Summer Fun: More days at home please?

The last couple of months have been kinda crazy.  My days fill up with various things that I don't want to give as much attention as they demand, but they all have their reasons so I just sort of grit my teeth and deal with it.  Taking care of Mom's house really took a lot out of me and I'm still recovering from that, but next week I'll have to do it again, this time without Dad to help with the kitties.  They're going to a kubelwagen convention in Ohio and although Mom isn't thrilled to be going, she's not insisting on staying either.  They'll be gone for a week or so while I'm trying to prepare an audition and get the house (and myself) ready for my boyfriend to be here from Alabama for a week or so.  I have 3 days at home this weekend so I'm pushing myself pretty hard to get as much done as I can before my parents leave so I don't go crazy before my man gets here.  Last week I was home all day Sunday only, and the week or two before that I hadn't had any full days at home so my poor house was rather neglected.  On top of that, it makes me crazy when I can't have a day or two at home, I need the time to myself to fill with projects as I see fit.  Having 3 days this weekend is a wonderful thing and I wish it would happen more often like it was in the spring.

Quick rundown of what I did on Saturday:  Got up later than usual but still kinda early for yoga with my friends.  It's been at least 2 months since we were all 3 able to be together, the way our schedules have been.  The yoga was good, the girl talk was great, and I'm sure we all needed it.  We're hoping to meet on Monday too.  When I got home and before it got too hot out, I cleaned out my car, wiped down the dash, washed the inside of the windshield and windows, sprayed down the floormats, and vacuumed.  It needed to be done... badly... and that's one thing I wanted to cross off the list before he gets here. 

Next I worked on my poor little garden that has been as neglected as my house.  I've been able to water it enough and we do get occasional rainstorms that help with that, but something has been eating some of my plants and I hadn't had a chance to pull out the dead stuff and find more chicken wire to put up.  The first thing to go was my beans.  I'm still rather unhappy about that... the plants were doing so well and they had lots of flowers, in a few more days I would've had a good handful of beans to harvest, and overnight they were eaten down to the dirt.  That made me so mad.  I got some wire and put it up to keep the deer out, but since then something smaller has been getting in and nipping off my garlic.  That makes me suspect it's not a rabbit, since theoretically they don't like garlic, but I don't know that for sure either.  We've seen a couple squirrels out here, which is very unusual, and yesterday Mom had a skunk look in the back door at her, so who knows what's gnawing on my garden!

The lettuce and one tomato plant and all of the petunias have been nibbled down too, but that's probably from the grasshoppers.  Not much I can do about them, except I did have a lovely black and yellow garden spider that I had to move to work in the garden today.  She's not as big as the one down at Mom's house, but I'm glad to have her around.  I hope she finds her way back up into the plants and sets up camp again, she eats all kinds of bugs that we have too many of, like mosquitos and mud wasps and grasshoppers.  I was sad to move her, but I had to.  See that very sad cherry tomato plant behind her?  Yeah... Also, the fabric pot on the left used to have my beans in it.

I planted more beans in that pot, more carrots in another pot, Italian salad greens, and sugar snap peas and transplanted a couple petunias.  I found some more chicken wire to put up, so hopefully that keeps whatever it is out.  My cucumber plant is doing really well so I moved it so it has more room to do its thing.  I got 3 nice sized cucs off of it today and there are plenty of little ones there now.

I pulled a bunch of weeds out of my flowerbed and along the "walkway" to my front door, gathered rocks from my "yard" (if you can call it that lol) to put up against the skirting to keep the weeds down and help keep the weather out from under my house, and got another section of deck railing stained before it got dark.  The rock project will take a while to get all the way around, but there are plenty of rocks to do it with and when I get to actually moving dirt to fill the gaps there will be rocks in that too so it will kinda do itself once I get that far.  These red bricks will be replaced with limestone slabs like my little steps but for now, they'll do.  They're basically useless in the summer but in the winter they shovel easily, melt snow quickly, and the ice forms around them instead of on them.  They were a quick fix when the mud was horrible so they're not ideal by any stretch, but they work.  At any rate, I need to continue the gravel edging partly for aesthetics and partly to help with insulation and make upkeep easier.  It's gonna take forever to pick up all the rocks...there may come a point where I just buy several bags of pea gravel and use that instead.  We'll see.

Sunday's plan:  First thing, stain the rest of the deck railing.  The top part at least, since the slats take a while to do, but the top really needs to get sealed before the weather beats up the wood too much more.  It's already warped and splitting from the extremes, so that needs to stop.  Staining when it's too hot out does strange things when it dries, but doing it in the evenings means it gets dark before I can get very far and the water rinse to get the dust off doesn't dry quickly enough.  It's supposed to get into the high 90s again tomorrow so I'll get as much of that done first thing as I can before the heat kicks in.  After that, laundry needs to happen (which of course will heat up the house...but I can't put it off for too much longer), and if I'm lucky Dad and I might work on the terrace a little.  Maybe that's just wishful thinking... but the Deere has the front shovel on it now, and I'd like to see what it can do so I can maybe get some shrubs and fall bulbs planted before winter hits and I have to deal with the incessant mud for another 6 months.  If that doesn't happen, or if it's too hot to do it for long, I'll probably spend the rest of the day working inside. 

My office needs rearranging or something, the office closet needs painting and shelves put up, and there are a couple piles in the living room/kitchen that need to be gone through and dealt with before I'm comfortable having company.  The office closet is a big project that I can't get done in one day, so I may not attempt it just yet.  It took a day to do the front closet and that one's much smaller, although some of that included putting linoleum down and I don't have to do that in here.  I need to decide what I want to do about my desk too...hrm.  Well, for now it's time to get my horn out and practice, then bedtime.

Summer Fun: Stone steps

My dad has a new riding mower.  A fancy one, that likely cost more than my car.  (Granted, my car is old, and it was old when we bought it... but still!)  And, it came with 2 hats!  Lol.  Anyway, this thing has a nice cart and a front shovel/blade combo thing, is powerful enough to mow down the prairie, and it makes him giggle like a schoolgirl.  It's rather hilarious.  Point is, this thing can get the dirt work done that I need and haul stuff up and down the hill without any trouble. 

Yesterday we took it out onto the back acres to find some big, flat limestone rocks.  I know there are tons back there, it was just a matter of having a way to get them hauled to where i could do something with them.  I need them for walkways and such around my trailer so I don't have to trudge through the mud all the time, something that would last and look nice and not cost much (if anything), and I knew we had lots of limestone.  We loaded up the cart and took that load of rocks up the hill, sorted them a little, then picked one little spot we could finish up in just a couple of hours.  It was pretty hot out there and I've been fighting off a pseudo cold all week and didn't want to push too hard and he's been at work a lot and needed to get a nap in before he went back.

We picked the little hill just outside my back door.  When my water pipes froze repeatedly last winter (I'm in negotiations with the contractor who built the skirting to get the gaps filled in so it doesn't happen again... that's all kinds of fun, let me tell ya) I had to keep getting underneath the trailer to turn the space heater up, move it, turn it down when it was nice out, all that.  I had to get under there at least once a week for probably 3 months, usually in the deep snow and subzero temps.  Out my back door is a little walkway from the door to the back hill... not sure why he built it that way, instead of connecting it to the deck or building some stairs... but the hill is steep right there and every time I had to get under the trailer I had to slide down the hill on my butt so I didn't land on my face in the snow.  Getting back up was fun too. 

So, we built some stairs.  They're cute, they'll get the job done, and they were free.  Unless you count what my parents paid for the land and the mower... Point is, we didn't have to buy anything extra for them and now I don't have to slide down the snowy hill in the middle of the night anymore.  Hooray!  We have more rocks that we brought up that will need to be a walking path from the deck stairs to the front door eventually.  I'll probably start at the deck and work my way around one little load at a time, so that maybe by the time I turn the corner toward the front door there will be an entryway room built on with some real stairs!  Well, maybe not.  A girl can dream, anyway... it'll be a while before the contractor we like can get out here for that.  At least I need to get something by the deck stairs because the first step is too high off the ground and a nice thick slab right there will help with that considerably.

That's a project for another day.  That's as far as we got yesterday because I got overheated, even in the shade... guess I didn't drink enough before we got started or something.  But all is well now, and the little stairs look good!

Next weekend is another show, possibly the last one of the summer, and I need to get some biker chic stuff made.  I've been crocheting like mad to fill out my inventory a bit, so I need to get back on the jewelry bandwagon.  Cheers!

Spring Fever: Weekend Digging

Hi!  It's almost time to drop the "spring" label, isn't it?  Maybe when I feel ready for summer to hit... lol!  I have done a little beading this weekend, and I will be doing more after I'm done here, but I wanted to update you on my garden plan.

Today I spent a few hours digging at the end of my trailer to make room for two spirea bushes.  I'm pleased with the progress I made today!

I should've taken a true "before" picture, but oh well.  Just imagine that the front area looked like the back does.  This is after I had cleaned out some of the grass/weeds and worked up the soil a little.  As you can see, the tongue of the trailer sticks out, there's lots of prairie (read: tall, thick, sharp) grass growing everywhere around the house, and there's a little spot in the siding on the skirting that was falling off.  For the record, we paid quite a lot for a professional skirting job last fall, and we keep finding corners he cut, and we're not pleased.

At any rate, I dug up all the dirt on one side of the tongue, screwed the siding back on the skirting (it had been just stapled, which is why pieces like to fall off... one of these days I'll just go around the house with a bag of screws and my screw gun and get it over with), and pulled out the grass and weeds.  I went down to my parents' house for something and Dad pointed out some small edging bricks he had lying around that he didn't have a use for, so I measured them and the space and figured out that he has almost exactly the right number to edge my little plot I'm digging!  Bonus! They're also a good color, a red-grey, which works well with the other reddish touches I have out there.  The siding on the skirting is pinkish-red, the deck is a lighter pinkish-red (thankfully in the same color family!), when I get the deck railing and picnic table stained they'll be red, the dirt is red, it just all seems to be working out that way.  The same thing happened in my living room and I'm pleased with it, so why not?

So, after a couple of hours of digging and a few trips down to my parents' house, this little plot is almost halfway done!  Tomorrow I'll get some peat moss to work into the soil and plant some of Mom's tiger lilies around the edge, then work on digging the rest back to the deck.  I don't have the spirea bushes yet, but on my next trip to Rapid City I'll go to Jolly Lane and see what they have that won't get too big for the plot.  Looks like their Renaissance, Mellow Yellow, or Firefold varieties should work... need to see what they look like.  I have nice big windows at the end of the trailer and I don't want them to get covered up, nor do I want to have to prune the bushes back much.

I'm not sure what to do about the gap in the tongue itself... it's not big enough or accessible enough to plant and I don't want to be pulling grass out of it all the time.  Maybe I'll just pile a bunch of rocks in there so nothing will grow and call it good.  If there's one thing I have up here, it's rocks!

My yellow siding is ugly, isn't it?  Alas, that part's pretty far down on the priority list.  Oh well. I got pretty far on this little spot of ground today, and maybe tomorrow I can finish it up.  It feels good to do a project like this and finally see some progress!  I'm so used to staring at the huge amount of work left on the terrace and feeling like I'm getting nowhere.  Maybe the occasional smaller project is necessary to boost confidence a little.