More Change than President Obama

* Stringham high: We have neighbors! Both houses across the road from us are now occupied. Our new neighbors just started moving in Wednesday evening. Now we just need to meet them. Waiting for the right time, since they seem to have movers and contractors and other helpers there constantly. We're planning for today...we just have to get our social sides kicked in the butt to take our new neighbors the welcome basket we made them (well, and M has to make some of his tasty bread to go with the basket).
* Stringham low: What's there to be low about? I've been working my tushy off freelancing, and it's been fun!
* Stringham super-high: We had a red strawberry yesterday! It was smile, and it wasn't fully ripe yet, but M snipped it off because he didn't want the birds getting to it first. (Oh, and we picked up a WiiFit when we went grocery shopping last night--first time we'd SEEN one, and there were bunches and bunches...stayed up until 3 AM playing and working.)

We've Got Wood

This weekend, my parents came up and brought with them my cousin BJ and his wife, C, to cut down the 2 mature trees we have that were rotting. We knew when we bought the place last year that 3 of the 4 trees were rotting and would have to come down, and of course, last year, half of one tree fell on and near our house, necessitating its cutting then. But the other 2 were left for when we had the money to get them cut.

But my parents decided to spend their holiday weekend helping us. So they persuaded BJ and C to come up. BJ brought his tree-felling equipment, and within an hour of their arrival on Saturday, had the first tree (one along our driveway) down. While Dad and BJ used the chainsaws to cut the branches and limbs into manageable pieces, Mom, M, C, and I drug the limbs away to a pile and stacked up the wood in an out-of-the-way place. Three or 4 hours later, only the main part of the trunk remained on the ground (and it lies there yet today, waiting for M to split the pieces into manageable, moveable sizes). Luckily, the skies had gotten cloudy and a breeze had picked up just as my parents and BJ and C arrived, so we weren't miserable the whole evening.

After dinner, we all fell, exhausted, into bed, and woke up early yesterday morning to make a "quick" trip to Home Depot for more supplies. The day was a little sticky, but still cool. Until we started on the tree. This time, we were felling the tree that's on the west side of the house, amid all the ruts left when the heatpump line was dug and laid, where we have no shade, but sun exposure all day after 9 or 10 AM in the summer. The humidity really vamped up, and it got up to the mid-80s, at least. The tree fell easier than the first one had, but it was almost unbearably difficult to cut up and move...the thing was full of water, so it was dense, and hard to cut and move. Add to that the fact that we were still worn out from Saturday night and were so hot and that we had to watch every step for fear of twisting our ankles in ruts, and you had a crew of extremely sweaty, thirsty, filthy (did I mention that the sawdust from this tree was super-fine?) people. At almost no point were all 6 of us working like we had on Saturday. Instead, 2 or 3 of us worked as long as we could, until we thought we'd fall flat on our faces, then take a seat and drink water, beer, or soda, and then we'd rotate, going back to work while others rested, or we'd all collapse for a while until someone could muster up enough gumption to haul just one more wagonload of wood to the pile. (Across grass the whole way, so the pulling of the cart or the dragging of the branches was far more difficult than it had been Saturday, when most of the trip had been on the smooth driveway, and shorter.)

Again, several very big pieces of trunk are lying in our yard, but the limbs that landed in the neighbor's field were all dragged away, and all the pieces that were small enough were carted to our woodpile, though they were simply dumped unceremoniously into a large pile instead of neatly stacked. We were just too damned tired to do much after about 3 hours of cutting, dragging, and hauling.

That's it on the tree front. We now have just 1 shade tree left, and it's pretty young and on the northeast side of the house, so it doesn't help much...

Meanwhile, the reflective ribbons M put on the fruit trees, along with the blood meal spread around them, seem to have kept the deer from further nibbling, so our "appetizer" trees have really bounced back.

Several of the greens in our garden are popping up; all of our corn mounds have sprouted and have plants at least 3 inches tall; our tomato plants are thriving in our water-bottle "thermal protection" pods.(TM) :) (Pictures shown here are from Mother's Day weekend, when we planted the corn and transplanted the tomatoes, not of the sprouts)

Our potatoes are thriving. (And BJ has offered to give us as many old truck tires as we want to use for planting the potatoes next year. Three cheers for [free] recycling!) Our beans seem to be suffering from SOME exfoliation, but according to our companion planting guide, the potatoes should be attracting some other insects that will feed on our bean-stripping friends.

Our Ozark strawberry plants have teensy little strawberries everywhere. All but one blackberry bush is showing foliage; same with the blueberry bushes. Sunflowers are starting to sprout, and our Jerusalem artichokes are really shooting up.

And tomorrow, I begin my stint as a full-time freelancer. I think I'll start by taking half a day off. (Well, it's to donate blood, not to play hookie.) Cheers!

Oh, and we had another traffic pull-over while we were working outside yesterday. Instead of pulling into our driveway, this genius just pulled off the side of the road at our mailbox. (The picture isn't that great because I didn't want to be obvious about taking pictures of two cops pulling a minivan over.)

* Stringham high: Rotten trees: 0 Seifert/Stringham family: 2
* Stringham low: Supreme exhaustion
* Stringham super-high: Go, go gardening!

Oh Deer, the Carnage Has Begun!

It's official--I am now a full-time freelance editor! *gulp* Yesterday, the final day of my contract, was bittersweet, as I left behind some good coworkers and friends and some...not-so-great coworkers (I found a great piece of advice a few weeks ago: If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.), knowing that they'll be a little (well, a lot, for a while) worse off without me.

As I helped water the garden last night, I discovered that quite a bit of our corn has sprouted, and our tomato plants are getting bigger and healthier. As we did our walk-around last night, M and I were also extremely excited by the green strawberries he had found yesterday (that's his finger behind one of the berries, for scale, and his cell phone takes blurry pics) and the blossoming of nearly every fruit bush we have. Despite the unseasonably cool weather we've had the past couple of weeks, our plants seem to be doing exceptionally well. We may even have some salad greens sprouted from some planting we did 10 days ago.

Oh, and the deer have been nibbling the sugar maples and the Bartlett pear as they've walked through our yard. We got some blood meal today to put around the trees, and if we need more help, we might get some hair clippings from our hair dresser. I've read that the combination of blood meal and human hair is very effective.... Of course, I've also read that stopping deer from eating plants is difficult and requires a 3-pronged approach and that it varies from location to location, depending on the type of deer and the type of plant. So why should our deer "problem" be any different than our other issues? ;) We don't want to harm the deer, and we don't mind sharing--we just want to give the trees a chance to get large enough so that some nibbling doesn't do them too much harm. We'll keep you posted as we experiment.

* Stringham high: Full-time freelancing!
* Stringham low: Building raised beds and storage bins for our root crops is more expensive than we'd like.
* Stringham super-high: Corn growing much better than last year!

Happy Mother's Day

It was cold, but we planted. M hoed and raked, and I raked and hoed, and we built mounds for our corn and transplanted our seedlings and planted 2-liter Mountain Dew bottles. We hope to corner the market on New Dew, the second-generation Dew that results from 2 Dews mating. We even threw in some Dr. Pepper and Coke bottles for good measure. The female bottles should fill up, and we harvest during gestation, and bam! Instant money-maker!

Okay, seriously, we DID plant 2-liter bottles, in a hexagonal pattern with tomato and pepper seedlings in the hexagons. The 2-liter bottles are filled with water and are meant to serve as a temperature equilibriator, protecting the plants from sudden rises and drops in temperature, which is apparently the kiss of death for tomato and pepper seedlings.

We made 30 mounds for corn and planted 4 types of corn: 3 sweet varieties and a blue corn for grinding for flour. We transplanted about 50 pepper and tomato seedlings, I'm guessing. And some cauliflower and broccoli and marigolds and chives. And we planted lavender, cilantro, dill, and sweet basil in our "herb garden" (a section of our very large "normal" garden). And then there was a row of carrots and white onions; a row of turnips, beets, and radishes (oh, and we transplanted one "volunteer" radish that Mike found in the garden); half a row of leaf and head lettuces; and some dwarf marigolds as "barriers" to some parts of the garden to help with pest control.

All in all, it was a lot of work, but not bad for about 8-10 hours. And we did all that while entertaining somewhat unexpectedly--my parents called late Saturday morning to ask if they could come visit for the night.

We are both exhausted (me so exhausted that I can't even TRY to make this post funny or entertaining), I am peeling from the sunburn I got two weeks ago, M has just added more to his standing sunburn (I swear, I'm just going to have to tackle him and put sunblock on him forcibly, or he'll never have it on), and we (of course) still have more planting to do. But we planted everything that was planned for this weekend. Tuesday, in honor of our anniversary (our agreement to always plant something on or near our wedding anniversary instead of buying each other cards or flowers or going on a date), we're planting some sunflowers.

* Stringham high: No more tilling for months! (Unless we run out of garden space...)
* Stringham low: M is so exhausted that I don't think he can remember his name, much less help me come up with an idea of a low.
* Stringham super-high: 7 more days of my contract (9 calendar days), and hello, career independence!!!!!

I Like To Hear the Rain Come Down

It’s a beautiful day.

I came home early, in pain, from work. A migraine. The “perfect storm” of hormones and changing barometric pressure. As soon as I walked in the house, the smell of a “cat house” assailed me. We have two cats, both fixed, but they can make the whole house smell like we’ve got an entire litter using anywhere and everywhere in the house as their own private litter box.

Then I saw the corrected adjustment for a bill that I paid over the weekend. I had thought the corrected bill and had already arrived and that that’s what I had paid. But no, I somehow didn’t give it thought when I paid it and only just realized that I’d paid the original full amount, rather than what I should have paid.

And M said he has an interview on Monday. Woo, good news! But it’s “an insurance job.” Well, I know how that will go, but at least he has an interview. But still, I rained on his parade. I couldn’t help myself, apparently.

He asked why I hadn’t asked him about the bill over the weekend, and I said, basically, I screwed up. I assumed that the bills we had in our bill holder, the one specially meant to hold our bills in the right slot so we’ll be sure to pay them on time, had our old bill instead of the new one we had received. Silly me.

So I was tetchy. Pissy. Angry.

Oops.

M walked into another room, I thought to use the restroom, but never came back. So I put on my shoes and went out to the porch to sit in the rain. I realized I had overreacted when I was doing it. My hormones overpowered me. Despite what my best friend D used to tell me, I DON’T give my hormones too much credit. I only wish I did. They don’t get like this all the time, but every once in a while, they go crazy. Smells are sharpened, exaggerated. I can’t focus on anything—including thoughts—long enough to see them through to completion. Any little interruption that comes along aggravates me, gets under my skin.

So I overreacted. And I got pissed about overreacting. So I sat, with my hooded sweatshirt on, on a patio chair on the porch, listening to the rain pitter-pat gently on the grass, through the leaves of the trees, onto the pavement of the porch, the sidewalk, the driveway, soothing me to calmness. The sound of the rain is gentle, comforting, calming. I watch a squirrel run partway up a tree trunk across the road. The mist has settled in between the trees, the moisture combining with the semidarkness under the trees to blur the lines of everything, the squirrel and the edge of the tree trunk becoming less distinct the longer I watch.

I turn my head up to the sky and let the drops caress my closed eyelids, massage the tension from them even as they twitch from the sudden, light plunks. I inhale the cool, damp air, rich with the scent of freshly cut grass and heavy with relaxation. As the cars slosh by on the highway, makes me think that the earth is breathing, the kiss of the cars’ tires on the pavement acting as the slight aspiration of the earth’s sigh, the spray rising behind the cars like the moisture that freezes in the air after you exhale on a very cold day.

The rain is starting to soak through the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I sigh. Truly, it is a beautiful day. These days are rare; the chance to enjoy them, even rarer. The slow fall of this rain, its slow, steady fall, this air temperature, the green of all the fresh leaves and new grass, the mist, the chitter of birds in the tree branches, all flow together, intertwine gently, like lovers reuniting after weeks apart, holding one another gently, caressing one another in reverence.

Sighing slightly with the earth, I wander back inside, my anger cooled for the moment, my hormones held at bay.

But there, waiting, is the sound of a crazy bird that has spent all day flying into one of our windows. Into the same spot, over and over again, making a huge smudge on the window. Thunk. Thunk…..Thunk…Thunk. No idea why, just hurting itself over and over again. Mike said maybe the bird that ran into the window the other day was a female and scattered pheromones on the window and this is a male trying to get to her. A possibly good theory, certainly worth consideration. Nope. Even window cleaner on the spot didn’t make it stop for more than 5…thunk…minutes. The cats yell at it. Thunk. The cats moan at it, hungry, excited. Thunk. Thunk. … Thunk. I stare at it. Thunk. Crazy—Thunk!—bird. Thunk. Son of a bitch. Thunk.

Mike picked up George from his napping position in a dining room chair and carried him to the bird’s window. The bird flew away to watch from the tree stump at the west end of the house. It values its life enough to stay away from a human and a cat, apparently. But it has no fear of a window that obstinately holds its ground against the bird’s crazed—but somehow mellow—attacks. Crazy freaking animals we have around here. Seriously, first drag-racing mice, and now a suicidal bird? The darker side of me wants to laugh and wonder where the rest of his compatriots are…maybe something similar was Hitchcock’s inspiration. Crazy effing bird.

15 Minutes Later…

The bird has stopped.

For now.

We Don't Want Zombies on the Lawn

Easter weekend, my parents came up, and Mom helped us with the last bit of planting we had to do for a while. With her help, we planted all of our potatoes, all (a metric butt-ton) of our onions, and our 18 boxwoods. We also got the weed block cloth down around the rest of the fruit bushes and all the windbreak plants.

Some of the daffodils that we planted in our tree stump (you know, the rotting tree stump that got trimmed down by some well-meaning contractors AFTER we had planted daffodils in them) apparently got buried enough by sawdust that they took root, so they are up, but not blooming. The other daffodils we planted are blooming. And at random spots in our yard, we have other gorgeous flowers (that weren't there last year and that we didn't plant) blooming. For instance, what my mom thinks are irises in the back lawn, by the pipes sticking up from the old oil tank, and there are grape hyacinth growing in a bunch in the middle of the front yard.

Apparently, spring is FINALLY here, but amazingly rainy.

Last week, many of the trees and bushes that we had planted started budding. We now have a pear tree, a cherry tree, and some raspberry bushes budding and a bunch of strawberry plants really taking off.

This weekend, I mowed. I shouldn't have put it off so long, but it was the first opportunity I've had all spring. And wow, what an experience! We decided that, because we've planted so many things in what USED to be our yard, we'd expand and take back a little bit of the property that we let grow up last year. So I mowed that area for about 2 hours on Friday night. And Saturday, I mowed the rest of the yard. It used to take me 3 hours to mow all of our yard. I have no idea how long it took this Saturday because I was also (1) picking up glass and pottery shards and rusting metal bits that had gotten turned up when our heat pump line got installed and (2) using the lawn tractor to run over some of the smaller ruts left in our yard from the heat pump line installation. So, with all the things we've planted and all the ruts and piles of earth left behind from the heat pump installation, I didn't have a yard to mow so much as a gauntlet to run, an obstacle course to defeat. Lucky I like mowing the yard, no matter how long it takes. Call me crazy, but I find it therapeutic.

Anyway, I came home today to freshly baked bread. Last weekend, checking email, I had seen information about a book called Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes. We ordered that and a book on root cellaring from Amazon, and today, M made bread. Delicious bread. It was "mediocre" for "artisan" bread, but FAR more delicious than store-bought bread, and it was just a first try. It was whole-wheat, and made with about 20 minutes of effort, to make the dough. And that dough will give us about 7 more "individual" loaves of bread. I highly recommend this book already. Seriously. Do it. No kneading dough; no rising, then letting it rest, then kneading, and repeating the process. After the dough is prepared (you can leave it in the fridge for several days), you cut off a chunk the size you need, let it rest for 20 minutes or so, and prep it to cook. Then walk away. Mmmmmm, bread and honey....

Now we just need to figure out the best way to make a "root cellar" here to store our onions and potatoes.

On the job front, M has had a few calls in the past couple of weeks, but no results yet. But people still are calling and interested. As for me, after some discussions with customers from my freelancing, I learned that I should be able to "make a go" of freelancing, getting as much work as I estimated that I need to make the same amount of money that I'm making on my contract with the government (far more money than I've made on any other job). So when my contract runs out May 19, no more putting up with the crap at that particular place. I learned today that I had actually made it in at number 5 of the 5 candidates selected by the first stage of the hiring process. Luckily, though, that was low enough that I couldn't be considered. Of the 5 candidates, 3 or 4 were veterans, so they were automatically bumped ahead of me. And 3 or 4 (including me) had Masters Degrees. So even though some of them had absolutely no experience doing what the job requires, they were already "more qualified" than me, and it would have been nearly impossible for the program manager to make justification to the higher-ups to choose me over the others. Sad for them, truly. But now I don't have to feel the least bit of a twinge of conscience about choosing to leave the group I was with because I don't want to put up with the ridiculous bureaucratic shit they have to deal with every day.

So, come May 19, I will be self-employed full-time as an editor and provider of other publishing resources. I should have enough work to pay me the money we need to pay our bills, but I could use enough money to get us health insurance. This means that if you know someone who needs a manuscript edited, a resume or cover letter proofread, a story critiqued, etc., send them my way. For a modest fee, I can probably do it. ;)

* Stringham high: So far (knock on wood), all our recently transplanted plants seem to be "taking" and thriving.
* Stringham low: Still no job for M.
* Stringham super-high: 21 days in my contract, then I can take a few days' vacation and work from home!

WTG? (Who's the Golfer?)

Wonderful weather. 60 degrees, sunny, breeze 10-11 mph.

12 hours of planting and cultivating today. Planted 8 more arborvitae along the western edge of the property for a windbreak. Then I mowed for 4 more strawberry rows and tilled 3 of them while M dug holes for our fruit bushes.

We then planted 2 sugar maples, a dwarf apple tree, a dwarf pear tree, a Bartlett pear tree, 5 blackberry bushes, 9 raspberry bushes, and 6 blueberry bushes. That was done around 6 PM.

Then M started the third tilling pass through the three strawberry rows I had started, while I filled in peat moss and hoed and raked behind him. 3 hours (including 20 or 30 minutes for dinner) later, 2 of the rows were tilled, fertilized, raked, hoed, and covered with weed-blocking cloth, and the 3rd row was tilled. I was ready to collapse. Mostly, my arms and legs were shaking uncontrollably. I used my legs to fight the tiller and do most of my shoveling. And I've never had much arm strength, and all the tilling, shoveling, hoeing, lifting, and raking across the 10 1/2 hours of work we did just turned my arms to Jell-o. I honestly don't know how I'm able to type right now. But I do know that my thumbs really, reallyreallyhaveareallyreallyhardtimepressingthespacebar.Oh,mypoorpoorthumbs.

Other than being Jell-o, I'm not sore (yet), and M's not either, though he's going to have quite a bit of pain when his tries to move his lobster-red neck tomorrow.

Incredibly disappointed that we didn't get more done, but our yard looks completely different now. It doesn't look or sound like we did much, but I think the grubs and worms in our soil would beg to differ (if they could speak, of course).

* Stringham high: 13 trees and 20 bushes planted today!
* Stringham low: Strawberry rows not done, and not one of the 100 strawberry plants got put in dirt today. :(
* Stringham super-high: We keep digging more glass and crap out of the ground. (This is good because it means there's a little less junk in our soil every day.) Click the title of this post to see what we dug up while making the hole for our very last blueberry bush.