Restart

 I started running a 12-week lifting program, a spinoff of GZCLP called the Rippler, back in mid January, and finally finished it in mid-May! And now immediately restarted it at (slightly) higher weights.

Squat: 95 —> 95

Deadlift:  125 —> 140

Bench:  75 —> 75

OHP: 55.5 —> 60

Not a huge amount of progress, though to be fair the calculated 1RM is higher for all of these but they suggest being conservative and skewing down; in the case of the bench, which I did today, the program calculates my 1RM as 82, so they assigned me 3x5 at 67.5, which was too much, so i dropped to 65 for the second two sets and reset my 1RM to 75.

My squats, on the other hand, are simply not good! I have tight hamstrings and not so much ankle mobility, but even using small plates to elevate my heels doesn’t help. You’d think having thicker legs and being female would help me here, but no. Definitely the exercise I like least.

The deadlift on the other hand is my favorite of the core  lifts, even as it is the one most likely to cause injury if I’m not paying total attention to form. Hopefully I will be on track to reach my body weight deadlift by the end of this cycle!

Pride and Prejudice

 

Definitely posted out of order, but Sara and I met up in Danbury last month to see the 20th anniversary screening of Pride and Prejudice! We saw it in Florence on Valentine’s Day 2006, along with seemingly every other American study abroad student. I’ve definitely watched since then, but I had forgotten how excellently made the whole film is. Seeing it at a cinema let you appreciate elements of set dressing and lighting that are really part of the background, but contribute so much to what the director Joe Wright in a brief foreword said was his desire to make it “gritty.” Usually I roll my eyes at that word, but it made sense here; period pieces are usually super cleaned up, and even the “poor” areas seem sort of sanitized for visual consumption.

Just went back to “the archive” to recover what I said about it then: “ In other news, Monday night we all went to see Pride and Prejudice at the English theater, along with Sara, her amusing friends, and about 100 other females, plus the odd unlucky male. I definitely didn't expect the movie to be as entertaining as it was, but I absolutely loved it! Carla said that it was one of the best movies she'd seen lately and I quite agree. It was funny, and had a lot more fun with sly jokes than the six hour series could manage. Mr Darcy was smoking, and even Keira Knightley I didn't hate quite as much as usual. There's something extremely enjoyable about watching such a film with your close friends and having the entire audience oooh and ahhh at the same favorite parts. Except for the end, where they apparently cut the kissing scene. So yes, I felt cheated that after a two hour romantic comedy it ends with a kiss ON THE HAND. Come on. Europeans love sex! What's the deal?”

Me, 20 years later: LOL

Garden Adventures

 I have to laugh at what I wrote in my last post, assuming I’d dug most of the giant rocks out of my new garden bed. Ha! Every time I’ve gone in there in the past couple of weeks - adding soil, digging weeds - what have I found but more rocks. Giant rocks! This continued even into my planting day with on Wednesday. Dig a plant role, find a rock or five.

About half of the plants I got from Prairie Meadow fit into this space - the center is butterfly weed, rudbeckia, and coneflower, with some grasses, mountain mint and a few others in there.

Amazingly, the 50-ft roll of fencing fit around the perimeter! It’s not terribly secure, just zip tied to garden stakes, but with any luck it will be a basic deterrent to the bunnies and squirrels. They have so much else to eat around here.

The rest of the plants were added to other beds; northern blazing star near the lilies, asters in the center circle, hairy beardtongue by the Great Turtle, and coreopsis right in front. None of these are getting any protection, simply because I am out of fencing. Sink or swim!!

None of the other beds have the same size of rocks, but rocks they have, plus random roots, etc. All told this tool me about five hours worth of work - and I still need to finish the mulching this weekend! At least my 100-foot hose can reach the new bed from the back porch, so it’s only the other smaller groupings that I have to carry water to. And today it will rain, so that’s one day of free watering!

ETA: and now post-mulch! We ordered five cubic yards this time, which translates to roughly a metric fuck-ton of mulch. Sean helped me distribute the remaining 2/3 of it yesterday. We thought we had over-ordered - no way we need this much even with the new beds! But by the time we were done we could have used justtttt a little bit more, haha.

New Beginnings!

 First of all, the important news: Sean got a job teaching Latin at Fairfield Prep, which he'll start in the fall! After all the toxicity, anxiety, and unhappiness of the last few years at Notre Dame, "relief" doesn't really begin to cover the emotions of the last few weeks. The world at large has never looked darker than it has in recent months, so it feels incredibly fortunate to have this kind of a bright spot appear. 

Ironically, we haven't had any chance to actually celebrate; Sean got sick, which turned into bronchitis, and I once again believed I'd avoided it, only to get sick a week later. Mine wasn't as bad as his, but I still cannot remember the last time a cold kicked my ass quite this hard. My last post was about my lifting progress, which was up to a 24-week stretch since the last time we both got sick. Honestly, considering that we both work in "group" settings, that's not that bad. But it has still sucked this week, even as it's made the unseasonably cold weekend easier to bear being stuck inside. We've tried making dinner reservations twice - cancelled. Tried to have the boys do their first sleepover - cancelled. 

What I have done is a little celebratory purchasing: namely, the Colossal Pollinator Garden Kit from Prairie Meadows - 50 seedlings! This is destined for our new garden bed along the retaining wall by the driveway. (Separately, I will be watching the progress of the native perennials I sowed by the pond in the fall, but those are far enough way, and on a slope, that I don't expect to be able to see much from the house). 

On a warm day back in October, I decided to start ripping out the creeping Charlie and assorted weeds growing along the rock wall, with vague plans of filling this in with native plants and bushes in the spring.

 

In late March, over the weekend in which we were pretty sure Sean was going to get offered the job but hadn't yet entered into the final panic of getting the verbal offer, waiting for the formal offer documents, signing them, etc. etc., we return to tackle bringing up the turf grass in the area. 

This involved removing a lot of dirt, after carefully shaking and removing as much as we could, and taking extra time to spare as many earthworms as possible. Oh, and removing rocks. SO MANY ROCKS. Not small ones, either, more like 5-10-15 pounders, which we tossed onto the existing rock pile at the end of the driveway (rather satisfying to heave a mini-boulder eight feet, I must say). Joe the neighbor came over to bring me a garden stool at one point, and I asked him if he knew where the rock pile even came from. He thought it might have been from when they dredged to make the pond decades ago. The rocks in the pile don't look like the darker rocks that come up in the soil, though - they look more quarried. So who knows.

Now, you'd think I'd make a decorative border for this new bed with free rocks from the rock pile I already have...but in the interest of it looking a bit more uniform, I ordered some concrete pavers and then dug a mini-ditch to bury them.

The current results:

This is awaiting new soil to bring the ground level up (you can't see it from here, but from the driveway the drop from the grass level to the current soil is 4 inches or so, because of all that we removed between dirt and rocks). Then we'll wait for the plant shipment, which they said could be anywhere from mid-April until May. We're going to be doing the biennial mulch refresh this spring, too, so this bed will get black mulch to match the others. 

The trick is going to be figuring out how to adapt the planting plan we're getting to the site we have. Obviously, our patch is an irregular triangle, as opposed to the neat rectangle shown below. Sean had to remind me of the actual formula for the area of a triangle (cough, math skills, cough), and I measured it at 90 sq ft, but part of it is occupied by the remains of that giant stump, which has den holes around it for who knows what critters. I'm also not willing to plant too near the wall, which has an outward bulge in it at the end; I don't want to add any additional weight that would cause that to fail. So that cuts down a bit on available space.

I would have bought the smaller garden kit that Prairie Meadows offers, but it was already sold out when I went to order, so I bought the big one for $200. I'll have to put some of these seedlings elsewhere - in the center circle, or in the side bed with the irises I transplanted in the fall. It needs to be full sun, so it's got to be on that side. Only 5 of these species are native to the Northeast, so I do feel a little bit of guilt about that. But figuring out the calculus of plant height, bloom time, and garden design entirely on my own just felt like too damned much, and after the stress of the previous few weeks, I just wanted to pull the trigger and get started. That's what we'll consider this: a starting point. Let's be real, not all of these plants are going to survive, so I'm sure there will be gaps to plant more natives in the future! In the meantime: forgive me, Doug Tallamy, for I have sinned!

Lifting Progress

It's weird to think that Amazon can function as a sort of "archive" of one's past, but I was wondering how long I'd actually been weightlifting, and the answer lay in my past orders! August 2023, I invested in a squat rack, weights, and a bar.

The first bar I bought was a 33-lb "petite" bar, which I figured would be more manageable in our relatively low-ceilinged basement. Unfortunately, despite being advertised as working with a standard rack, it's like half an inch too narrow between the collars to fit comfortably in the J-hooks, so I had to add a standard 7-foot 45-lb bar. that said, it's actually turned out to be helpful to have 2, though even if the short one is awkward! I can have the big one set up for deadlifts on the mat, and set up the short one for lower-weight exercises like overhead.

It's been more than a year, but I started using Boostcamp to track my lifting on the GZCLP program in December last year, so I think of it as coming up on one year. I went back and checked where I started on the four compound lifts, vs. where I am now.  These are the T1s, so this is the weight I can do in 5 sets of 3 (as opposed to my "rep max" of 1).

December 2023 --> December 2024

Squat: 72.5 --> 95

Deadlift: 105 --> 125

Bench: 52.5 --> 75

OHP: 38 --> 55.5

The only one of those numbers I know has been higher is the deadlift, because I hit 135 in July, right before we went away to visit Sara and Zach, but then a combination of Daniel's wedding and getting Covid turned into a "deload" period that I've been coming back from the entire fall. I'm also more hesitant on the deadlift weight than on any of the others, since I tweaked my back with poor form several times in the first few months. That said, I did 125 yesterday and managed 5 reps on the last set, so that means it's time to go back to 135 on the next round. Whoo! 

Obviously I have not been the most committed lifter. For example, I didn't start really paying attention to protein, or rather how little of it I was actually eating in a given day, until...this summer, maybe? And god knows I haven't given up wine. But I'm still pretty pleased with how much stronger I am! I just have to remind myself that I am also 39, so I can't expect to get crazy results with a fairly moderate approach to strength training. 

One of the things that's been frustrating is the knowledge that you can't do everything. Before I got the barbell, I was mostly doing Caroline Girvan workouts, which I really enjoyed - they combined cardio and strength, usually, so I felt both wiped and like I was getting stronger. But I couldn't do her workouts and the GZCLP program. Now I just do one of her longer stretching videos on the weekend (or today, which felt like a weekend even though it wasn't). For a while, though, that meant that I was only doing the weightlifting, with no real cardio, but recently I've been trying to alternate lifting with cardio. Since I'm now very aware that my "running" days are over (thank you, drop-foot!), it's been boxing. I found a good YouTube channel of a guy that does fairly no-nonsense training. He uses the numbers, which I often have to take a moment to figure out what's supposed to be happening (and some numbers that I didn't know existed, like 8 for "overhand right" and 7 for "shovel hook"). I'm also southpaw, so when he stands in orthodox and says you need to "duck right" I have to mentally convert to "duck toward rear leg...go!" While I was getting ready to box today I decided today to give myself the gift of a two-month free trial of YouTube premium. Do you know what's more annoying than a video being interrupted by ads? When you have to take one of your gloves off to hit the skip button! But at least until February 24, that won't be me. 

Another "set your expectations" realization I've had is that I have to accept what I can do with the limited time I have in the morning. We get up at 5am, so as long as I drink coffee/eat a banana and am downstairs by 6am, I can warm-up, work out, stretch, and be eating breakfast by 7:10, which gives me enough time to shower and head out at 8:15. That limits the kind of lifting programs I can follow; GZCLP works because it's T1 5x3, T2 3x10, and then three T3s 3x15, which works out to about 50 minutes (especially if I super-set two of the T3s). I see some of these programs that women rave about on /xxfitness and the estimated time per workout is two hours. Like, what? Who has time to do that 5 times a week? It bums me out sometimes that I don't have time to work on getting stronger at X, Y, or Z, but I have to pick and choose, and I've tried to focus on stuff that will actually help the compound lifts. Unfortunately, as I've moved up in weight I've realized that I need to start incorporate warm-up sets at lower weights, which adds another 10 minutes. That means I might have to start getting downstairs by 5:50. Boo. Hiss.  

Finally, some goals. Or at least one goal: I would like to achieve a bodyweight deadlift in 2025!

The Shed Saga

This is the story of the shed, and my heroic efforts to keep it alive.

Our saga begins in August 2020. We'd just toured the house, which I knew immediately that I wanted, but I waited until we were out in the yard by the shed, away from the seller's ears, to tell Steve, our agent, exactly how much I wanted the house (and Sean, happily, concurred!) 

A week or so later, we were back with our inspector. He had nothing but good things to say about the house, in general, but as I followed him around, making notes in a notebook, he pointed out a whole bunch of problems with the shed: rotting trim that was actually interior-grade wood, not exterior; the lack of ventilation; the fact that the roof shingles were curled up and falling off on the side that got more sun exposure, due to the lack of ventilation; the damage to a couple of floorboards inside, etc. He pointed out that because the shed was massive (16' x 20' ish), it was definitely worth it to repair as opposed to needing a new one. 

I took this photo during the inspection:                  

Now I will be honest that I did basically nothing with the information the inspector gave me for the next several years. New homeowners have other priorities, and the shed seemed mostly fine, aside from finding bits of asphalt shingle in the grass when it was windy. In the fall/winter, a woodpecker would show up to beat the shit out of the front and back, creating holes and chipping paint that I did my best to repair and conceal (of course, matching old, faded shed paint is a ridiculous quest, to which the "patchwork" visible in many of these pictures attests). We noticed a groundhog living underneath it, plus chipmunks, and seemingly rabbits in spring. We sadly acknowledged that the logical spot to plant a future garden, which was right near the shed, was too close to this critter condominium to ever be successful.

The shed and I in happier times. Also pictured is my hammock, which last winter fell prey to the mice that had moved into the shed. I thought storing it rolled up in the rafters was enough, but nay. 

Flash forward to the fall of 2023, when I go into the shed after a rainstorm and see the marks of water on the plywood roof. Of course it was on the sunward side, where the shingles were failing. Unsure of how long it will be before we can have the shed roof redone, I decide we need to tarp the roof to protect it from further damage. Now, the Great Tarping of 2023 is a tale on its own, which I think I've already written down here. Suffice it to say, our new neighbor Ken saved our asses by behind totally willing to climb onto the shed roof to get the tarp situated...and then do it again when the damn thing blew off before we could secure it all the way! 

Despite frequent reinforcement and tie-down with cinder blocks and candy-cane-shaped rebar (which Ken purchased for us and installed, very kindly!), the tarp had a tendency to move in the blustery winds of winter. 

Luckily, we didn't have to put up with it forever! In January 2024 we had the shed roof replaced ($2k). 

The immediate risk had been assuaged, but now it was a countdown until my brand-new shed roof started being degraded by sun exposure without ventilation. 

This summer, we had a carpenter install vents on the front and back of the shed ($500). He quoted us $5k to remove and replace all of the rotting siding and trim, which was definitely not in the budget, but got me thinking about what I might be able to do myself to give the shed a bit more of a lease on life. 

One of the problems was that Don, or whoever built the shed for him, used a bunch of MDF-type material that was splitting. Along the shady side of the shed, the trim board had fallen off entirely, and the siding behind it was affected by wood rot, which was also where the mice were entering. Ditto along the back side. I knew I couldn't replace the siding outright, but I figured I could do something about the trim situation. 

Step one was to measure and order cedar boards to replace the worst of the trim. The longest board was 16' and there was another that was 8' Along the long shady side, I decided to get a board that was 8" wide, instead of the 5.75" that had been there, so I could mount it higher and conceal/protect more of the damaged siding. 

I did OK with measuring the larger wood pieces, but I wound up with some not-quite-there bits. On the front of this corner, the new piece of trim (cut down by Megan's dad for me) turned out to be both a little too long, and a little too narrow. Too long, that's fine, who cares. Too narrow by 1/4"...well, now we have a bit of a problem, Houston (ultimately I decided to solve this issue by means of visual illusion: I painted the 1/4" gap white!)

On the back of the shed, I thought I did OK with making sure the board was level when I nailed it up (which I did by myself, keeping the board propped on cinder blocks). Of course, once I added the trim pieces at the lower left corner, there was just a little bit of wonkiness. Here I decided "I will pile cinder blocks here when I am done, and never look at this again." There turned out to be a lot of the latter sentiment on this project, because I am really the only person who spends any time actually close to the shed. Ultimately, the goal became "make this shit look better when viewed from the house" - and I can't see this side at all, haha. 

Speaking of cinderblocks. The shed project by this point in the fall had expanded into the "shed zone project." There are two pine trees behind the shed, which had accumulated three years' worth of needles, on top of a huge amount of cut tree debris which the previous owners had piled up there after the August 2020 tornado. Digging up softened, rotting wood and hauling it to the woods, and then raking up more than a dozen leaf bags' worth of pine needles and hauling them to the dump in my Honda Civic...that was a lot of effort. And then there were the cinder blocks. Not only were there blocks around the perimeter of the shed, there was a massive NEW pile of them, after Sean and I had dug out the random U-shaped single layer of cinderblocks in the center of the yard during the summer of 2023, moving them behind the shed. I decided they were unsightly and had to go. The fun thing about the shed being so far from the driveway is that I got to make many, many trips with the wheelbarrow (4 cinder blocks per trip). Then five dump runs, since a Civic does not hold that many cinder blocks at once.

On the plus side, now I know where the "masonry deposit" area is at the transfer station! 

After all of this, it was time to turn to painting the shed and its new trim pieces. This too became A Whole Odyssey, because first I had to scrape off as much flaking paint as I could from the existing trim, and sand it down, and wash it. Then I caulked along the top of the two new long boards. Then the taping - so much painter's tape. The priming - and I wasn't going to prime anything besides the new wood, but the two quart-size cans that Goody's recommended cost me $85, so you'd better believe I was going to use up as much of that primer as possible! Finally, finally, there was painting, which I started on Wednesday and finished today. The front and back of the shed, with all those stupid trim pieces, took the longest, but the parts that required me to be on a ladder also took a long time. I'm happy to finally have gotten some use out of the Gorilla ladder I bought last year for $100, but it doesn't have the little shelf that my regular 6' A-frame ladder does, so for most of the painting saga, I was adding paint to the can lid and using that as a little painter's palette. Up and down, up and down. Today, literally the last day of my painting journey, it occurred to me that I could set the paint can into the circle indent on the top of the A-frame and position it close enough to the extension ladder that I could dip the brush in it directly. *facepalm* 

I realized I didn't take any progress photos during the painting phase, perhaps because my spirit was finally flagging on this whole endeavor. It was cold as BALLS today, with a lot of wind, which is decidedly less fun to paint in than the Indian-summer temperatures when I was priming. I took this photo out the bathroom window a little while ago. I'm very aware that it doesn't really look like much has changed, although the vent is clearly painted, but operation "make it look less fucked up from the house" has been a success. (Up close, though: HA). 

Now, this photo definitely shows the "patchy" effect of me painting over woodpecker damage, probably in winter 2022. Usually I try to deter him with those dangly icicle things, but imagine my surprise last Saturday to look out the window and see a little 2.5" hole at the left corner of the shed, where the roof intersects the horizontal trim pieces. That little fucker had bored an entire-ass hole through the shed! My shed, that I have spent so much time and energy on! I went out to the shed to figure out how to patch the whole, but imagine my even-greater surprise to open the doors and find the woodpecker dead - his neck snapped in a mousetrap. See, that has been another parallel shed project: deter and destroy the mice. I had been periodically stuffing steel wool into the gaps, but they would just nibble themselves a new entry in the rotting wood, so I got snap traps and some bait gel, and I've killed 8 of them so far. Plus one woodpecker. Serves him right, the little fucker. I chose not to get any fox urine crystals or other predator deterrents, because I thought that might drive away the woodchuck, and the adorable short-tailed shrew, and the other critter condo residents. Them, I do not mind, even though it means I can never have a tomato garden without first building Fort Knox. But those bastards who turned my hammock into nesting material? Doomed. 

Of course, now that I've killed my enemy (accidentally) and freshened up the white trim, you know I'm looking at the red panels again. There are so many places where it's damaged. But how do you get "faded old shed" red, instead of the kind of red that, after 2 sample efforts, I wound up with 2 years ago? That's my current conundrum. I also have to spend some time on my mouse-proofing efforts (combining steel wool with expandable foam), and install the adhesive patch and compound for the woodpecker hole (currently stuffed with aluminum foil). 

In conclusion, it only took four years, but I've addressed most of the inspector's concerns about the shed. Sean and I have joked that if we won the lottery, his first project would be expanding the back of the house for a bigger kitchen (just this morning he was wistfully imagining a second kitchen like we had on Concord St), while mine would be transforming the shed into the Pussy Palace (tm). I'd run power out there, insulate it, and get some outdoor cats with RFID tag collars that would work with a high-tech cat door. I'd never have to worry about mice again, and I'd have a place to see kitties without having them in the house! Ah, dreams. 

In the meantime: the shed endures. Long live the shed!

Niblings and Shed Update

I put the three-day weekend to good use, and got the two larger pieces of cedar trim nailed up onto the shed! The one in the back (which came out a little wonky, despite using a level) was 8 feet, while the side one was 14 feet. Honestly very proud of myself that I didn't smack any fingers with a hammer, though there was quite a bit of cursing when the huge-ass framing nails just absolutely resisted in some areas. I was lucky to be able to prop the boards up on the cinderblocks, but still had to kind of throw my body against the wood to keep it as flush as possible while nailing. I expected my left forearm to kill me the next day, but in fact it was my lower back and butt from that! Still to come are the additional trim pieces. I picked up some "regular ass" nails to use for those, now that the big pieces of trim are on. 

Jen and the boys came down Monday for what was supposed to be a pizza lunch, but we'd forgotten that not only was it a holiday, but all the pizza places around us are closed Mondays anyway. So it was lunch at the Hornet's Nest and then off to a park closer to the shoreline with a labryinth across from a tranquil lake. Well, as tranquil as the walking path was going to be with these two shrieking and hollering anyway - pictured here in a rare moment of quietude as they waited for us adults to catch up. 

Charlie, tiny demon of chaos, is going to be nine next month. Pictured here while we waited on the same bench later, while Mom and Uncle Sean attended to Leo's sudden "uh-oh, I have to poop" in the woods.

Leon, temperamental man of moods, is five! The forest poop was, happily, a false alarm, and we went to get ice cream and look at the skeletons on the Branford green. 

 

Birthday Update

 I turned 39 yesterday! For some reason, I like the number itself better than those on either side of it. Hopefully this portends good things! 

Here are some good things that have already happened:

• My exhibition formally opened on Thursday night! This is the fourth show I've curated at Fairfield (and will be the last for a fairly long time, given that our exhibition calendar is planned through 2029 or so), and I'm really proud of it. Since it's Old Master prints, it's not as eye-catchingly beautiful as the Kress exhibition - but it is, admittedly, hard to beat an El Greco.
• I deadlifted 135 lbs. yesterday! Technically I'd already done this in late July, right before we went to see Sara and Zach, but our August brushed with Covid turned into basically a month without working out, and I had to build back up to that. My birthday present to myself was 45-lb bumper plates! 
• My new plants are coming along! The wildflowers are sleeping under their burlap, but the ones I had to hack through clay and a rock mine to plant are doing well:

• 

• 

I'll admit that neither set of hardy mums are exactly the color I was thinking - I thought the orange ones would be more the deep russet orange, and the smaller ones are a bit more pink than the deep red I thought they'd be - but I appreciate them all the same (and my other birthday gift to myself was a pair of dark orange mums in plastic pots for the front steps).

This past weekend marked 18 years since my mom died, which is kind of hard to fathom. Perhaps it's because we keep her memory so alive with our stories and jokes! But I'm grateful for the wonderful things I do have: Sean, my home, my family and friends, my general health. Here's to you, 39, may you be a very good year. 

Projects Old and New

I took this video [which, alas, won't upload, booo] by the pond earlier in August. Nothing is really "happening" - the intense birdsong of spring is over, and even the bullfrogs have calmed down. But gently, almost imperceptibly, the "island" is drifting across the pond in the breeze. I find it so calming to watch when it does that! 

Calling it an island is kind of a misnomer; it's a giant floating mass of reeds, which occasionally seems to anchor itself in place for weeks, and then will wind up floating about. Lately it's often been in the shallower end in the morning, but somehow it always seems to find its way back to its "home" in the back corner of the pond. There's an actual island over there, likewise covered in reeds, but durable enough to have actual trees on it. If you go around the back of the pond, the edge of the island is only about 10 feet away - but it's 10 feet of quite deceptively deep water. I'd never be able to get the rowboat back there - it's too hemmed in on the sides with vegetation. Maybe one day I'll borrow a kayak and use that as a pontoon bridge! 

I did take the boat out for its third and final "sail" of the summer last weekend. This time my goal was to clean up some floating bits of plant debris, so I just brought a Home Depot bucket that I could fill up with muck, then pull alongside the shallow end and hand off to Sean to empty. Another reason I wouldn't go into the water, aside from the deepness...it's so full of bugs, Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm happy that the ecosystem's happy, but nothing like pulling a mass of pond weed into the boat and having tons of mite-sized bugs spill off it onto your legs. There are also bugs that look like beetles or crickets but live underwater. This did not fill me with joy. Nor did Sean's unexpected announcement that the island was floating toward me! I was in the middle of the pond, I turn around, and the wind was indeed pushing it my way. It was sort of freaky - for one thing, it's a lot BIGGER when you're looking up at it from a boat. 

 

Since none of the pond turtles want to be my friends, I had to buy one. This "little" guy is 56 lbs of concrete, but he was only $35! He lives in the front mulch bed now. He hasn't been officially named, but I'm using "The Great Turtle" as a placeholder. 

This Home Depot visit was in preparation for another long-delayed intended project: splitting the irises in the front garden bed. Supposedly they're supposed to be split every 3-5 years. Now, I don't know who planted them (was it the people who sold to us, who were barely here a year? Or the lady who lived here since the house was built in 1960?), but they definitely haven't been split since 2020 at least. The rhizomes were huge and heavy, and I was thinking of Archimedes' "I could move the whole world, with a lever big enough" as I levered my shovel parallel to the ground trying to bring the clumps up. Then you start snapping them apart, separating each turnip-looking rhizome with a little leaf frond from its compatriots, and piling them up in stacks like in this picture:

I wound up with more than 70 individual rhizomes - and I wound up leaving one half of the iris plantings intact (partially "for science" and partially out of exhaustion). The only problem is that planting guidance says to replant each individual rhizome with 18 inches of clearance. Who has that kind of space? I crammed a few into where the plantings had been originally:

and then added a dozen or so alongside the house where the mulch bed had been empty. You're supposed to bury them so shallowly that the top of the rhizome is visible, which I think I did okayish at, but we'll see what happens with all of these in the spring.

The other task last weekend was spreading those bags of soil on top of the empty area by the pond that I've been solarizing all summer! We took the plastic off and spread out four bags of soil. Then this morning, I mixed up all of my seeds from these lovely envelopes:

and shook them up in a mason jar. They barely amounted to a tablespoon:

So I added some sand to make it easier to spread, and did my best to spread it around evenly. Then I tamped them in a little by walking over the bed (always slightly dicey because it's on a slope and there are two bunny burrows at the edge just begging to roll your ankle!), added a little water, and then covered it all up with gardening burlap. Now, in theory, we wait for spring! I know that wildflower patches usually don't produce actual flowers until the 2nd or 3rd season, so it's going to be kind of a challenge figuring out if something is a weed that I should pull or a seedling, but...fingers crossed!

Between the irises and the wildflower patch, I feel like I've wrapped up two projects that have been in the back of my mind for a couple of years. I was also able to cross off "add ventilation to shed roof" at long last (something that was advised by the inspector when we considering buying the house), with a local carpenter Josh Leetes, who was recommended by the guy who did our pest control. To actually redo the shed - replace all the rotting trim and some side boards - he quoted us $5k, which is hilariously out of budget. Inserting a pair of gable vents, though, was a mere $500. Sold! But now the vents sit unpainted, so my next project, and sort of a stop-gap "keep the shed looking decent/prevent mouse entry" thing, is to 1) replace the rotted trim myself with new wood, and 2) scrape/repaint the trim on the front when I paint the vents. I'm planning to go to the lumberyard this week to talk to someone about the costs. There are fancy recycled composite boards that come pre-primed, but we'll see how that compares to "basic bitch" wood. 

 

Another Summer Update!

The milkweed patch went gangbusters with flowers, but I only saw two monarchs over the 10 days or so when they were at their height, and spotted a single monarch caterpillar (which wasn't on the plant the next day, so could have potentially become a bird's snack). However, I'm trying to content myself with how much joy the bee population was getting from them! The phrase "hive of activity" was extremely apt. The smell of the milkweed flowers, while subtle, is rich and warm - really lovely when brought to you over a breeze. 

I went out on the pond a second time to do reed removal, and discovered that the damn thing still has a slow leak. I'm hitting it with more flexseal this week. Also, the oarlock pin worked great...on the oarlock I managed to get it on to. The other one flew off into the water as soon as I tried to attach it. I had Sean run and grab me a safety pin, which turned out to be a cheap piece of shit (thanks Amazon), but I was still able to twist the metal to hold the other oar in place. It was still very awkward with two oars of the same length, but whatever. 

The second video is just to capture the "bullfrog chorus" at the pond. In previous weeks it was more overlaid with birds, but I realized that most of the birds have probably fledged their kids by now and are less aggressive (redwing blackbirds, I'm looking at you). The bullfrogs remind me of a group of stringed instruments hidden around the pond, each with a single chord being plucked when they sound off. Not captured, but always funny/surprising to me: if you walk up to the pond and startle them, even if you don't see them, you'll hear this high-pitched "scree!" and a plop as they jump in. Combine that with three or four little red-eared sliders paddling madly to safety when you come near, and it's about enough to hurt a girl's feelings. I just want to be friendsssssss!

2024 Update

 Sean was recently amusing himself by going through "the archive" -- which I last updated last July. Look at me, squeaking in under the 1-year wire! I had to go back through my photos to see hm, what should I add to the record in brief?

Autumn: 

Our shed roof has been in trouble since we bought this house. The inspector had pointed out that despite its impressive size (20 x 16, as I learned when I needed to obtain the tarp below), it had some design flaws: Don (our house's original owner - his wife Betty sold it to the developers in 2018, and the Grammaticos stepped in during that flip before selling to us) had used a lot of interior wood trim on the exterior, which is a no-no. He also didn't install any ventilation in the roof (possibly assuming the side windows would work?), so the shingles on the left-hand side, which caught the most sun, had been baking for years, curling up and falling off. By this past fall, I could see that water was making it to the plywood ceiling from inside the shed, so I decided we needed to put up a tarp. It sounds so simple, and yet, the Great Tarp Adventure would have been a complete failure without the intercession of our new neighbor, Ken, who replaced Todd and Margo. The first tarp, which was too small and only covered the front where the water was coming in, kept blowing off in storms, despite my best efforts to anchor it to cinderblocks (of which we have many, thank you Don). Then I decided we needed to tarp the entire thing - but I'm afraid of heights, and the thought of Sean getting up there was giving me such anxiety (even though yes, it's not very high up). Ken saw us struggling and came right over - despite being 75, he has that wiry, no-nonsense old-man energy, and no qualms about going up onto the roof to get the tarp settled from the top. Oh, and going up again 15 minutes later, because a sudden gust of wind lifted it off before we could get it settled. He even went out and got these candy-cane shaped rebar pins and redid all of our ropes (because even with cinderblocks on the top of the rebar sunk into the group, the wind really wanted that tarp).

                                   

We repaid Ken's kindness with a bottle of his preferred beverage - Macallan scotch! The tarp stayed up until we got the roof replaced in early February (yes this was winter, despite the 0 snow on the ground). Winter is a good time to get small roofing jobs done, I guess - it only took them about four hours. I thought they might have to replace some of the plywood where there was water staining, but nope, it was still good (and a sign of Russo Roofing not trying to upsell us, which I appreciate).

                                           

  I chose the lightest gray shingles possible to help reflect the heat, but on the summer to-do list is to install a pair of 8-inch gable vents along the back side of the shed (not directly in the center, where you normally see them because that's where Don ran the main roof support beam).    

Winter: 

We had a gas fireplace installed, which is ridiculously cozy, and unlike the one we had on Concord Street, this one lights up with a remote! We had to experiment with our Christmas set-up, since the last couple of years we had put the loveseat directly in front of the (empty) fireplace. Sean masterminded this, and it worked great!

A big windstorm in December took out the beautiful tree by the pond - split it right in half. It was some kind of willow (possibly a black willow), which apparently are not terribly long-lived, but it was such a delight to see in the summer, with all of the birds in the branches. Even after we had the remains hauled away, it looked like a raw wound from the windows all winter (and we can't even see the stump from the house, which looks even sadder). We were planning to plant a new willow in the spring, but literally as I was emailing with a native plant nursery in April, I realized there is an American elm coming up in just about the same spot. It's a much bigger tree than the willow, but it's native, so why not let Nature handle it, instead of worrying about protecting a sapling I planted from the deer and bunnies? 

                                      

Spring:

We look our long-awaited trip to London in April! Getting there was pretty stressful, and Sean got sick halfway through the trip, so it was not the perfect vacation, but we still had a great time. We had booked an "aparthotel" near Paddington, which turned out to be a perfect choice - it had a kitchenette and a dishwasher, and a Marks & Spencer down the street, so we could do breakfast on our own, but there was also full concierge service (which we honestly didn't need, but was still nice!) As always, it's important to us to eat well when we travel, haha. Culinary highlights: the Sunday roast at a pub in Mayfair; an Indian restaurant in Kensington, Dishoom, that my colleague Megan had recommended (and then I forgot about and independently decided on from the guidebook); a Spanish tapas place in Mayfair; and honestly, a classic "local pub" dinner, down the street from Paddington, as locals filed in to watch some kind of soccer championship. 

Of course, for lunch, there's no better deal than the V& A's cafeteria. Not only is this the first museum in the world that offered meal options from its inception, it's like $15 for an excellent hot meal with sides, plus you're eating in these rooms:

I actually got to visit twice on this trip - Sean was not feeling well and stayed at the hotel the first time I went, but we went again. Honestly, I love everything about this museum, but the Cast Courts just blew me away on this visit. The scale of the column of Trajan! My jaw dropped when I walked in the first time. No picture does it justice. That you can go inside it (which obviously you're not allowed to do in Rome), and that you can actually make out some of the relief carving (hard to do in Rome, though of course both surviving column and the plaster copy lack the original paint that would have made it legible!)

At the British Library, Sean permitted a rare photograph of him with one of the oldest copies of the Bible in existence, the Greek Codex Alexandrina:

Summer:

Goose war 2024 is going okay so far! We laughed about seeing Canada geese in St. James' Park when we got to London (they were imported in the 1950s), but the joke was on us, because the first skirmish took place just days after we got home, in late April. It had been a very warm early spring, so I was anticipating this, and the fencing was up before we left, but the babies were small enough to scoot under it. We wound up in a bit of a Mexican standoff, with the geese inside the fenced pond, and despite the harassment of the "goose lady's" border collie, unwilling or unable to depart. This was a Thursday. I thought we'd have to leave the fencing open for a day during the weekend at the shallow end and try to close it behind them when they left (which I had to do once before, and it really hard, because as soon as you come close they of course race for the water). I left for work on Friday - geese in the pond. Came back Friday night - no geese. Fencing intact, not much goose poop in the grass. Where did they go, and why? I wondered if someone had come onto our property to "let them out" - or was Ken involved? (He remains mysterious on the topic, but was in immediate agreement with us and Joe about how welcoming he felt toward them...).

Anyway, never got an answer, and we haven't seen that goose family again. This encounter did inspire me to get a Ring camera mounted facing the pond. It's blurry at that distance, but enough for a quick check. I also used landscaping staples to make sure there weren't gaps for the goslings below. The next goose skirmish came in May, while Linda was here - I was at work, saw movement by the pond, and had her confirm. This was a different family with younger goslings. Deterrence: my neighbor Joe flying across the lawn on his riding mower, terrorizing the geese into departure (I watched this happen live via Ring app). The family has shown up two more times, coming not from Lidyhites Pond but rather, I presume, from a smaller pond up Laurel Hill that I've seen on maps. Both time I was able to use the lawnmower to drive them back into the woods. Unfortunately, the second time, when I went around behind the pond, it had recently rained and turned it into a vernal-pool swamp. I got stuck in the mud and Sean had to come push (and now we know the John Deere is rear-wheel drive). 

In conclusion: the Goose War of 2024 continues. Constant vigilance! 

Wildflower project: 

We have a massive patch of milkweeds by the pond, as they are aggressive spreaders and I've let them have free reign. However, we only get 1-2 monarchs a year, which is so disappointing! Wondering if the problem was not enough flowers nearby to attract them to lay eggs, I've started working on solarizing about 110 square feet along the bank. This mean first weeding and digging out all of the roots I could, which was pretty backbreaking. Some of those weeds had insane root systems. Oriental bittersweet had made its home there, and its roots are bright orange and branch for four feet in multiple directions, it was wild. 

            

I've been solarizing these under plastic for a few weeks, and just took the plastic off today. I read that you should give the patches a break so that any surviving weeds have time to stick their heads up -- then you rip them out and redo the tarps for another period. The goal is to seed this area with native wildflower seeds in the fall, six weeks before the frost, and then hopefully they will germinate on their own in the spring. I can't afford to cover this much ground with plugs, so seed it shall be. I'll also need to temper my expectations, because apparently wildflower areas tend to "creep" in year 2 and then "leap" in year three. 

                                                

After I finished the second patch I came back to take a photo and found I'd been joined by a rather large snapper! This is the downside of the pond fencing: it's not a problem for things like raccoons, squirrels, or deer, but it is for turtles. I opened a stretch of fencing further ahead, left the area, and she scooted on in (she moved fast!). We just did the same on the shallow end for a large box turtle. Unfortunately, I've already found two massacred nests of turtle eggs so far. 

The Boat Project: 

Last year, the boat was taking on water, so I spent a week applying coats of flexseal before giving it another water test. Success! The USS Fat Man (named in honor of JTD and his desire for a boat) took to sea pond. Now, the oars we have are two mismatched ones I found in the shed, and are super awkward to use. I acquired oarlocks, which made rowing a little easier, but they didn't come with cotter pins to hold them in place, so they still kept coming out of the oarlocks. I got the pins today, so this should be easier on the next round, one hopes. Sean was the on-shore support, and took this photo that, yes, looks like it was taken with a potato:

The actual purpose for going into the water is to stem the advance of the invasive reeds (the phragmites australis at upper right - the shorter reeds at upper left are native) by cutting them below the waterline, and also picking up any reed debris that's hanging out in the pond. This is fairly awkward and messy work. A big wooden rowboat is not exactly the idea craft here -- a lightweight metal jonboat would be amazing -- but it's the one I've got. But the giant oars are more designed for "row yourself about on a giant clear lake!" instead of "maneuver yourself alongside the reeds and don't float away while you're cutting them." It's not the most elegant endeavor. But the only other option for the reeds is aquatic pesticide, which would cost $2k for the permits and the company, and they wouldn't remove any of the dead reeds. Plus, the birds freaking love the reeds, they're always hanging out in them and on them, which admittedly they don't seem to do as much with the shorter native variety. So the goal is control, not eradication.

We've also had fun observing our friend the great blue heron, who is very shy (he's flown away when he's spotted me on the driveway). Just this week we finally were able to watch him catch and eat a fish (of which there are so many in there)! But the smaller birds, especially the redwing blackbirds, tend to harass him away. :-(

Finally, I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention my other, ahem, "nature control" project: reducing the number of chipmunks, which exploded this year. We had to have the driveway repaired two years ago because of them, and now they're destroying the retaining wall too, which was the last straw. All efforts at deterrence failed, so now we've moved on to murder. At last count we've got 17 fewer chipmunks around here than we had last month, but they're still seemingly everywhere. We'll see what the number is the next time I update this!

Edited to add: I went out late yesterday afternoon to take a photo of the solarized beds without their plastic. When you stand by the pond edge, the milkweeds almost block out the roof of our house!

I also discovered that what my plant-ID app tells me is willow shoots coming up from the trunk of the fallen tree! The baby American elm is lower left, with sort of jagged leaves. Now to decide who we let thrive...