Category: Home Improvement

Margie spent the day catching up on Needed Things to Do.

For my part, I bought Much Mulch, to scatter about the yard. Forty-five cubic feet, and it covered about two-thirds of the flower beds. Prior to that, I planted a bushel of bulbs in the New Side Yard and the Old New Side Yard — dwarf irises, dutch irises, tulips and muscari.

Still, too much is left un-mulched. More Mulch Next Week! Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Margie did a great job cleaning the kitchen. This is a pre-requisite for (a) the cleaning people coming Monday, and (b) my boss from the Netherlands coming Monday night.

Of course, we didn’t get any Christmas stuff done, alas. Maybe tonight.

Our eastern neighbors are … well, kind of reclusive. We almost never see them, inside or out. Occasionally they have a door open while watching football, during which games we can hear them hooting and hollering.

They have a very small back yard, it being a wedge into the corner of the circle. There’s a humongous cottonwood in the center of their back yard, which means that they very quickly in the autumn get up to their elbows in leaves.

So this year, the gentleman of the house appears to have gotten a leaf blower/vacuum.

Now, I don’t know if he’s afraid of cranking it beyond “1,” or if he’s got too many things plugged into that power socket, or what, but he doesn’t seem to be … ah … making much progress.

Indeed, he seems to spend hours at a time — hours at a time — blowing a little bitty square clear of leaves. Back and forth. Whoooooooooooooooooooooosh. Back and forth. Blowing. One. Leaf. At. A. Time.

Occasionally he puts it on vacuum.

Whoooooooooooooooooooooosh. Flrp-flrp-flrp. There goes a leaf. One. Leaf. Whoooooooooooooooosh.

For. Hours. At.

A.

Time.

Whooooooooooooooooooooooosh.

I went out for a walk with Katherine this afternoon. We wandered around the yard for a while, and while I enjoyed the experience, I was shuddering at how many leaves that needed sweeping.

Then when we were back inside, I heard this roar … and here came our lawn mower people, doing what will probably be the final mow of the season. But they did suck up a bunch of leaves as they passed through.

There are plenty to replace them still on the trees, of course. But every bit helps.

I mean, all the neat home improvement, do-it-yourself stuff around the house here is all due to him. Shelving. Lighting. Closets. Doors. Ceiling Fans. All good stuff.

I think we’ll avoid this do-it-yourself project next time he’s out.

(Link via Xkot)

As someone I was reading today noted (sorry I didn’t comment at the time), a “powder-like substance” is, well, powder. Let’s save those syllables for the war effort, folks.

Anyway, everyone has gone — well, nuts over this. And, yes, it’s drawn out the lunatics who want to create chaos, and the oafs who think it would be funny to do a hoax.

But, still, everyone is going nuts over the whole “white, powder-like substance” thing.

So I’m at the airport, done with scarfing down some McDonalds grub, and getting up to head for the gate, when I glance down at the table.

Salt. I’ve left some salt sprinkled across the table. Because my blood pressure isn’t high enough, I have to augment it with massive doses of salt, using French Fries as the vector.

So there’s salt sprinkled there.

And as I take another few steps, I can just imagine someone coming to that table, seeing that salt, and screaming for security, and haz-mat teams scrambling, and my flight being cancelled, and the concourse being evacuated, and if, heaven forbid, someone remembered me sitting there, my spending the next few weeks telling my life’s story to the FBI rather than to my blog audience.

And it was just plausible enough, given the present hysteria, that I almost go back and clean off the table.

But I don’t. Because, damn, life is just too short, even now.

During the first cold snap of the year, we discovered a problem with the pilot light on the heater. So, of course, we rushed right out, called to have someone come and fix it, and during the present cold snap we’re all nice and toasty.

Sh’yeah. Right.

(And this is not an indictment of Margie. It’s not just her job. I have a finger, and a telephone, and all that.)

Part of the problem is that we’d never had anyone come to clean and disinfect the basement area where the furnace is from when the sewer backed up. No stinkiness or anything, but it needed cleaning.

So Margie, in a great flurry of activity the week before we went off to Orlando, got both cleaning people and heater people scheduled to come to the house. The cleaning people came this a.m. All’s bright and shiny. The heater people come this afternoon. None too soon, since it’s — well, the thermostat says 56 degrees. I call it damned cold for the inside of a house.

Spent this afternoon out in the yard, for the first time in too long.

Planted an apricot tree we bought three or four weeks ago. May have waited too long — it’s not looking very happy. But I dug a hole in the old new side yard (the big one), and fertilized and planted it, then took a big bucket of water and watered it. I’ll care for it over the next few weeks, and we’ll see how it does.

Repaired a broken sprinkler line out front, which I noticed first about two months ago, and marked about a month ago. Yikes. Gotta keep up with that stuff, otherwise you get all sorts of problems — not just wasted water, but things that should be sprinkled being short-changed because of the water pressure loss.

Then went around and chopped back a bunch of “volunteer” aspens and cottenwoods and olives and whatever the that other kind of tree is. Clipped off some daisy seedheads, so that they don’t continue to choke out other things. Used some Round-Up to zap some crabgrass moving into the gardens (out of the lawn where it belongs).

General cleaning and tidying. I’ve really neglected the garden this season. Took a couple of hours — time well spent.

Sometimes life is too much like a metaphor. Or a metaphor is too much like life.

Anyway, gotta go shower. Sing, “O-bla-di-bla-da.”

We got the ceiling fan up. And operating.

Cue “Dave does the Happy Ceiling Fan Dance.” Use your imagination.

Trees, trees, trees
This Labor Day weekend was, indeed, laborful.

Sure, Friday was Dad-at-home, taking care of the Squig, while Margie worked at the office.

And Saturday … well, that was a golf day. Labor, but of a pleasant sort.

Really, it was all of a pleasant sort. Sunday, post-church, Margie and I went off to CostCo and bought four Gorilla Racks. Came home. And started in on the basement.

Long ago and far away, we had a relatively open basement. Between the initial move-in and some organizing elbow grease from Margie and Ginger (Margie’s mom), it was in pretty good shape. A little cluttered, but not bad.

But time and tide have worked their toll. Progressive Christmases have left boxes of decorations and wrapping materials in disarray. Storage of large items such as Margie’s old loom, the crib and various other baby things, have filled up space. The sewer blockage had left the contents of that room stacked in the rest of the space.

And, of course, there’s Old Man Entropy, making disorder out of order.

It was becoming an intolerable situation, and Doyce’s comments that, hey, we should get it cleaned up so we can use it for gaming made that even clearer.

So that’s what we did.

Not entirely, of course. But it’s a zillion times better than it was. All four gorilla racks are set up, some with boxes on them. Several dozen empty boxes or boxes of trash are in our dining room and living room and back deck, waiting to be put out at the street tomorrow night for the trash men. Things are stacked in a relatively efficient manner.

The trick, of course, is finishing the project. Going down there and getting boxes really loaded onto the racks, things back up where they belong, etc. With a little nudging, maybe I can do that this week. Or maybe not. But at least there’s space to walk around in, which is light years better than where we were before.

A tip of the hat to Doyce, for helping me with the racks, and to Jackie, for helping Margie with the organizational stuff. And Justin, natch, for both trash carrying and babywatching.

That was Sunday. Monday, we tried to return the favor.

Doyce and Jackie’s yard is, to be polite (and as polite as I need to be, since they are the first to tell you), a “fixer-upper.” Heavy on the grass and conifers. Light on the aesthetics.

Jackie got a coupon to Arapahoe Acres for money off a tree. This led to an off-the-cuff “let’s get a tree” party. Doyce determined that one or more of the low pines by the front door needed to go. I bundled up a box of tools and headed over, leaving Margie while Katherine went down for a nap.

Speaking from the perspective of having removed several large, overgrown junipers from the front of our house once upon a time, said junipers being embedded in several inches of clay-cemented decorative pebbles, I was expecting this to be a massive effort. In reality it was a walk in the park. About an inch and a half of pebbles. Dirt that was almost sandy in consistency. A stump with few tap roots, and a pickup truck with a chain to do the actual yanking. And minimal sticky-pokey branches and debris. Not to mention a young helper to clean up the cuttings.

Then off to the nursery to find an appropriate tree. Fittingly, Margie and I purchased two trees (a dwarf apricot and a semi-dwarf Jonathan apple), while Doyce and Jackie got a semi-dwarf Red Delicious apple.

A little shoveling, a little shifting around of rocks, and, voila, instant front yard tree. And it already makes their front yard look better.

One weird thing in this was my taking on the Jim (Kleerup) role — being the Elder, Experienced Advisor, suggesting grand plans and decorating ideas for the yard. Doyce & Jackie seem to welcome the advice, but I do keep waiting for the one piece of it too many. It also worries me that I might steer them wrong on one of these ideas.

Still, it’s kind of fun having a blank canvas like their yard to “work” in. There’s a lot that could be done, limited largely by money (of course) and willingness to get out there and sweat. And if I can help, it’s a pleasure to do so.

And it was neat getting a couple more trees, especially since we just discovered that the aspen in the east side yard has completely died. Not sure when we’ll install the apricot tree there (nor the apple tree on the east side), given my folks coming out around this next weekend, and the need to get the house cleaned before that, etc. Maybe some post-work yardwork. We’ll see.