More yardwork, that is! I spent all day yesterday in the yard. I raked almost the entire back yard including endless trips with the wheelbarrow full of leaves to the compost pile. Which is now more of a dead leaf mountain, but once we get some grass clippings and other stuff in there it should pack down quite a bit and make better fodder for mulching. I finished the raking today and the yard is now officially a Poop Free Zone. Which it shall stay from now on! It's an Annedate. Of course, now that the leaves are all raked up the patchy weedy unevenness of the ground is painfully obvious. We're thinking perhaps we'll rototill the entire thing and start from scratch.
Today I wasn't nearly as productive. More on that in a moment. For now, here are some photos.
After he pulled up the white lilac in the front yard,
K shook and rinsed all the soil off. This is what's left:
Burton-esque, eh? (Speaking of which, I'm gathering excitement for
this.
A family of robins (or more than one family?) have taken up residence in the hammock trees in the side yard. One was singing at the top of his lungs this morning:
Unfortunately an egg fell out of their nest. My guess is that it's dead since it's been there a few days. I was sort of hoping that they'd figger out a way to somehow rescue it. K said he saw another egg smashed in the driveway the other day so who knows what's going on.
In the back yard looking toward the side yard currently behind snow fence to foster grass seed and ground cover growth.
From the deck looking at the back yard (with Logan):
In the front yard things are looking so good so far. I've been transplanting a bunch of
those little white wildflowers from last year from the midst of the grass in the back to the more gardeny area in the front. They seem to still be alive so hopefully they take alright. You can see them in the front right corner by the fence.
The bay window including hideous still-there arbor vitae:
The lilies in the front are growing by the day.
Which is nice because all the little yellow and purple flowers are gone:
On to the reasons I wasn't more productive. The alarm company called in the early afternoon and notified me that some of the library alarms were going off.
Three of them (usually if staff accidently trigger one, it's only one). Skip through a bunch of phone calls as more and more alarms were triggered. I ended up meeting the police at the 'brary and as it turned out, the janitor had left the front door unlocked this morning. A patron was wandering around inside picking out items to check out, chatting on his cell phone about how weird it was that all the lights were off and there didn't seem to be anyone around. Wtf? How much sense does it take to figure out that those clues add up to the library not being fucking open? Add in the fact that the hours are posted in about sixteen places and you come up with IDIOT.
More than that, though, I was pissed that the janitor left the front door open. Yes, the door was malfunctioning, but it was clearly unlocked and she should have called someone rather than just leaving it open. It would've saved a lot of fucking hassle for the alarm company, the cops, me, and especially would have saved the money it costs the library for all this.
After I got home from that, my neighbors were watching three small dogs running around their yard and wondered if I knew who owns them. I don't. They were a dachsund, a chihuahua, and a little mop of a thing. All looked purebred to me. We tried to herd them but two of the three were skittish and took off and the friendlier one followed them. Crossing the Giant Four-Lane Road, eek! The neighbor fella and I both headed out to look for them, but only found them after they already found their way home. Their owners did not seem overly concerned about them running around. Plus none of the dogs had tags on their collars. Not cool. They seemed well-fed and healthy but I'm still skeptical. It's so not safe for them to be running loose, not to mention it's not legal to have an off-the-leash out-of-the-fenced-yard dog in town.
Speaking of sketchy, the Dead Lady House people have been working on the house a lot lately. Apparently Mr. Ex Con just got laid off, so he has plenty of time to spend standing around surveying the work that needs to be done and drinking energy drinks. I think there's a ratio at work - the more of his buddies that come along to help, the less work actually gets done. They also seem to mess up a lot, or else they just shout obscenities for no reason. The shape of the house keeps on changing. There are three dormers on the front upper story now (partially obscured by a tarp here):
As for knitting, I'm still working on the sweater. It's going, but slowly.
