secondhand gods

bunny-proof fence

We have the cutest wee little baby bunny living in our backyard. He has been quite a charmer and we look for him every evening when the light is fading; he can usually be seen lingering at the edge of the tangled and overgrown perennial garden, with a tender green shoot systematically disappearing into his efficient and velvety little gob.

Lately, however, he has become more bold, and GB caught him trying to enter our square foot garden not once today, but THREE TIMES.

It's a good thing we have a bunny-proof fence.

(sorry, photo taken of bunny on the fly through a screened window)

It's a sad fact of life that today's wee precious baby bunny is tomorrow's sullen and uncommunicative were-rabbit.

randoms

Watching: the weather; thunderstorms in the forecast for the next several days. Our weekly summer grill-out to celebrate the weekend -- usually on Friday nights, GB & I sprawl out on our back patio between the square foot gardens and the Fuckington's riotous perennial bed, cooking burgers on a tiny charcoal grill, watching birds on the birdbath and in the birdhouses, listening to neighborhood sounds -- was unexpectedly cut short last night by a fast-moving swathe of storms. The entire state was under a tornado watch and during my commute home from work, the announcer kept breaking in on NPR to advise of a new tornado in some unheard-of, distant county. We got our burgers, but there were no s'mores last night as I'd been hoping. Instead, we got some rain and some high winds and I had to settle for a raw uncooked Hershey bar. Also watching:  Our peony bushes, which are finally blossoming.

Not Watching: Television. Our experiment to cut back our amount of television consumption is about two weeks old and we're both amazed at the difference it's made to our evenings and weekends. We eat dinner together at the table, sometimes talking, sometimes reading companionably. Except to watch the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, the TV has not been turned on at all in the evenings, which has brought us a grounded sense of calm and leisure. We feel we can set our own rhythm and pace without being hectored by commercial breaks or laugh tracks in the background. I still like the Weather Channel, so that's on occasionally, and overall it will be interesting to see if I am able to keep the TV off when GB is traveling for a few days in a row (I usually turn it on for companionship when he's away, and that's when I can get sucked into the most disappointing programming.) I think we've made a substantive and positive change to our habits well before Miss Snoop arrives.

Reading: With all that extra time, I've been reading a lot. A big fan of Frank Herbert's indescribably fascinating "Dune" series, I reluctantly picked up the more recent offerings written by his son and another writer. I didn't expect to like them, but they've been more fulfilling than I thought they would be. For one, they don't try to pick the story up where it left off -- the books are prequels to the original series. In some cases, you're reading about familiar characters at an earlier stage of their lives, in others, you're reading about events that were a historical basis for the original books. The writing is not nearly as complex, intriguing, and satisfying as Frank Herbert's. But then again, the plots are faster-moving, less thorny and multi-layered, and thus a lot more accessible. The characters are quick to engage with. Overall, the series passes the test for me and I can deem the books acceptable.

I have it in my sidebar, but I couldn't finish Steve Berry's "Venetian Betrayal." I just couldn't get into it. He didn't spend any time on character development, so I was plunged in with these characters that I neither knew nor particularly wanted to know, with no desire to go back to the beginning of his series and read more books to get to know them. His writing is quick and choppy, with two or three page long chapters, which is good when you're sleepy and thinking, "I'll just read one more" but it left me disoriented. Now, his historical sequences about Alexander the Great were fascinating, but I read several books about Alexander the Great when we were in Australia so already thought he was an extremely absorbing topic, and if I want to read more about him then I'll just check out a biography from the library or reread Mary Renault's books.

I am just finishing up "Confederates in the Attic" by Tony Horwitz which has been fabulous. I can highly recommend it. I checked it out while waiting for his latest book, "A Voyage Long and Strange", and it has been wonderful. It's a blend of history, journalism, and humor as he goes roaming around the South in search of the Civil War. He eventually gets sucked in to "hardcore" Civil War reenactments with people who are so obsessed that they even extreme-diet to achieve the sunken look of old Civil War soldier photographs. The descriptions of his adventures with these groups -- and one guy in particular, whose grumpy visage adorns the cover -- are historically enlightening and hilarious to boot.

Knitting: I'm getting extremely sick of knitting little hats and booties. I'm starting on a pair of socks next, to get back into some good old "adult knitting." My evening free time has helped me surge ahead on finishing the baby yoda jacket, though, and I think it's going to be really cute, although it is a lot of seaming and I am just not a seamstress; I'm hoping everything doesn't end up crooked and mismatched. The neck stitches are still on scrap yarn stitch holders, waiting to be finished off once the seaming is done. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn't look as boyish as I'd feared, even in the rough natural cotton yarn; as GB said objectively, "It just looks earthy." And as he rightly pointed out, she has a lot of pink and fluff and frills in her wardrobe, so she could definitely use some earthy pieces to balance it out.

in the garden

 

In my mind, the house is full of the scent of lilacs. I say "in my mind" because I'm sure this is just the power of the purple suggestion that is just outside our window rather than reality. In reality, I'm sure our house smells like the quesadillas we had for lunch. But I still only smell the lilacs.

Blood test taken yesterday -- arm bruised but otherwise went smoothly. Got a lot of knitting done in the waiting room, observed the preponderance of freaks who show up on Fridays for blood tests. The other girl there for the 3-hour test flagged about an hour and a half in, turned pale as milk, and had to be taken to a mysterious back room to lie down. I didn't see her again. I knitted on, undeterred.

Crib purchased today. GB put it together in a flash, bless his engineer heart. It is nice but ENORMOUS. I think I could probably sleep in that sucker, in a pinch.

Thai food has just arrived and we have "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood" to watch tonight -- so I bid you Happy Weekend and adieu.

apple picking

Whilst in New York State, we visited GB's family and spent a drowsy, golden afternoon in an orchard atop a bluff overlooking the Hudson Valley, picking apples.

The weather was so beautiful -- the sun so warm and heavy, and the air smelled liked apple juice and autumn leaves. We found it so easy to fill our pails with fruit, with only the buzzing of wasps and the far-off sound of the hay wagon and children laughing to disturb us.

Unfortunately, when we had clambered back to the parking lot, we soon found that perhaps the heady giddiness of the orchard experience had affected our judgment when it came to the volume and mass of the fruit we picked.

We picked seventy pounds of apples.

Luckily, it just meant that late into the night, the house was fragranced with the delicious smell of my MIL K's mouth watering apple crumb pies and apple tarts.

It's nice when stories have a happy ending, isn't it?

randoms

1.) It's Saturday afternoon and the heat of the last few days has eased off a bit. However, I still have chipmunks shinnying up the peony bushes to drink out of the birdbath, and big red squirrels creeping cautiously along behind me as I water the garden in the evenings. They wait til I'm inside the house again safely, and then try to slurp up as much slopped water as they can from the ground and off the plants in the garden before it evaporates. I felt so sorry for them that tonight I just left a bowl of water on the patio. Poor critters.

2.) I forgot about August gardens. I forgot how in August, everything starts popping out all at once, and you end up with a surfeit of produce, more produce than you can eat, and panic sets in that things will start going bad before you can consume them. We have a dry pint of cherry tomatoes off our bushes, and a big cucumber to eat before it goes soft and squishy. Last night, GB made lovely bruschetta with some fresh crusty bread (sliced thin), mozz, tomatoes, and fresh basil from our own garden. At Widget Central, we have a food co-op, of sorts. The gardeners have been bringing in paper sacks of their zucchini and pickling cucumbers, passing them out to coworkers and leaving them in the town hall with "Free" signs on them. I came home with two big beauts this week, and today I am setting about turning them into zucchini bread, with some help from our friend Bittman.

3.) I haven't yet read the new Harry Potter. As I said in a comment to Suse, I don't know why I haven't rushed out to grab up my own freshly-minted copy, except that I've been slogging through a few library books lately and I just haven't gotten around to it. At our local parade last week, someone had been up down every block, and chalked spoilers in bright pastels. "Voldemort Kills Harry!" "Dumbledore Wanted to Die!" Up and down every block, some industrious young anarchist had troubled him/herself to eke out every secret. I felt like kicking that kid's ass when the parade was over. However, not having read it yet, I can't determine whether the spoilers were accurate or not.

4.) Not having HBO, we are catching up on Big Love. Having exhausted the available seasons of their other fabulous offerings -- Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome -- GB picked this last show up a few weeks ago. I fully expected to hate it, finding Bill Paxton's character to be almost unbearable. But strangely, it has us hooked, and we devoured the first season. Chloe Sevigny -- we love to hate her.

Lastly, here's some images of what you get when you go to our hometown parade.

And to answer the question that I am sure is going through everyone's mind at this point in the post: no, I have no idea why our parade was chock full of old men dressed like vikings.

july garden update.

Okay, remember? This is where we started.

And here we are now.

Now, if everything would PLEASE JUST RIPEN.

square foot garden

GB's been working on a square-foot garden this spring. The above is the "before" picture, when he first planted everything in early May-ish.

He bought a book, and tried to plant some seeds, but although we got sprouts of almost everything, and he painstakingly set up a pseudo-nursery in our back bedroom (an oven rack hanging suspended in the window with various recycled food containers as the pots -- we had sawed-off peanut containers, ice cream cartons, and soy milk boxes proudly displayed in our window for months, like some sort of trashy mobile), none of them really matured beyond the "spindly" stage. Eventually he resorted to buying the starts from a nursery. He made the garden box out of mostly scavenged pallet wood (once he was sure it had not been chemically treated or fumigated) and the trellis is bent cedar branches that came down from some tree-trimming around our house.

 

So that's what it looked like "before." Here's the "current" picture.

I've never seen a bigger tomato plant (in the back there) in all my life. It's as tall as I am, no kidding.

I think he underplanned the space for the squash, as it is burgeoning all over the dill and even treading upon the eggplant.

In other news, woe is us for waiting until the hottest day of the year to test our central air conditioning. We returned home from the Royal Oak pottery & glass show yesterday, cranked up the a/c, and settled into various projects, waiting for the chill to set in. Although the air blew through the vents, about an hour later I wandered through the kitchen and realized that it was, in fact, two degrees hotter in the house than when we started. The repair guy can't come til Friday which doesn't do much for us in the short term as today's 94 temps are probably the high of the week.

But Fucking Ron and Fucking Edith have the last laugh yet again. Based on the condition of the shower drain and the bathroom drawer, I'm expecting that the repair guy will find our a/c system mysteriously stuffed full of F. Ron's hair and dandruff.

hello muddah, hello faddah...

...the cottage will be...Camp Granada..."

After opening the cottage, GB has been scouting canoes on Ebay and I'm proud to say that we are the new owners of a 17ft. aluminum Grumman. We didn't want one of the fancy-pants new plastic or fiberglass ones, not only because they are way too heavy for us to manipulate, and require special wintertime storage that we really can't accommodate, but also because old aluminum canoes are so cool. As a kid, I never went to a summer camp with some Indian name on a green lake somewhere up north (thank God because remembering me as a child, it would have been a uniquely torturous experience) but aluminum canoes, dented and dinged, bring up so many thoughts of summer lakes and kids, camp counselors and merit badges.

We drove a bit upstate to pick it up last weekend. When we left suburban Elysia, it was in the high '80's and sunny. However, by the time we found the seller's house, paid, and began the process of strapping the thing atop Ogilvie, our purple minivan, the sky had turned black and the wind had kicked up. In the middle of a completely ominous duststorm, with the wind whipping down the empty street blowing grit and dirt in our eyes and mouths, and thunder rumbling in the distance, we hurried to get the canoe fastened down before we were either struck by lightning or blown away.

(By the way: "we hurried to get the canoe fastened" actually means "GB hurried to get the canoe fastened while I stood in the street with my mobile phone and took a picture.")

We made it home with moments to spare and managed to wrestle the thing off Ogilvie. The sky was turning darker by the minute and I hurried. However, it was a bit heavier than I expected and it banged me in the head and I dropped it with a god-awful clatter that must have stood hairs on end all over the block.

"Hope it still doesn't leak," GB said.

We're quite excited to have a canoe. We just need to get all the accoutrements -- paddles, life vests, and a little cart to haul it around with -- and we'll be floating down some brown river in upstate Michigan, a la Ernest Hemingway, reciting "Hiawatha" to each other.

Or, more likely, dripping wet, cursing, slipping on muddy riverbanks as we try to portage around some obstacle, in the middle of an utter downpour. Our best-laid plans tend to work out that way on occasion. Luckily, we still manage to have fun.

peonies

In a complete non sequitur, here are some photos of our burgeoning peony bushes, which are truly gorgeous and which almost make me forgive Fucking Ron and Fucking Edith of all of their house-and-yard-related transgressions.

weekend projects

The weekend has been rather disappointing, weatherwise. I was expecting sun and mid-60's, and both days have been overcast and chilly. Yesterday morning we tried to make the best of it; we walked downtown, and GB got his hair cut at the corner barber shop while I read the paper in the straightbacked chairs by the window, and listened to chatter about the Tigers. When he was freshly shorn, we walked past the old movie theater and across the street, and checked out the Farmer's Market in the pavilion, which was a little depressing. A guy played Pink Floyd on an electric guitar, and there were a few stands of crafts and plants. We beat a hasty retreat. Hopefully it will pick up over the summer.

The rest of the weekend has been split between indoor housework, a project that I'm finally finishing up after several months, and outdoor yard work. First, the project. I bought this rocker last fall, when we were living in the Deadwood condo, at Recycle Ann Arbor for $15. We don't make it over there very often, so it was a great find. I started stripping & sanding it in the garage at Deadwood, and just finished it up today.

Before:

Now:

I think it will look pretty cute on our front porch, with our red wagon and our ferns, and the flower boxes GB made me that I spray-painted the same color as the rocking chair.

The front yard has been concerning to me since we moved in. There's no grass. It's so shady, the Fuckingtons just got rid of the grass, spread a bunch of mulch, and planted hostas. Of course, I didn't really know about the hostas until they started sprouting this spring, which was a relief. Without them, the yard looks a bit like a barren wasteland of mulch. However, I've breathed a sigh of relief since I saw them. There's still a lot of things that offend me about the front yard -- the lack of rhyme or reason to where they planted the hostas -- they're just spread around willy-nilly -- and the rocks that they've used to line the paths, which to me look cheap and a little sad -- but it's still better than I thought it was going to be. We plan on putting a white rail on the porch, and planting some nice little green bushes or something in the front, but things could be much, much worse.

GB's gone a little nutty with tree-trimming. I mean, it's a necessity. Fucking Ron and Fucking Edith were horribly fond of planting cedar trees right up against the foundation of the house, and where they would loom over power lines, etc. However, GB & I have been in a pitched battle about whether he should get up on a ladder with a chainsaw and do it, or whether we should hire someone. Guess which side of the ladder I was on? In my opinion, saving money isn't worth the litany of terrible things that can happen when someone climbs up on a ladder with a chainsaw. GB didn't agree, and since he's an adult, and much bigger than me, I can't physically bar him from doing it. Once I relented, he saw the opening, and went for it, and I haven't gotten him off the ladder since.

He will not be trimming or removing the mother of all trees on his own, however. I speak of the enormous willow in our backyard, whose future we are currently debating about.

I really love the tree but the fact of the matter is, about 1/2 of its branches are dead, and it's a whomper of a tree, poised over neighborhood power lines, neighbor's homes, etc. Every time we have high winds or an ice storm, we hold our breath about that willow. It seems solid, but it causes us a lot of concern. At one point, neighborhood rumor has it, the power company asked Fucking Ron if they could remove it at their own cost. Gratis. Fucking Ron refused, to the consternation of the 3 other neighbors upon whose yards the tree drops branches, leaves, bark, and threats of downed power lines. I don't know. I can't imagine our backyard without it, but I feel like it's a potential problem waiting to happen, and if we took it down, we could replace it with 2 or 3 smaller trees which would be easier to maintain and care for.

The back gardens are coming up nicely, and it's a real treat to see what's in them. Some things I know.

Some things I don't. Can anyone tell me what this is?

Whatever it is, we have tons of it. I just need to know whether it's a weed or something that will flower in some way, shape, or form. If it's a weed, I will dispatch it with extreme prejudice. It's easy to pull up and comes up with most of its root system attached. However, if it's something that could be pretty -- like a black-eyed susan or something which technically I know is a weed but which I still think is lovely anyway -- then I'll leave it be.

Anyone?