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Here’s a picture of a very happy Sophie to test my RSS feed:

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What I did today: spent a wad on containers at HD Landscape Supply closing sale, got two hanging baskets, two rootbound McHostas in tiny ceramic drainless pots, two fake urns, two white 12″ pots and saucers, and 4 white 24″ boxes. Bought the wrong ends of the Melnor quick-connects; now have enough hose ends to last the decade. Impulse seeds: columbine and lavender.

Did about 6 Bright Lights chard seeds in a box, liberated the hostas into the hanging baskets (currently hanging S side of house outside master bath), direct-seeded some lavender into a 4″ pot. Dumped the columbine out behind/around the moonflower trellis. Need to thin the moonflowers; got a little crazy. Should remove the two that haven’t grabbed on yet.

Into the seed starter: 12 BL chard, 12 (6×2) nevada lettuce, 12 Sweet surprise cabbage. 6 Twinkle eggplants for giggles.

In the mail: two kinds of beets, mesclun mix, hot chocolate rose for bedroom garden. Possibly some other impulse buys.

Inventoried the seed box, should get rid of all the morning glory packets, just keep the ones mom gave me ages ago; some might take still. Have an embarrassment of tomato seeds, particularly the heirlooms that never made it down this year. Should toss the McMaters and go heirloom-only from now on. Have 1 packet penstemon, which is a digitalis: no go for the back yard. Give away.

Two containers of sad Home Depot tomatoes aren’t going to do anything unless I find more sun, but I think it’s going to cool off too much. Sad HD cucumber is going to need me to pollinate them if they’re going to do anything, but outlook is poor.

South side under bathroom wall is so wet and muddy from rain/hose that it’d be smart to build a raised bed there. Maybe sacrificial lettuce experiment.

I’m thinking about mounting a box all along the east side of the shed. I really want to pull out the boxwoods on the north side of the shed, one of the better sunny spots where the oak doesn’t cover, and build out a bed there – it’d look better as cottage garden, but it’s such a good tomato spot. Might hang tomatoes from the shed roof in the Spring; might mitigate squirrel issue.

West of the driveway is prime real estate, but is open to animals and assholes. If I build something there, it’s going to have to be raised, bricked in and under, and it’ll have to look fairly attractive. One assumes the house next door will sell eventually. Really ought to go get another trellis and do something outside the kitchen window for a little privacy, or put in hooks for something that can hang and trail.

The yaupon or whatever it was outside the front kitchen window is dead and spindly, needs to go. Whatever killed it is nailing the hedges along there too – let’s cut it all down and rootkill before winter and compost the crap out of it, maybe build out that bed into a circle that goes around the fakey wall to the side window.

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So, we are more or less moved (the ‘or less’ is a common subject of my 3am panic attacks, so I’m going to ignore that for now; it’s almost over, we’ll put it that way), though we have a water leak under the yard and no dryer and a couple of mysterious not-working things in the house, and it’s starting to feel like mine.  We’re still living fairly simply, though the amount of stuff that’s in boxes in the garage and yet we continue to exist comfortably is sort of terrifying.  Very little is put away yet, and I don’t anticipate that really happening until the end of the month.

The dogs barely know the difference.  We’ve had a housebreaking setback with Sophie, which I expected, though I didn’t expect her to so stubbornly decide that poop goes in the house and not the yard.  B will go outside and wait her out for nearly an hour, only to have her circle and drop a deuce the moment she’s back in.  Interrupt her mid-drop and take her outside, and she’ll hold it until she’s in again.  We have tile floors in all the common areas, and bleach wipes, so at least there’s that.  I have just tonight allowed the cats a very small roam of the back of the house, just their room and the bathroom where they can’t do much damage.  They’ve been shut in my office until now, because the girldogs’ prey drive is at Level Orange these days.  One of them has manifested an eye infection of some sort just today, which is just exactly what I needed (only slightly less than he needs it, I suppose), but I’m hoping it’s allergies and not some sort of damage.  I am inclined at the moment to never mix the dogs and cats again, and just let the cats live out slightly confined lives in my office with occasional outings when the hall door is closed to keep the dogs in the living room.  There’s a floor-level window in there; I have plans to get one of those window boxes that lets the cats out into a little atrium and trim the shrubbery so they can see into the yard.

But we absolutely got the two things we wanted most:  air conditioning that works, and short drives to work.  I commute on surface roads and can stop at the ATM and pick up breakfast and still be there in 20 minutes; B’s drive is similar.  Quality of life has spiked dramatically.

We are still working on feeling at home in the living room, I think.  Thanks to our newfangled Dish DVR, we can watch TV and recorded shows in the bedroom (with no extra device on that TV – I’m telling you, it’s space-age stuff), and I don’t know if we’re just tired or don’t like it as much in the living room but we tend to end up there at night.  We eat our meals at the dining table, though, which is quite nice.  I do wonder, though, if dogs have some sort of racial memory that makes them lay under the table at mealtimes.  They’ve never had a dining table before, but they know what to do.  Well, except for GIR; we put one of the chairs he’s always sat in at the table and he gets in it and sits with us at dinnertime.

What?  He’s very polite.  We don’t fix him a plate or anything.

We haven’t met any of the neighbors, though we’ve been inconvenienced by them.  The people next door, the ones with no fence and a hottub they appear to never use (as opposed to the people on the other side with no fence and a patio they never use) had their foundation repaired the day after B went back to work.  I stayed home to calm the dogs and got a massive headache from the concrete-pumping contraption right outside the kitchen windows and the occasional flinging of something heavy against our house.  Some people down the alley have had bulldozers and trucks moving large piles of dirt into and out of their yard repeatedly for a week.  First I thought they were getting a pool, then I thought they were digging up and filling in a pool, now all I know is that I sometimes can’t get down the alley because of the dirt, the truck, or the bulldozer.  I did see a man in scrubs and a woman and an off-leash schnauzer one day, and I stopped and asked if the dog was loose and they wanted him caught, but they said no.  Apparently they walk him without a leash.  Some unknown number of our alley neighbors have pools; we hear children screaming like they’re being massacred and splashing some nights.  It is a broad demographic on the street from what I can tell, which is nice, and most of them have a bit of a “landscape the hell out of the yard and then watch it go” attitude, so we fit in pretty well as far as I can tell.  When the weather cools off, maybe we’ll start walking in the evenings and meet some people then.

Let me tell you, though, of one of the finer things in life:  a bathtub slightly larger than a coffin, with elbow room around it.  Oh, I bathe.  I’ve had a domain for over a year meaning to be devoted to the discussion of fine bath products, and finally I will be able to crank it up.  Did I order anything from Lush?  Oh yes, before we even moved, and had it shipped to the new house.  Plus I found some lost Lush in the linen closet (note:  do not lose a Therapy bath bomb in a linen closet.  I love the things, but they stink like old mustard and when it gets hot in the house you get a face full of stank every time you open the closet and your towels smell like ass) , so I’m set for at least another week or two.  I need some new bath reading, because the emergency Jodi Picoult I picked up was a piece of badly-edited shit, and I need a proper bath pillow, but I am otherwise set for some time.

Probably the most useful things I’ve learned so far have to do with line-drying laundry.  It’s not really as bad as I’d feared.  On a hot day like today, I can do a load of bath and kitchen towels and all but the thickest bath towels will be dry in an hour or so.  I got my work clothes washed and on the line by 6:30, and they’ll be mostly dry by dark.  Not much gets accomplished at night (and I fear the random rains we’ve been having), but if they’re nearly done by dark they’ll be completely dry by morning.  I do know, however, that I fully rely on the dryer to get the lint and hair off my clothes, so we are either going to be buying a new dryer or figuring out how to liberate ours from the bizarre gas-line situation at the old house pretty quick.

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