« Lying Fallow | Main | Tiny Bubbles »
August 07, 2006
Making Up for the Lost Weekend
Or something like that. Goodness it's been a long time since I last posted. Did you miss me?
Please don't take it personally. I wasn't trying to get rid of you, honest. If I wanted to break up, I'd do it in person, not by blog.
Oh. My. God. Can you imagine that entry?
Dear Diggory,I don't love you anymore, and I thought it best that you find out at the same time as everyone else on the planet.
Love (you like a friend),
Millicent
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, has done that very thing.
But I wasn't trying to avoid you. Really. My life just took over, as life sometimes does.
For instance. On Friday, my cell phone (which had been randomly turning itself on--when it was already on--and also randomly unlocking the key guard so that my pants were making phone calls while I walked down the street) decided to randomly shut off in the middle of conversations. Since I've owned that phone for years, I qualified for an upgrade discount and now I have brand new phone. Unfortunately, it's in the basic (boring) black, as the pink was on back-back-backorder, per the guy at the phone store.
So today was about getting a new cell phone, among other things. Friday was not, however. Friday was about getting by on as few phone calls as possible and painting a ceramic container for our kitchen utensils. (I promised myself one field trip a week this summer. I've been really terrible about it so far, but I finally took one on Friday.) Friday was also about picking up the 67 thousand pounds of dry cleaning because I only go to the dry cleaner once a year. (At most. Yes, that does mean that my dry cleaned clothes tend to be sniff-tested more than is really acceptable.)
Friday was also the day my dear David got a wild hair and decided that the front jungle landscaping beds were too overgrown to tolerate. Apparently he's tired of being the white trashiest house on the block. So he went to town with the weed whacker while I hand-trimmed around bushes and shrubs I wanted to keep. On Saturday and Sunday, we mulched those beds with 2+ inches of compost, and on Wednesday, a BIG delivery of shredded bark mulch is arriving that I get to spread over the beds all by myself. (Dave's working and they'll be dumping it in the street in front of the house, so I have to get it out of the way ASAP.)
Dave also razed the fire hazard weed bed along the alley (on Saturday). So today, I edged it with used brick and filled it with 20 cubic feet of bark chips. Don't even begin to judge me on this. I edged it so the bark wouldn't scatter all over the alley, wasting my efforts and money. This was not about having a tidy space--well, it was, hence the lack of weeds and the plethora of bark chips, but I'm not the kind of person who edges everything in brick--Never mind. All you would have to do is come visit to see that I am.
But it's only so the lawn mowing guys know where the edges are. Otherwise, they tend to mow down the daffodils.
And to keep in the mulch.
In my defense, I will point out that the bricks don't exactly match. It's a practical and eclectic tidiness. (Practical and eclectic. Like so much of the rest of my life.)
Anyhow, the yard is starting to look pretty good. We suspect the neighbors now all assume that we're getting ready to sell the house. No such luck, people. You're stuck with us for a while longer. At least we no longer have the white trashiest yard. Even our driveway is more or less in order now. (Dave did that a couple of weeks ago. The 5'x3'x3' pile of weeds is gone, as are the broken coffee table and the stacks of styrofoam. ) We still have the metal bedframes stacked against the garage, waiting for the Country Wife set to be built. (We're storing them for the designer.) But the official white trashiest house designation now actually belongs to the white trashiest neighbors.
I would like to take a moment here to announce that the overgrowth in the front yard was entirely my fault, and that Dave is generous and forgiving beyond belief to not only still love me despite the four-foot thistles that were edging the street, but to actually do what was probably the majority of the work on the beds this weekend.
You see, we have a division of labor in the Sallyacious household. Dave does all construction, heavy lifting, carpentry and spider killing. I do the dishes, am usually responsible for the laundry and the changing of the cat litter and am the outdoor maintenance person for items non-house related. But I had done shit-diddley with the yard this year.
Thats not entirely true. I had weeded and then mulched a large portion of the front beds in June. They grew back even more actively than before. So I did some more with the same results. That, combined with the fact that I had grand plans for the beds two years ago, before I blew out my knee, and that I couldn't do any work on them last summer, meant that I really wanted nothing more to do with the front beds. So I did the mature adult thing and ignored them.
Sweet, sweet David understood that I was incapable of action, and offered to help me out on Friday. And then he did. If he hadn't taken the initiative, the weeds would still be the most humiliating feature of the entire city of Moscow. (And that's saying something.)
So Friday was the day the weeds came down, while Saturday and Sunday were the day the beds were mulched. And Saturday was the day the dish network guy came to install the two (because we're so damn north and west of the East Coast, where all satellites focus) satellite dishes. We're so lucky. (Really. We are.) You can't see the dishes from the street or the alley. They're attached to the wall of the garage between the garage and house. They are invisible from the front of the house and also the back. You can only really see them from the porch and the sweet little garden between house and garage.
The downside to this, however, is that the sweet little garden got the shit trampled out of it by the satellite dish installation guy on Saturday. It's not salvageable. It's going to take some major fixin' in the spring, I fear. Since the trampled things were perrennials. Grrrrrr...
So that's a rather rambling account of my weekend. (So sue me. I had a glass of wine with dinner.) Today I did the whole bark/brick thing and got the new cell phone, which was really much more bother than it should have been. However. It's a very nice phone and all of my numbers are entered. My one concern is that it's basic black, just like everybody else's phone. It is, however, far, far too expensive for me to tart it all up with nail polish like I did my first cell phone, which was also exactly like everybody else's phone at the time. So I went to the local craft store and bought a bunch of self-adhesive rhinestones and some dragonfly appliques. It's not going to look like everybody else's phone when I'm done with it...
So. Enough about me. How was your weekend?
Posted by sally at August 7, 2006 08:14 PM
©2006 - All content copyright Sally Eames-Harlan unless otherwise noted