Friday, April 30, 2010

That went fast...

April, I mean. It snowed most of the day Wednesday, but did not stick much here. Today was in the 70's. It's hard to feel secure or put away one's Polarfleece nightwear.
I got paid for digging more days than not in the past three weeks. I found some flakes in one place and really a lot of nice agricultural dirt in another (behind a Big Ugly Damn brewery, which made me insane with scents of hops and malt... smelled better than the beer ever tastes). I hope there will be more digging. It's fun, painful, enjoyable, great exercise (I think working in archaeology to get in shape for field school is supposed to be backwards, but we all know where my heart is) and they send me checks in the mail, with which I buy mulch and few, a very few perennials, honest.
Briefly in better shape, I dug a garden bed last Sunday and started another one yesterday, and Doug and his girlfriend Barb finished sifting the one I was trying to rehab, and I moved some plants around. Pictures when it's mulched.
While putting off working on the second flowerbed I weeded the other neglected bed on the far side of the front steps. It now looks like someone went over it with a particularly nasty herbicide, but it was just me. Pictures when it's mulched and has some live plants in it.
And in the courtyard, I have been setting patio tiles a few at a time, buying them a few at a time (along with mulch, which I need more of both). When I bought the house there was a decrepit aboveground pool. I removed it, and there was a lovely 17' circle of deep sand. It's had a firepit thing in the center for a few years now. Pictures sometime, perhaps.

Have I mentioned that the archaeology field school is going to be based here in June and July? Twenty people camping in my front yard? Heather will be here or there is no possible way I would have agreed. But where she decrees order, there WILL be order, and I am trying to prepare the way for her.

This means there is some point in having a garden, as I will be here to water it. And to making the whole place look less like an abandoned building. Doug persists in having a social life, which cuts into my exploiting him, but he assures me he will cut the grass and hep me generally clear areas inside and out. As Paul the contractor left a lot of his stuff here, most importantly where I hope people will be able to eat (the glassed-in porch area) I have agita and am trying to get people to take it away. It's wrong to throw other people's stuff away. And yet it's also wrong to dump at someone else's house and disappear. I think I would rather have a problem from expecting people to be responsible human beings than a problem from expecting them to be schnorrers. But mostly I want people to be tidy and rational and bring me nice things to eat. It's good to dream.

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