getting landscaping ties in the front of the bed by the street. We did run into a few snags, though. There’s about a two foot gap at the end of the last tie that we’d like to fill with part of another tie, and a six-foot length along the bottom of the driveway that would happily accept the remnants of an eight-foot landscape tie with two feet cut off. The catch is that I don’t have a saw that’s powerful or long enough to cut landscape ties. Maybe my neighbor’s table saw?

Anyway, I think I’ll have to continue to lay bricks between now and kingdom come. Pictures as there is something photo-worthy.

A slightly sleepless night later (note to self: hamburger perhaps not the best thing to eat on a slightly acid stomach, even if homemade) and we awaken to the phone ringing downstairs. Lisa says, “I’d better turn on the upstairs ringer; we don’t want to miss the delivery call.” Then I hear a rumble from outside the window. I peek out and there’s a flatbed trailer parked across the street, with a pallet of bricks and landscaping ties atop it. I scramble into clothes and across the street and guide the forklift until he manages to push the pallet into the left stall of our garage (Lisa having volunteered to put her car outside until we can get the stuff all in place).

Yes, it’s a holiday here at Jarrett House North. The plan was to take off a day to get everything in place for our new bricked walks and garden beds. And of course it’s raining. Ah well.

…why Ignatz Mouse always stole his bricks, or bought them on credit, from Kolin Kelly the brickmaker in Krazy Kat. The damned things are pricey. They would have been pricier, except we found that “patio bricks” (in the building materials section, not the garden section) were more than ten cents a brick cheaper.

The bricks, as well as some landscape ties (why do they come in eight-foot lengths? That’s two feet longer than can fit in my car even with the back seat down), will be delivered tomorrow. So that left us with a light day, right? Heh. After four hours digging up the front beds, weeding, planting new plants, trimming the sidewalk, putting weedblocking cloth down, and digging the outline of a new bed in the side yard, I think that’s all the “light day” I can take.

(Incidentally, I almost wrote “Colin Creevey” in the first paragraph. Which leads to the amusing mental picture of Ignatz Mouse beaning Harry Potter with a brick, while Colin madly takes pictures of a confused Krazy Kat. Crossovers are so scary.)

Bright and sunny here this morning. I know it won’t last but I’m enjoying it now. Tomorrow we’ll start our first major outdoor projects, replacing some of the old bare muddy bark paths in the garden with brick and laying a new bed under the cherry tree, where all the grass is being replaced by weeds. Today, though, I have a monster of a cold. Vitamin C and eight hours in front of a computer should help.

I was excited a few weeks ago to realize that our lawn needed to be cut. This may sound odd, but last summer and fall everything was so dry that I was afraid that the grass wasn’t going to come back. But it was looking long, lush, luxuriant, and I was happy.

So yesterday, I set my self up for a day of lawn care, I got the mower out. And after a few rounds discovered that it was “luxuriant” the same way the hair of a man with a comb-over is “luxuriant.” Only when I clipped the sparser-than-I-realized grass back, I found not bare scalp but moss. And dandelions.

God, dandelions. Bane of my existence. At least I found a curiously satisfying way to attack them (shovel, at a shallow angle under the center of the dandelion, to cut the taproot, then the whole plant comes up with a gentle tug, without harming the surrounding grass). I’ll need to keep watching for them; the taproots will continue to send up new plants until they exhaust themselves, and there will always be new ones that pop up. But I’ll be ready. After all, vigilance is the eternal price of a lawn.

I took a bunch of photos of our back yard this morning, with the full intention of posting them, until I remembered that Lisa has the USB cable for the camera with her at her conference. (Mental note: buy another A:B cable, cheapskate.)

It’s the kind of grey humid morning, just after a rainfall, that was so rare in Virginia… heh. Not here…

It’s amazing how little it takes to make me feel domestic. I came home in the late afternoon daylight and helped Lisa weed the bed beside the driveway.

(The beds are all a complete disaster, incidentally. We have paths around all the garden beds, from the garden to the back patio, and from the garden to the garage door, and all the way down to the street covered in bark. Thinly covered, now, and with weeds creeping through—actually, covering—the bark. I foresee paving brick, landscaping cloth, lots more bark, and raised beds in the future.

(Also, have I mentioned how good it is to have daylight again?))

Anyway, I only got as far as the end of the fence while the light was still good, then we did some quick shopping and made dinner from leftovers and did laundry and set a pot of stock that I started making last night back on the burner to cook down. What is it about dryer sheets? the smell? Something, anyway, that makes me want to be even more domestic. Or else just makes me sound like Mickey Rooney on a bad day.

While we were in the garden last Saturday, Lisa noted large holes dug in the back bed, larger than you might expect from a squirrel. “Maybe it’s a cat,” I offered.

“Looks too big to be a cat,” she said grimly.

I thought it was destined to stay a mystery, but Sunday night after dinner with Ed and Gina we were sitting around the dining room table talking. Then Gina said, “Oh, you have a raccoon!” pointing out our skywall into the darkness.

I saw a naked pointed snout and said, “That’s no raccoon. It’s a possum.”

Sure enough, as we watched him, he went into the back bed where the holes were. He was huge, at least a foot tall at the shoulder, and not particularly afraid of the light either. At least until we got a flashlight, at which point he unhurriedly vanished into the bushes.

Unfortunately I didn’t think to get a picture. Sigh. At least now I know what’s been digging in the side lawn.