Weekend Projects
This past weekend was spent cleaning house and preparing for fall. The house was a bit of a mess from various dog related chewing and tearing activities, and it only got worse from the scavenger hunt. We cleaned it up pretty quick though.
Outside, gave the lawn its last mowing for the year. I Hope so anyway. Not that I should complain, Meg did most of the mowing, at least once I got the mower started she did. I was planning on preparing a flower bed to be planted with bulbs for the spring, but then realized I needed a shovel to do this. Now, I do own a shovel. It just happens to still be at the river house. So now I own 2 shovels. One at my house and one at the river house.
Since this particular plot of land that our house's previous owners had designated as a flower bed appears to have never grown anything but a small, sickly blue spruce, and since our development is a partially wooded lot, I needed to add a lot of bone meal to the soil.
Wow. What a horrible run-on sentence. Let me try again:
This "flower bed" is one only in name. It looks to have never grown anything but one sickly blue spruce. This is mostly due to our lot being partially wooded, and the soil being mostly clay. To help remedy these two factors, I added bone meal to the soil.
Ah, much better.
After turning over the soil to mix in the bone meal and provide some much needed aeration, Meg got to work on planting bulbs. I got started on cleaning up the early leaves that have dropped. Within minutes, my rake handle broke. I gallantly tried to continue on, using my now stubby rake. Immediately, my rake, which I had named "Stubby Jim: The Rake Who Is A Pirate" just moments earlier suffered a horrible accident. Stubby Jim broke at the plasticy bit that holds the rakey bits to the handley bits, ruining his pirate dreams forever..
Now, having suffered two rake related disasters in such a short time, I almost gave up. After a brief memorial service for Stubby Jim, I was off to the hardware store once again.
This time, I got a rake that was all metal rakey bits up until it became all wooden handley bits. No plasticy weakness in this rake of champions, no sir.
I think the previous owner of this house hadn't raked up leaves at all last year. At least I hope so, because hardly any of the leaves appear to have fallen from our trees yet, and I filled an 11′ x 14′ tarp with leaves.
(I hope got my ' and my " correct. I don't want to make a mistake of Spinal Tappien proportions. I mean the bigger one, if I'm wrong. )
Anyway, If my presumptions about the previous owner of my house are wrong, and he did actually rake his leaves, I am going to be in a mess of trouble when we get closer to winter and the rest of these leaves drop.
After the leaves were taken care of, I put netting over the blubs to keep the squirrels away. Then I started watering the newly planted bulbs. When I get the hose out, I kinda go nuts. Besides watering the bulbs, I cleaned some spider webs off of the fence, and washed off the shed. And then the sidewalk. And then the driveway.
I almost washed off the mailbox for no good reason before I decided it was time to put the hose down slowly and walk away.