It’s been sunny and in the 90s for the past 4 days. I love this weather, as do Pi and K, and so this weekend I took the storm door off and put up the pet screen “door” that I got at Orvis a while back. It’s really great. The girls needed a day to realize they could go in and out as they please but now they are pretty much used to it. They don’t tend to just go out by themselves, but they do come in to bug me to come back outside sometimes. I think they just like having me around!
I haven’t had any bug problems in the house. However, it would be easy for them to crawl in. Thankfully I use Ortho Home Defense so nothing crawls into my house. I’d recommend that if you get this screen. It was about $50 and I think TOTALY worth the price for how much easier it makes going in and out for all of us.
Still too busy for proper house tending and blogging (hell, I’m too busy to even keep the place clean). Hopefully the end of the semester (2 weeks!) will free up things a little bit.
In the meantime, I have managed to get a few things done around here. This is the oddest of the projects.
Chunks of paint had been coming off my house since I moved in. When the siding guys were here, a LOT more came off. Some of it landed in my garden. I do not want lead paint in the garden, because it gets lead into the soil and then, eventually, into my dinner. However, there were way too many little bits to pick up by hand (without going insane):
My solution to this problem was to purchase a friend for Chompy: Slurpy*.
I’ve wanted and needed a shop-vac for a while now, and this was a perfect occasion to buy one. I set it up, took it outside, and vacuumed up all the paint chunks from the garden. I can only imagine what my neighbors must have thought - weird girl in her garden with a vacuum, VACUUMING THE DIRT.
The approach was quite effective, though, and now I’m relatively lead free. Horay!
I have a few little house things to post but K is the story of the day, I’m afraid. She had another seizure this morning. It wasn’t as bad as the last one - this was about 2 minutes with half an hour of confused growling and barking after - but it’s still very sad. Pi and I left her alone in the bedroom while she recovered. It was much better for all of us since we knew how to handle it. Still, it was 3.5 months from the first seizure to the second, and not even 5 weeks from the second to this one. That increasing closeness worries me.
We had an appointment with the ophthalmologist this afternoon anyway, and everything looked ok to her. She left a note for our neurologist who I will talk to tomorrow. I guess we will probably wait to see if and when K has her next one. If they get closer together, we’ll start on some medication. If they stay the same distance apart (or slow down), then we’ll just deal with it.
This is all very sad and frustrating for me. We’ve done the MRI, a ton of blood tests, antibiotics just in case, but basically there is no cause - everything looks normal. I really want to help her, but there isn’t much I can do. My poor dog.
It was a beautiful day today. I spent it working on a paper (on the patio with my laptop). Pi played fetch for 6 hours straight. K would occasionally fetch, but she had a more serious mission.
Something is over here by the lilac. It’s buzzing. We can smell it.
W can hear some buzzing over by the post. Hmmm. Is this little bee the cause of it?
Nope. It’s this GIANT BEE. GET ‘EM!!!!!!!
Those carpenter bees don’t know what’s good for them. They were taunting K all day, hovering in front of her head. Luckily for both K and the bees, she didn’t catch any. There’s always tomorrow, though.
Easter has two very important meanings in this house: (1) colored eggs and (2) chocolate bunnies.
I planned to color eggs last night but realized all my eggs are brown. This morning, I decided to color them anyway and it turns out brown eggs color as well or better than white eggs.
The blue one is a bit off, but they are great overall.
Now, on to the chocolate bunny. I gave up candy for Lent, which means chocolate candy since that’s all I eat. I love it. I gave this up right after buying up a bunch of half-off godiva milk chocolate after Valentines Day. I’ve been taunted for 40 days! This morning, the bunny that MOM and DAD sent on Friday came out.
Oh, Hello Fannie May Bunny!
I sure bet you’d like to get out of that confining package.
Ah, that’s better. But you don’t think I’m going to let you just hop away, do you??
(note the worried look on his little bunny face up there)
In addition to finding the siding done when I got home from Boston, I also found my raspberry bushes delivered. I planted them and in the process of digging the holes it’s likely that I completely killed the chance of getting sunflowers there. It will be worth it if I get raspberries, though, and it will be nice to have something permanently filling that empty space along the fence, too. For now, it’s just a bunch of sticks.
I am thinking about planting the sunflowers along the driveway. It would look extremely odd, but it’s whimsical enough to appeal to me.
While we were outside soaking up the nice weather on Friday, K engaged in a battle with the Carpenter Bees. They are giant and loud which apparently indicates to K that they should be chomped on. She stands by the lilac bush and waits for them to come near her, then tries to bite them. So far, she hasn’t caught one, but it will be a very interesting surprise if she does.
I arrived home last night from a trip to Boston to find the siding and painting done! Even in the dark it looked good. They had scraped down all the wood trim, repainted that plus the floor of the front steps and the little porch in back and the porch itself (which I had scraped over the winter). They even kept the blue ceiling on that porch (though it confused them).
It’s hard to see the improvement in the paint on the trim in these pictures, but it really looks great. I told MOM last night that I knew how crappy the house looked, but I’d gotten used to it. I still thought it looked bad, but it wasn’t smack-me-in-the-face bad like it was the first month I lived here. Now, I’m shocked at how good it looks when, really, it just looks non-crappy.
And, just for one more bad reference, here are some before pictures:
I thought there would be no work on the siding today since we were supposed to get torrents of rain. However, Accuweather proved itself, yet again, to be Inaccuweather. It was sunny when I got up at 7:30 to the sound of pounding and between when I went to bed at 2am and when I got up the forecast had gone from 1.5 inches of rain to 0.4…and it did not rain overnight.
Before it started raining much today the guys got the back of the house done. Hopefully tomorrow they will finish the sides and painting.
Since the backyard is to the south of the house, it gets lots of sun. The garden is against the house, so it gets sun almost all day. This side gets sun until the mid-afternoon when the trees and eventually the fence cast shadows. This bare patch is where I’ve planted my sunflower experiment - four sizes from super giant 10′ ones to little 1 foot sunflowers.
However, I was on the Burpee website ordering some giant Lima beans, and saw they had raspberry bushes for a reasonable price. I bought 10 of them. I adore raspberries. The only place to put these bushes is in the space where the sunflowers are. They need sun to light shade, and this area provides that. It’s also the only other sunny place in the yard (short of planting them smack dab in the middle of the lawn).
I hope this will not require me to sacrifice the sunflowers. The raspberries probably won’t produce this year, so I don’t think the sunflowers will hurt them. However, I’m willing to remove the sunflowers if they will cause a problem.
