Outside Work

When I made my post a week ago I said the work on the living room quarter round was the first I'd done on the house for awhile.

Well, I forgot.  I've also been taking advantage of the days when fine weather and my time off overlap to get something done in the yard.

Allowing for pulling the henbit out of the (unplanted) vegetable plots, mostly it's been grinding up last fall's maple leaves with the Toro leaf-vac.  I can only do at a time as much as is permitted by 1) the time and daylight available; 2) my stamina; and 3) the dryness of the leaves.  Dry or dryish leaves equals great progress.  Damp or sopping leaves means constant clogs in the grinder wheel and repeated disassembly to clean it out. 

Several bags filled two Sunday afternoons ago as I cleared out the borders on the east side of the backyard.  Those leaves were pretty much all dry.  Got a few more bags filled this past Sunday as I tackled the border on the east side.  This part of the yard gets less sun, the pile was deeper, and I could only do the top layer.  Worked on it again this past Monday for forty minutes or so between paying jobs.

Still a good (or bad, depending on your perspective) amount to do.  But I have other work I have to complete first, and technically I'm only on the Internet to look up a fact for the sermon I'm writing for tomorrow.  Maybe if it will refrain from raining I can get more of this cleanup done tomorrow.

The ground up leaves will all go for mulch for the vegetable beds.  Assuming I get them planted, that is.

Down Day

Got up this morning, put on my work clothes, and was going to spend all day sanding steps.

But the mild weather tempted me outside to do something about the net-bound black raspberry canes.  Spent all morning detangling the net and cutting off the tops that'd grown through it; pulling up the suckers that had ranged out of bounds (including through the fence into the neighbors' yard), and lopping off the old growth.  Ended up with three paper leaf bags full of trimmings.  I'd glad I did it and I wish I'd done it a month ago, but after that I was scratched and exhausted.

And went upstairs and took a four hour nap.

And still felt draggy and tired after that.

So no sanding today.  Damn.  I guess this chemo business does have an effect on me after all.

Quick Update

I have been working on the house the past two-plus weeks; I just haven't been working in the house.

Nope, time and the growing season waits for no one, so it's been yard and garden, garden and yard, since the 19th of June.

Grinding up last fall's leaves to mulch the vegetable beds, mostly.  How long I could do that each day has depended upon three factors:  1) the relative wetness of the leaves to be chopped, 2) the battery life remaining in my lawn mower, and 3) the energy remaining in me.  Nos. 1 and 2 are the most determinative, since I'd be tempted to keep going until I dropped (though I know I shouldn't) if the mower would keep going and if there were enough dry leaves to do.

This process has really done a number on part of my back lawn.  Set the mower low enough the mulch the leaves, and there goes the grass.  What I really need is one of those leaf-grinding machines, but you know what they say about wishes and beggars.

There's been a lot more planting, too.  Local nursery had a good sale on flowers annual and perennial a week or so ago and I took advantage.  Put in some impatiens under the kerrias by the back gate, and it looks so nice, I wonder why I never did it before.

Got some pruning in, too, late last week.  My weeping cherry needed a haircut, badly, and I confess to taking my pruners to the shrubs of the neighbors to the west, here and there, to clean up where he'd done a crudely quick-and-dirty hack job on them about a month ago.  I mean, I'm the one who's gotta look at them, right?

Week ago Saturday, the neighbor across the street brought over his ladder and cleaned the maple seeds out of my back porch downspout.  We thought he'd got them all, till it rained hard that afternoon and the gutter was still overflowing.  I was watching the spout over the rain barrel, when whoosh!!!  the last of the clog cleared and that water exploded out of the spout and, completely missing the barrel, made a small temporary pond in my back yard.

It settled down and filled the barrel, and we got another good barrel-filler the 23rd.  Hope we get another soon.  That's the last it's rained worth a darn around here.

What else?  Once the leaves were gone from their spot in the west border, I moved the broken bricks I put there two years ago, then dug out the river rock and took up the landscape fabric.  Discovered a cool thing when I did:  the previous owners, when they put in the board fence, lined the foot of it with brick pavers.  Funny, it's only like this on the west side.  Looks like it keeps small creatures from burrowing underneath.  I laid another row of bricks over that, since the fence has shifted a bit.

That done, I was able to turn my compost pile.  Lots of nice dirt on the bottom, which I'll have to decide where to use.  Maybe I can fill the depressions in my front lawn.  Heaven knows that with this dry spell the grass in those areas might be dead already. 

Anyway, tonight, even though there were more leaves to mulch (raked out from the dark and mysterious side yard), I elected to come inside and strip old shellac off the stairs to the third floor.  Don't think I've tackled that since the 12th.  I knocked off about twenty till midnight, even though I only have two treads and risers and a certain amount of stringer left to do.  My sensible reason is that I have round two of chemotherapy in the morning and should get a good night's sleep beforehand.  My real reason for stopping is that my hair is falling out, and although I got it cropped short a week ago, it got really annoying with the hairs sticking to the sweat on my back and shoulders.  If I didn't have more heat gun work to do, I probably would have pushed through.  But I'm not feeling that dedicated.

So I'll try to add a picture or two to this post, then it's off to the shower.

Giving Thanks

As I do most years, I had Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Frieda's* house, sharing the meal with her and her extended family. Late this afternoon, after the rest of the family had departed and all the food was put away, Frieda and her husband followed me back to my house. In their extended cab truck. With a big, long, iron chain.

Where they hitched up said chain and pulled out the stumps of my arborvitaes from the side yard. You know, the one that fell clean over and its mate that started leaning after a windstorm last February.

Finally, they're gone!

Actually, only the one nearest the street came out with the chain. The other one, the dead one, Dave* broke out himself, because it was on the other side of the air conditioning unit and he was afraid of what the chain might do to the equipment.

And they're not exactly gone-gone, since I still have to take a chainsaw to the stumps and haul the pieces to the yard waste dump.

But those brown-fronded, shedding, bug-ridden arborvitaes are finally out of the ground and now I can plant the hollies I've been wanting since 2004!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Providential

We're having a wonderful Indian summer here in southwestern Pennsylvania, with outdoor temperatures hovering in the 50s and 60s during the day and going down into the 30s and 40s at night. This means I've been able to get outside and do some of the winter prep yard work I'd put off or plain wouldn't do if it were colder.

It's also meant that I could put off turning on the furnace full time. I can't claim any ecologically-founded virtue in this desire; it's just that I'm poor. Or cheap. Take your pick.

Actually, I deinstalled the thermostat had been deinstalled and shut off the HVAC main switch off last July when I started doing the faux finish on my 1st floor hall. My vow and resolution was not to reinstall it until the trim was refinished and put back in place and the new wallpaper hung. In September, this was supposed to be, a week or two after I finished with the Welsh-American convention I was involved in here in Pittsburgh and had bidden a fond adieu to the Kansas City friend who was my guest during it.

But work and life and Facebook intervened. So barring some work in the garden and giving the thermostat cover a "bronze" coat with model car paint (so it'll look less glaring over my new paper), I've accomplished pretty much nothing on the inside of the house since the end of August. Forget wallpapering; I haven't even finished stripping the 2nd floor hall floor.

And though the weather outside has been happily mild, my brick and plaster house can retain only so much heat. Inside daytime temps descended into the low 50s by a week ago last Friday, and reluctantly I gave in and reinstalled the thermostat over the primed plaster.

Ran the furnace three or four hours that evening, just to take the chill off. And a little the next morning. But that day, the weather got up into the high 60s, so I shut the furnace off again. More money saved!

Before I did, though, I removed the burner door and had a look at the burner itself. Um . . . yeah, look at all the smuts glowing in there. Needs cleaned, that's for sure. Actually, I am an inexperienced idiot with furnaces and I've never had it cleaned the entire six years I've been here. Can't hurt to get it done, and it'll probably help with energy efficiency, right?

So yesterday morning a serviceman comes from a local heating and cooling company to inspect, clean, and tune up my furnace. Down we go to the basement, I show him where everything is, and he gets to work.

Less than ten minutes later he's up at the top of the basement stairs, saying, "I have news for you, and it's not good."

"Oh?" say I, reserving judgment.

"Yes. Your heat exchanger unit is cracked. It's not very big now, but as you run the heat it'll widen and there'll be a danger from carbon monoxide."

"It'll need to be replaced?"

"Yes. And that's not good news."

Well, maybe not as bad as he thinks. "I have a home warranty," I pronounce. "It covers furnace repairs."

"Oh, which one?"

"American Home Shield."

"Oh! We're one of their repair agencies! In fact, we're their No. 1 furnace repair contractor in this area!"

Back downstairs, he tried to show me the crack, way back there behind the burner. But my eyesight isn't so good and I had to take his word for it. He stayed down to put things back together and I went up to call AHS.

Funny, but even though that H&C company is just across the river, they didn't have my zip code registered with them on the AHS contractor list. After a few phone calls the oversight was corrrected, AHS assigned them the work order, the order for a new heat exchanger was put in, and they're to call me in a day or two when it arrives and arrange a time to come put it in. Hopefully sooner than later; the thermostat reads 55° today and it'll likely go lower by tomorrow.

But I call this whole thing providential. If I hadn't run the furnace only minimally this fall, that crack would've been widening and the CO would've been gassing me and my critters out. If I hadn't got off my duff and called for a cleaning (finally!!), the problem wouldn't've been found. And how providential it was that the H&C cleaning company I called is an AHS contractor, so I could get the repair process working right away, instead of waiting a day or two longer for the assigned contractor to get back with me.

Who says being cheap doesn't pay off? Though I suppose, if I'd been so cheap as not to have gotten the furnace cleaned, I might've had a pay off I wouldn't like.

For a Change

I've been stripping wallpaper in my 1st and 2nd floor halls and stairway the past couple of weeks, and today I was tired of it. So for a change I headed out back to take care of some long-delayed garden maintenance.

I really would save myself a lot of trouble by not being so bloody green and instead put my fallen leaves out at the curb like everybody else. But noooooo, I've got to mulch them up and use them on my vegetable garden!

Somehow, though, it's never a good time in the autumn to get the mulching done. I figured out last year that the lawn mower, set really low, is the best tool for the job. But having no place but the yard to spread out the leaves, I can't use it for mulching until the grass goes dormant. And by late November, which is about when it does around here, it's too cold or too wet or too snow-covered or just plain too dark to do anything about it.

So the leaves get piled in the borders or on the stripped-out garden beds to wait for early spring.

Which really should have meant two weeks ago, if I was worried about the grass being dormant. Because despite our night-time temperatures' repeated plunges into the mid-20s, the grass is nevertheless starting to grow.

Time for lawnmower mulching action! Got the west border cleared of leaves; at least, the part of it not encumbered with my mouldly woodpile and the compost tumbler and so on. I'm not sure about the effect on the grass; I tried to rake up and bag as much of the leaf fragments as I could, but I may have done my turf irreparable violence.

Alternatively, I've enriched the soil and strengthened my grass by putting back some of what the maple trees took away. Your choice.

The charming thing about doing this job this evening is that I couldn't let guilt or ambition drive me to go nutty on it. I could work only while the light lasted and until I ran down both my lawnmower batteries. And that wasn't unendurably long, seeing that they've been down the basement discharging all winter.

Good thing to have the limitations. Because there was yet some daylight left when the batteries both died and if the mower had kept going, so would've I. And my body hurts enough as it is. If I thought I was "tired" of stripping wallpaper, now I really am tired. Period.

Tired

I'm tired, tired, tired.

Yardwork, which is to say, back garden work.

Got the new bed for the blackberries and so on finished last week. The sand cherry is moved out of the northwest corner into the east border, the new Solomon's seals are now in along the north fence, the saxifrage is moved from behind the kerrias in the north border to a position in front of them, and the new Jacob's Ladder (polemonium caeruleum) is where the saxifrage used to be.

And the blackberry is in the ground, as of yesterday.

The great struggle this year is against the maple tree seeds. Is there some conspiracy among maple trees that induces them all to let go in natural-disaster proportions in certain years? First my Norway maple covered the bottom end of the backyard with what looked like yellow-green snow. I swept and raked up the little paired green whirligigs, from the walk, the north border, and the unplanted garden beds. Then the neighbors' silver maple let loose a week-long barrage of pale brown samaras. Maple seeds everywhere! On the walkway! On the garden cobbles! On the beds I'd raked out before! In the borders! On the porch!

And especially in the grass, nose-down, wings in the air, looking like unexploded bombs protruding from the wreckage of London during the Blitz. Or lying flat and myraid in the bare patches I have to reseed.

I think the neighbors' tree has about shot its bolt. I think. So yesterday evening I went out and raked maple seeds out of my yard. And raked, and raked, and raked. Filled up the ComposTumbler with them but there were still thousands to go. Filled up a large black lawn bag with them, but there's still more out there. Ran the lawn mower over them, but they're still in my grass, waiting to explode, waiting till I drop my guard for one minute, conspiring to grow into saplings that'll defy my mower blade and mock the strain in my back as I bend to pull them by hand.

I do not care. I'm too tired to mess with it anymore. The backyard is going to get reseeded whether the maples are invading or not.

In a day or two. When I'm not so tired.

Then today, I fork-turned one of my four garden beds. It needed turned because I emptied last year's ComposTumbler load into it and the new compost had to be integrated. It needed turned because the maples in my yard love the amendments and fertilizer and water so much, they spread their roots in anew every year. I have to smack their little rooty fingers, as it were, and say "Hands off!"

But where, oh where did those new rocks come from? I know I double-dug that bed three or four years ago! I've been turning it over by spade and fork every year since! Why should I be hitting big roundy rocks 10" down now? Did the rock gnomes bring them via subterranean passage? They can't be petified potatoes I forgot to dig last year; I've never grown potatoes yet!

Well, the rocks are now out. Some of them, anyway. And the bed is forked and turned. And I've got six seedlings of broccoli planted, and despite the wind, mulched with newspaper and ground-up leaves. And a bushel more maple seeds are swept off the cobbles of the garden paths.

And I am tired. Too tired to upload pictures.

Maybe later.

I Didn't Mean to Do It

But this afternoon I weeded my front border.

And bought corn gluten to use as an organic pre-emergent on my lawn.

And raked out my side yard and the front parking strip.

I only meant to take pictures of the bulbs and perennials that were emerging. But I noticed how the little tufts of grass were invading the border around the daylily blades and I thought, "I don't want that in the photo!"

So I got down on my hands and knees to see if they'd come out easily.

Oh, yes, the ground was soft enough I could pull out the grass and a lot of their stolons, too.

Oh, look what a mess I've made of my lawn! Pulled-up grass tufts with dirt hanging from their roots, lying in straggly piles at the far end of the border.

That reminded me: I'm going to have to get the corn gluten down onto the lawn soon if it's to do its work. The local radio organic gardening experts say to apply it when the forsythia is in bloom. I haven't seen any yet, but surely that will happen any minute. And oh, dear, I'd been out with the car earlier and should have bought some then.

What time was it? Oh, a little after 4:00. Agway closes around 5:00. I'd better run over before I forget.

Wait, first check my AutoCAD drawing of my property and do a take-off to see how much yard I need to cover. Okay, roughly 1,700 square feet.

Half hour or forty minutes later, I'm back home with a 50 pound bag of corn gluten. At five pounds for every 250 square feet, that'll cover 2,500, way more grass than I've got.

Never mind. I'm not messing with the little 5 pound bags with the pretty graphics on the plasticized wrapper that'd cost me nearly four times as much for the same amount. I'll take the paper bag and make sure I keep the leftovers where it's dry so I can use it next year, too.

So now I have my corn gluten pre-emergent, but I also still have pulled-up grass carcasses on my front lawn.

Go get the rake, and a basin (the bushel basket is full of fir branches that need chipping). See that the sideyard is covered with bird seed remnants under the bird feeder, and dead red fronds from the arborvitae that got attacked by spider mites last fall.

Better start back there and rake that up, too.

Get the basin filled up. Go empty it, into-- what? Not the compost pile-- don't want all that millet in it. Oh, into a paper leaf bag. Bring the leaf bag into the side yard. Proceed to rake out the side yard, both my strip and the neighbors'. Up come bird seed shells. Up come dead arborvitae fronds. Up come last fall's leaves and up come the wan flattened corpses of last summer's hostas.

All goes into the bag, along with the dry sticks and heads of one of the Autumn Joy sedums, whose new growth was peeking coyly through the mulch. (Other one was still too soft, and I drew the line at getting out the nippers).

Finally I work my way up to the front border and deal with the rest of the grass invading it. Some of it is stubborn-- go fetch the garden fork and the weed digger. Scrape, dig, and pull; scrape, dig, and pull. Go after some other, unidentified weeds while I'm at it. Note the early signs of chickweed in the border-- damn. It's too small to get ahold of; it'll have to wait.

Rake up the weeding mess in the grass. Rake up the leaves that have been lying there all winter. Note that the strip of grass between the public sidewalk and the street looks like hell-- smothered with matted gray leaves and littered with the cigarette butts that some boor has been leaving up and down our block of late.

Got the rake out here, right? So use it.

I do. Happily, it's street sweeping night tonight on my side of the street, so I just rake all the nasty stuff out into the gutter. And hope the borough crew actually comes.

A lot of Thursday nights they don't.

It looks like rain. Hurry up, get the paper bag-- full now-- under cover. Get the broom and sweep the sidewalk and the curb. Take in the broom, the rake, the fork, and the weed digger. Be astonished at myself because I actually did some work in my yard before I actually had to do it.

Now if I can be that insouciantly diligent when the forsythia bloom and it's time to spread that corn gluten, my lawn just may stand a chance this year.

Checking In

Barring Wednesday's theological cyber glitch, I haven't posted for the past week.

And I haven't posted about productive work on the house for I think a week yet again.

That's because, barring routine housework and yardwork, I haven't gotten any productive work on the house done for the past week or two.

It's only partially because of the four-day-a-week AutoCAD class I started a week ago yesterday. It's mostly because in all my current projects, I've met some sort of check or delay or brick wall. And not wanting to do the bitch-and-moan polka, I've said nothing.

After all, you, dear readers (all two of you), want to hear how cleverly I'm solving the problems, not how they're making me wonder what was it, exactly, I didn't like about landlords.

But on the theory that it's more fun to read about the messes fellow-housebloggers get into before they emerge in shining and exemplary success than to plod through the self-glorifying sagas of those who never drive a nail wrong, I'll give a rundown of what I'm embroiled with and how I'm at least trying to take care of it:

Sanding and repainting the Adirondack chairs. Decided to use my Black & Decker Mouse sander to even out the old paint, but I was out of the Velcro (TM) -backed sandpaper sheets that go on it. Lowe's and Home Depot don't carry them. They're hideously expensive even online. But hooray, I found an outfit called Online Industrial Supply, that would sell me 10-yard rolls of fuzzy-backed sandpaper in my choice of grit for a very reasonable price. The two rolls I ordered came couple of days thereafter, and I'm using the last B&D sheet as a template to cut new ones to fit my Mouse. It's going to work great, and I'll get back on the job this weekend, as soon as I finish my AutoCAD homework or the humidity goes down, whichever comes first. Or last.

Reseeding the back yard. Got that done last Saturday. The seeding part, I mean. But the recipe I was using for repairing a dog-damaged lawn says to cover the seed with a quarter inch of compost. I was thinking compost would be too acidic, and I bought five bags of humus-y topsoil instead. It's lovely, rich, black dirt. It's also sopping wet. Quarter inch cover? An inch and a half, more likely! Not counting what sticks to my hands.

I tried emptying two bags worth into the garden cart, to let the dirt dry in the sun. But of course then the rains came. Dirt can't get very dry covered with a tarp . . .

Finally yesterday I said Oh, phooey, and scattered those two bags worth over the newly-seeded area as far as it would cover. It will probably just smother the seeds, but what can you do? The sugar maple tree has started its annual leaf dump, so it's all equal. I'll just have to try again in the spring.

Recovering my drafting board, etc. This is very annoying. The vinyl cover will not lie down flat, even with double-sided tape under it. You'd think after a week or more of resting, it'd behave itself. But noooooo! And it has to be flat, or you get those ugly gray smears up and down your drawing when you slide your parallel bar.

At least, when those of us who still think some architectural drafting should be done by hand slide our parallel bars!

I had an interview (yes!) with another hand-drafting architect this past Tuesday. While we were at it, I asked her about her experiences with covering her board. Told me, she doesn't try to tape the cover down. Just lets the parallel bar hardware hold it to the substrate. And I guess it flattens out eventually.

So I'll try that. But just in case I want to try the tape again, I gave the plywood board a coat of primer this evening. Maybe the sticky didn't work because it was absorbed by the bare wood grain.

Once my studio's put back together, I can get back to real house projects like woodwork stripping and floor sanding and redesigning the upstairs bathroom around the new kittens' litterbox.

That is, unless I'm consuming all my time trying to keep up in computer drafting class. If you don't hear from me before Thanksgiving, blame that.

Or you can blame the dog and the cats. Yes, you could assuredly blame them.

I Did That. It's Real Keen!

Funny how a whole summer is hardly long enough to clean out your files, but a few days will suffice to complete a whole slew of tasks you should have done ages ago-- like the few days before the impending visit of The Appraiser.

There is something to be said for an unhurried approach. So much more conducive to preserving one's health and sanity. But even as your deadline drives you on to exhaustion, it's also nice to stop from time to time like God on the Seventh Day and say, as did a high school classmate of mine after a communal renovation project, "See that part? I did that. It's real keen!"

Real keen, like the bolt I installed early Tuesday morning on the hatch to the attic storage. On Monday the kittens, taking after their adopted big sister the calico cat, figured out how to jiggle the cabinet latch open and get in. The little female picked up a dead bird in there (Let's not think about how it got there and how it got dead, okay?). I do not want a repeat of this. Thus, the brass bolt.

And from Tuesday, see how keen the basement shower floor is with a second coat of moss-green floor paint? Applied it with a brush instead of a roller this time: maybe it'll hold up better.

And a touch-up coat of paint on the rest of the bathroom floor:

That's real keen, too.

And early (very early) Wednesday morning, it was keen to get the basement laundry room walls de-cobwebbed, vacuumed, and scrubbed with mildewcide and Simple Green and the floor mopped with TSP:

Wednesday, I got the silly bushes in the front and side trimmed:
(I say "silly" because if you don't trim them, they look unkempt and disruptive and disreputable, but when you do trim them, it seems it's always the most charming, liveliest branch tips you have to shear off. It keeps striking me as some sort of parable about modern society, but whenever I try to work it out, I can't decide on which side the moral lies!)

But getting them done was keen, especially the lemon-lime parfait effect on the golden cypresses or whatever those are.

And it was keen to get out the loppers and tame the weeping cherry, which had threatened to reach out with its rampant branches and devour the house:

And ya gotta admit, it's real keen that at long last, I got the new tiles around the upstairs bathroom mirror grouted and a new medicine cabinet put in:

(Yes, you do see a gap in the tile at the top of the mirror. That is not keen. That was cut out by some previous owner to accommodate the former medicine cabinet with the fugly fluorescent fixtures attached to it (I think the ballast sat at the top). This cabinet here is an el-cheapo stand-in until I can custom-build the cabinet I need. The space between the studs is too narrow for a decent stock model.

(Of course, all this will be torn out when I do my Dream Bath with the blue iridescent tile and the clawfoot tub.)

There's even more keen stuff I got done these past few busy busy busy days, all so I can impress that august personage, The Appraiser. I was up till six-ay-em doing it. (Thus the chronologically-impossible but artistically-accurate time stamp on this post.) But at this hour enough is enough. I do believe (novel thought!) that it would be really, really keen to get some sleep.

Will the appraiser think all this work is keen? Will the bank extend enough of a line for me to get something done on? We'll see in a few hours what comes of it all.

Trade-Offs

I'm still trying to get rid of the landscape rock my previous owners were so fond of.

My friends Hannah* and Steve* have a large drainage ditch/percolation sink on their property they need filled with something permeable.

I got rock, they need rock. So let's trade.

Howbeit, I wasn't exactly planning on their coming over to scoop rock this evening. Monday night is community choir night and our Fearless Musical Director does not take random absences lightly.

But Hannah rang me at 5:00 o'clock this afternoon and said, "We're all coming over at 6:00 to get that rock. OK?"

"Uh, it's choir night, and I'm supposed to be there at 7:15."

"That's okay. I have to get the kids home by 7:00 to get them to bed for school in the morning. And this is the only time this week we can do it."

Um . . . my front border looked really ratty (witness specimen photo from last Spring): All random piles of rock and landscape fabric sticking up here and there, where I'd cleared the ground to plant daffodils and balloon flowers in previous years. Or from where I tried to dig up the miniature rhododendrens to transplant them in a more favorable spot, and gave up because the roots were under all that rock and I'd run out of places in my backyard to pile it. Good intentions and optimistic plans are all very well, but your typical appraiser won't see that. Curb appeal, my house front had not.

So I told Hannah and family to come ahead, and I'd take the consequences.

And they did, with their van, their tarp, their shovels, a five-gallon bucket or two, and a little plastic child's wheelbarrow. She and Steve and I amongst ourselves got the front border looking a bit more orderly; at least, if you look at it from the sidewalk. Helped (at some detriment to the plantings), by their kids Stevie* and Letitia*.

Wonderful how much three and two/halves people can get done in an hour and fifteen minutes! No, I did not make choir, and I shall have to prostrate myself in deepest self-agnegation to our director.

But it'll be worth it, for the work that got done.

Too bad the daylight ran out. Too bad Hannah and Steve don't need about 20 more cubic yards of the stuff. I'll trade them the rock, for a hole to put it in!

______________________________________

*Made-up names

Putting the Fear of God into Me

That is, if the god in question is Mammon.

But more on that anon.

I was going along, accomplishing a thing or two, but nothing ambitious or blog-worthy. Tied up the quince bush in the back garden so it wouldn't impale me on its thorns. Rigged up an arrangement with a bungee cord and a rock to keep the dog out of the Kitten Room while letting them come and go. Plodded along and finally, last Sunday, finished my file cataloguing and paperwork filing. Got the study dusted and vacuumed and put in order, hooray.

So did I immediately get back to woodwork stripping and other useful house renovation projects?

No. I made and canned tomato sauce (well, the fruit would have gone bad if I'd left it longer!). I spent a day or two trying to clean boot the operating system on my little laptop. I tabbed hanging file folders that needed it. I went to a lot of unavoidable meetings. I played with the kittens. I watched reruns of Rescue 911 on YouTube.

Anything but do anything significant to the house and grounds.

Until last night.

You see, yesterday morning I got a call from an appraiser. He's coming to look at the house this coming Thursday afternoon.

Panic in the streets!! The appraiser is coming in six days and my house is a falling-apart, torn-up mess!!

OK, Kate, think sensibly. There's no way the woodwork is getting stripped and refinished by Thursday afternoon. No way there will be new wallpaper up or decent tile or something down to replace the shabby vinyl on the kitchen and hallway floor. But there's a lot that can be and should be and must be done by then.

Like vacuum the blankets of pet hair and dust off the ceiling fans.

Check, did it last night.

And scrape the little tags of half-dissolved paint off the living room window and get the dirty drop cloth, etc,. cleared away.

Check, ditto.

And address curb appeal deficiencies. For example:

Today's task was edging the lawn, front and back. And yes, it was a lot faster and easier to do it this time, having undertaken the eight-hour marathon in June or whenever. And the Neutron edger attachment worked fine: once I'd put in a new string reel, I didn't have to stop and rethread broken edger string even once.

This is pretty, though I say it myself:

The Herbacious Border of the Future edged and semi-weeded:

I'd hoped to tackle my crazy bushes before nightfall. But sweeping up after always takes longer than you think, especially when you're working on cobblestone paving. Gotta get to those bushes before Thursday. And do something about the piles of landscape rock and fabric sticking up out of the front border. And clear the brush piles in the back away to the borough dump.

Why the sudden advent of an Appraiser? Not because I'm planning to put the house on the market; at least, not any time soon.

No, it's because my bank was eaten up by another bank, effective this past Monday. And I didn't like some of the new bank's terms and conditions.

So my checking account and I jumped ship to another financial institution. I also investigated transferring my home equity line of credit to said institution, since their ordinary interest rate is a good deal lower than what I'm paying now.

Buuuh-uht . . . ! If I can qualify, I can get 1% under current Prime, fixed. (Whoo-whoo!!) But going by the book, the value of the Sow's Ear falls short by a few thousand. The new bank is paying for the appraiser to come and see if the value might be scootched up higher.

Agreeing to that sure seemed like a good idea earlier in the week when I was on the phone with the loan officer. Now the appointment is made, I'm not so sure. There is so blinking much that screams out for attention around here. I think I'll be lucky if they don't appraise the house under the book rate, and refuse to transfer the line at all!

Whatever I can do to prevent that, I have to do. So for the next few days, I'll be sacrificing myself, my sweat, my muscles, and a great deal of money I don't really have to the great greedy god Mammon.

"Oh, great god Mammon, we bow before you! Grant us the blessing of a below-Prime interest rate! Salaamy, salaamy, baloney!"

Working on the Edge

My new Neuton cordless electric lawn mower with the edger/trimmer attachment came on Tuesday.

Wednesday I put it together and mowed the lawn. Yesterday, I read the instructions (yes, really!) and found out how the edger/trimmer works. But with the thunderstorm we had yesterday, I had to wait till today to try it out.

Started with the backyard path, which was pretty overgrown. What kind of a line I could get?

Better than with the string trimmer I once borrowed from a neighbor.

Even so, in some places, oops!

Then, around to the front.

Uncovered the brick edging I'd forgot I had along the walkway to the front door.

Then I tackled the public sidewalk. Can't say how this mower-attached edger compares overall to your typical hand-held string trimmer on that job. That one time time with my neighbor's machine, I got so annoyed at not being able to keep the line on the back walkway even, I gave up and did the front sidewalk with my dad's old yard knife, by hand.

Wish I could say my new edger cut through all the overhanging turf in one pass, but nothing doing. I suppose it's no surprise-- the string only extends out 3" or 4" at the most, and in some places the turf, including grass, was 6" thick.

So my dad's old yard knife (a cut-off and sharpened stainless steel dinner knife) batted cleanup again.

Then there was the everlasting issue of having the string break and having to undo the spool housing and find the end and poke it through the little hole then put it all back together again . . . Yeah, par for the course for string trimmers, but don't you think they'd figure out some way that wouldn't be necessary all the time?

Eight hours, several new calluses, a bodyful of sore muscles, and a sunburn later, I was finally sweeping up the last of the mess.

And I look at this job and I think, "Eight hours? For what?"

For a job that's Just Supposed to Be Done, that's what. It's not exciting or sexy like pulling the carpet off the stairs and finding good hardwood underneath or laying tile with perfect grout joints. Edging the sidewalk is like emptying the dishwasher or doing the laundry. You get no kudos or credit if you do it; in fact, you're a lazy slob if you don't. There's even a local borough ordinance requiring homeowners to keep the grass and so on off the public footpath. Don't wait for applause, just Get It Done, and about damn time, too.

And before you know it, it'll be time to do it again.

I've got some Dutch ancestry in the usual American mix, and something in me still admires the industrious huisvrouw of old who was out scrubbing her doorstep at 7:00 o'clock every morning. I still sometimes wish I could be that on top of everyday housekeeping and yard care chores. But it ain't gonna happen.

So big boring routine jobs like edging the sidewalk wait for some momentous event, like company coming or the purchase of a new power tool or God forbid, a citation from the local authority. I fear my Dutch great-great-great-great-grandmother would be sadly disappointed in me.

Though if she could see me using the new shop vac to sweep the dust off the sidewalk, I think she'd commend my ingenuity. So efficient. And very effective.