Just Like the Great Wall of China!

Well, sort of like the Great Wall of China. I mean, you can see the Great Wall from outer space but WE can see our new garden bed from upstairs! We have this really kickin' aerial view...
But of course, all good gardening stories have their vast dilemmas. In my case, I got a wonderful variety of interesting plants from family 'n' friends for my recent birthday. I promptly de-sodded and began digging in this really long straight bed along the side of the path that we take down to Bob's studio. It's the major axis in the back yard; our version of the Champs Elysees (another allusion to a historical, monumental site!) So I'm happily arranging plants in their containers when it dawns on me that in order to plant this one where I really want to see it, I need to move that one waaaaaaaaaaaaay back over in the older section. And then it strikes me how much like making art gardening is. Sometimes, it's all a very roundabout route to get results. I believe I heard someone refer to this need to see something in a specific place as "the genius of place". And that is really true. I'll lie awake all night if I don't put that plant exactly where I imagined it, even if I have to move three or four other things to put it there.
And that's not to mention that I need to move a section of fence in order to plant. The new bed is (inconvieniently!) bisected by our fence and we all know my recent history of fences and eyeballs. So I'm going back into my studio instead!!!

New and Improved Projects

This side of the house is in for a treat. First, we're going to remove that scabby plywood and see what sort of evil lurks underneath. Then we're going to tackle the chimney (or in this case, the lack of chimney. The former owner removed the apparently perfectly functional chimney and interior fireplace for reasons unknown...). The way I figure it, if my parents constructed a chimney of heroic proportions (along with an entire house!) then Bob and I can certainly make a chimney and hook up the woodstove and provide some additional heat this winter. We have to first excavate and make a new footing for the chimney. We'd better hurry up and do that as every time Bob and I discuss the foundation, he maintains we have to dig deeper. It used to be three feet; now it's four. Soon, it will be a twenty foot hole filled with boulders and mortar and it will take us the rest of our lives and never be deep enough...
Just look at the roofline and see another piece of the project. Where the lack of chimney meets the roof, there is a serious languague problem: peeled back flashing meets partially hacked shingles and dissected wood siding. A mini mess!

Underfoot lingers another less onerous affair; in fact, I think it could be fun. We're going to replace the wooden deck with a stone terrace. (Have you noticed that no one refers to terraces as "patios" anymore? Remember patios?) We sit outside pretty often and deserve a nice place to view the garden from. It's relatively flat by the house and it shouldn't be too hard to make a usuable terrace. Famous last words!
See the below photo to reference that there are actual weeds and grass growing up through the boards.

Hey! Even if we don't get to this this year- or even next!- it's still a nice place to sit outside.

The Middle Aged Business Man Sings Second Childhood Blues and Then Some

I was outside on Sanday morning, having a whale of a time "personalizing" our garden by adding those quirky touchs that make it ours, as seen in the above photo. I planted a prickly pear cactus (salvaged from our previous garden) in a cement container perched on a tall metal pedastal. Nice! You don't think to meet a cactus eye to eye. The air was warm, the morning was flawless...
And suddenly our neighbor to the southwest did what he sometimes does: he introduced the entire community to his idea of bliss. The stereo- apparently hooked up outdoors- was cranked and we were awash in "L.A. Woman". It dawned on me as the music careened through several different Doors greatest hits, that this wasn't even Jim Morrison and company but some Doors cover band. I can only imagine our neighbor flailing away, swinging some invisible microphone, lariat-style over his head as he plangently crowed about loving him two times. Heaven help us. I sure hope he was wearing leather pants This is surely mid-life crisis writ large.
I don't know why these individuals who wish to share their great good taste never treat our ears to Brahms or Prokofiev or Bartok and turn the neighborhood into a mini-Tanglewood. Typically, their selections run to songs and bands popular when we were teenagers, and I for one have had enough of The Doors. The morning ran straight down hill, however, as The Doors were followed by The Allman Brothers.
Despite the aural assault, I completed my garden chores and was quite happy with the results. I am considering hooking up a feed to my studio stereo and blasting my idea of auditory nirvana  Shostakovich string quartets followed by Alban Berg piano miniatures with a goodly dose of, yes, Kurt Cobain. Rock on, little brother!

No Comment (Breakfast)

What do you do at breakfast if your bread has large holes in it? In our household, we stick our fingers thorugh it and take a picture. Then it winds up on the blog. I guess it was a hot day.

The worst of it was that it wasn't even Bob's bread. It was some store-bought stuff that I wasn't super impressed with.

A Brookside Surprise

Bob discovered this healthy clump of lobelia one afternoon- it might have been on my birthday. I wish I could have captured the hummingbird that was alight on it when Bob first took me down by the bridge where this lobelia is growing in muck in the middle of the stream. Spectacular!
We are so lucky to keep having an amazing range of wildflowers and birds appearing in our backyard. Turkeys, bluebirds, the bats we saw the other night. And we know we have deer, but they've been incredibly well behaved thus far and haven't (yet!) dared to eat my unprotected hostas. I realize I am tempting fate by having this veritable deer salad bar unfenced...
I'm trying to concentrate on the interesting and beautiful things that I can (sort of) see with my one eye. I am aware that many people walk around like this their whole lives so I suppose I shouldn't complain if I exist in a visually impaired state for a few months. (And let's face it: I'm opting for optimism about what my sight will be like after the cornea transplant. Doctors love to boost the best possible outcome and I'm imaging it will accomplish nothing but to bum me out if I consider that my vision will never be the same as it was...) Anyway sometimes when watching bats and birds and the flowers filling in in my garden, I can almost forget that I can't see well. That's a good thing!

Tiny Bubbles

This morning when I took Jules out to pee, I saw this curious accumulation of tiny bubbles at the base of several of our fence posts (this was before Jules peed so it had nothing to do with his actions!) Thye looked like crystals: very pretty! It was also so nice to have relatively cool temperatures and a bit of wetness after all that heat.
Also, in the midst of the dying poison ivy, there were a few of those fairy cobwebs that sometimes form. A couple of years ago, when walking in the woods with Frank the Dog, I came on a place in a hemlock grove where there were hundreds of little cobweb macrame-like cat cradles all glistening with dew. Spectacular! But of course, I had no camera with me. In contrast, this was a modest show, but still pretty...

I think I liked the dryness of the expiring poison ivy coupled with the condensation lingering on the twigs and leaves.

Too Hot to Blog

Oh boy! You can tell from that last post that it's been too hot to blog. At a certain point, one's proteins begin to denature and the brain stops functioning and nothing of value is produced. Our computer is upstairs, in one of the hotter rooms in the house. I am therefore behind in emails as well as ideas! Don't make me do anything! And I usually pride myself on taking the heat better than some people...
We came back from work yesterday to discover the clock in our bedroom read 92 degrees. We spent the last two nights sleeping on the floor of my studio. A bit hard but lots cooler. There is a sliding door that allowed as much cool air in as was possible. Jules approved of our low lying attitude.
Here's a picture of the fan that Bob constructed from an old fan housed in an air compressor (another piece of equipment that coame wiith the house). It fit into our extremely narrow (only 15") windows which will not accommodate air conditioners... and it worked famously! The temperature in the bedroom was significantly lowered after the fan was turned on. Unfortunately, not much worked after two straight weeks of extraordinary temperatures. Bob has faith in this gigantic whole house fan mounted on the roof. I think it makes and impressive ammount of noise and fury, but signifies- and cools off- nothing!