Home ownership = Watching your husband garden

Three posts in one day! What am I, some kind of blogger or something?

Anyway, as I promised about 8 minutes ago, here are some updated pictures of the garden. (As for the subject heading, I guess it's appropriate if, as I indicated about two years ago, marriage = owning a lawnmower.)

First, here's the front of the house. The dandelions have given way to clover. But don't you like my flowers? Assuming that you can make them out at all?


The sidewalk has come along a little bit. It's proving to be a ton of work. But look! The trees have leaves! And you can see the no-mow-zone over on the right. Don't be confused by all the tall weeds that surround it--it is in fact a distinct area.



Here's the smaller garden--asparagus in the back, artichokes and eggplant in the front. Those are also various peppers and some melons mixed in there.


And the bigger garden: tomatoes, lettuces, chard, cilantro (gone to seed), more eggplants and peppers, beans, zucchini.... That structure in the background is the garage.



Just for kicks, here's the back of the house (which faces our neighbors) and the garage. We put in the flower boxes on the deck. In the foreground is a chestnut tree, with a container of soapy water in which to capture Japanese beetles.



I forgot to mention our compost bins and bramble patch! We have blackberry and raspberry bushes (no fruit yet, though).


And here you can see the strawberry patch against the garage; the retractable clothesline is just visible up there, too. Against the house are the herb garden, our new rain barrel, and some landscaping that came with the house.


TM did the vast majority of this, by the way. Am I grateful? Why yes, yes I am. (He's in the kitchen fixing us a salad right now, too--with the very lettuce that he's picking four pictures up.)

Home ownership = Weeding

Sisyphus has asked for house pictures. Well, Sis, sorry to say that the house hasn't changed much since you saw it last--here and here--but what has changed is the yard! So perhaps you'd like some yard pictures? Since dealing with the yard is one of our major occupations this summer?

First, I shall whet your appetite with a picture of our glorious magnolia in full bloom, as it was in mid-April, seen through the living room windows.


Second, I shall bore you with our yard issues. Here are the realities that we daily confront:

1. Our yard is freaking BIG.
2. Our property is on a corner, so we don't have much of a back yard--most of it is bordered by the street, which means that it's not very private.
3. It's on a hill, too, so that adds to its non-private nature.
4. All of this is to say that our weedy, dandelion-filled yard is highly, highly visible to everyone.
5. We hate lawn.
6. We hate mowing.
7. We are obstinately committed to not spraying with poisons, because of all the toxic run-off and poisoned groundwater and all.
8. None of our neighbors seem to share the views expressed in 5-7. We are surrounded by chemically enhanced, oft-mowed, immaculate lawns. Note the contrast in the picture below, which was taken from our front porch:

Welcome to Dandelion Town!

Thus: We are determined to get rid of as much of the lawn as possible. We'll keep the southern patch around the magnolia, where the retractable clothesline goes, and which would make a perfectly reasonably-sized yard in its own right; it's less weedy, and the dandelions haven't fully taken over in there yet. Even in the picture above, you can see the dandelion-density difference between the north (right) and south (left).

So what are we doing? Well!

We have TWO large vegetable gardens! An asparagus row! Two new (small, but expandable) flower beds! Six fruit trees! A tiny little redbud tree! Two chestnut trees! A no-mow zone which we will convert to wildflowers next summer! A large area where we're killing the grass to replace it with blue-rug juniper! Plans for a blueberry hedge, a second (and larger) strawberry patch, two big beds for native plants and flowers, another lilac bush, and more! (Everything preceding the last exclamation point will have to wait for next year or the year after, however. Petit a petit le oiseau fait son nid, etc.)

We've even introduced ajuga into the lawn in the hopes that it will take over! Desperate times, man.

I don't have any pictures of the current state of affairs, so you'll have to see what it looked like in mid-April.

TM checking the asparagus. (Isn't his hat darling?)

The first garden (before anything had grown there--it's coming along nicely now).

Here's where I dug the sod out and arranged old bricks to make the two new flowerbeds.

One more thing: There's a buried brick sidewalk running through the front yard, which we're slowly uncovering. Here it is at an early stage. You can see the newly-planted fruit trees in the background; they're bigger, now, and have actual leaves.


Clearly, I need some more recent pictures! Stay tuned (assuming that you haven't totally lost interest yet).

Shop in Haste?

I just ordered a bunch of stuff from here. I didn't mean to order as much as I did. But every time I checked my shopping bag, something else was out of stock, so I finally hit "check-out" in a panic, and now I'm hoping that I don't live to regret the almost-$250 I just dropped (in my book, that's a lot to spend on clothes).

On the other hand, we bought our house in haste, and it is a delightful treasure! --And with that ever-so-natural segue, I shall finally (FINALLY) put up the rest of my house pictures, since I'm sure you've been dying to see them.

The kitchen:



(With skylights!)


The bedroom:


The basement (not terribly exciting, but it is mostly finished):


The wine cellar:


And...the bathroom. Admire! Admire! This sucker took me like a WEEK to paint.



Note the Gothic cathedral theme: gold stars on a dark blue ceiling, corners that are suggestive of a dome, a gargoyle, the candle-holder. Here's the power switch (I cut out God to make room for the switches):


And here are some little pictures I put up (I paid $0.60 for all four frames, and the images came from medieval conference CFPs and catalogues). What puzzles me is that people always tell us how cute our bathroom is; apparently they haven't noticed the bleeding Christ or the suicidal woman.


Funnily enough, we are daily tormented by a cardinal who is determined to fly through the window of the bathroom. As TM remarked, "It stands to reason that the cardinal would seek entry into the Gothic cathedral, no?"

Happy new year!

We are home, home, home! It is exquisite.

We got back at around noon yesterday--after an all-day drive on Thursday, a little dinner party and an overnight in City to the North, and then a mere 2.5 hours of driving yesterday. It's good to be here--everything is exactly where it ought to be. Both TM's parents and my mother are not...um, like us (or, especially, me) when it comes to housekeeping and home arrangement. TM's folks just have loads of stuff--stacks of magazines and books and papers, boxes and boxes of crackers or whatever--stashed around the house (not like hoarders, but like people who don't get rid of stuff--there's a difference, really), and my mom is an artist whose dense, dark, creepy little collages sort of expand out to fill the entire house. Her house is very interesting, but it's also a complete mess and drives me a bit crazy. We, on the other hand, are all about the open space and the findability of objects and light coming in through the windows and whatnot. I love our house.

New Year's Eve was a very quiet affair. We're both still recovering from the Most Enduring Colds Ever, and were also rather tired; thus, we spent the early afternoon having a Family Nap with the cats in the guest room (they're not allowed in the bedroom). In the evening, after dinner, we watched a couple of episodes of "The Office," ate chocolate cake, and were in bed before 11. Hurrah! I despise watching the ball drop (which we, being sans TV, couldn't really do anyway) and find New Year's generally overrated; since not a one of the parties that I've been to in Field Town has lasted past 10:15, I couldn't imagine that even a party would make it to midnight. Besides, there weren't any parties. So it was quite lovely to go to sleep and wake up at a reasonable hour, very rested, on New Year's day.

So today, I shall do the following, in an effort to a) get back on track with some stuff after the long trip and b) start the year off in a constructive fashion: 1) practice yoga at some point, and 2) work on an article proposal. Perhaps I shall also knit. And I need to walk down to the office to pick up an article. Oh, and I need to make granola.

Resolutions? I have two. One is to get my yoga practice in order. I subscribe to this online thing where I get streaming yoga videos for a very reasonable price, and I need to just do one of them every couple of days. That's all. The second resolution actually comes out of that reverb10 thing where people had to come up with a word that they wanted to define 2011. It made me think about how quick we are to think about resolutions in terms of improving our own lives--but maybe it'd be good (at least for me) to think outside of my own comfort? So the word/resolution that I thought of was "Kindness." I'm going to try to be kinder, just in general. Not that I'm horrible as-is, but I can be selfish, and impatient, and surely my comments on students' papers could be less sarcastic now and again. Thus, resolution no. 2.

I shall conclude this post with pictures of the guest room, which is where we napped yesterday. Enjoy!

House, Part II

For some reason I had a really hard time photographing these rooms successfully. Well, you get the idea. Here's the dining room:




Like the living room, it has three south-facing windows. Since these pictures were taken, TM resurrected the French doors from our attic and put them back up in the doorway between the living and the dining rooms; they're quite lovely!

And we put our Icon in the phone alcove next to the kitchen door:


For reasons I won't get into (= not very interesting, but complicated), I am really tired and need a shower. Thus, that's it for today.

House, Part I

So the house pictures are going to have to come in phases, I'm afraid--a) because I have so very many of them (lucky you!) and b) because it's the only way to get me to post more than once a month, apparently.

All the pictures have been imported AND reduced to a manageable size, though, so I have no further excuses! Here goes.

Up for today: The Outside of the House and the Living Room.

1) Outside. Here is what my house looks like.




Isn't it darling? Isn't it sweet? Doesn't it have a striking front porch? (Ignore the aluminum siding, please.) Our little bungalow was built in 1900 and, in the '30s and '40s, was a grocery store/coffee shop. This means that it's almost certain that Field's Most Famous Alumnus drank coffee in our house at some point. This seems impressive, but for the fact that our offices are also in the building where he used to have swim practice or something. Anyway. I don't like FMFA anyway, so we can all just get over this bit of trivia.

2) The Living Room. The living room comes in many parts. First, the light:


The room faces South and West, so that's the sunset through our almost-brand-new windows.



Cats enjoy the view.



I love the light in this house. The living room, dining room, and kitchen all face South, so the light just glows across the hardwood floors all day. The windows all seem to come in twos and threes, too, so there's a wonderful feeling of openness in every room.

The living room is so big that we decided to have it house our desks as well as our "social furniture," and there's still plenty of space:


We just got the couch--which dates from the '20s--off of Craig's List at quite a good bargain. Despite appearances, the velvet is all the same color (there's some weird reflection thing going on in this picture).


Of course, there are also fabulous built-in bookcases, and yes, the fireplace works. (We're waiting on a framer to finish with the piece of art that will go behind the mantel clock.)

And while we're in the living room, take a look at the Morris Chair we just found and had reupholstered:


What really sold us on it were these guys:


We've named them after (very obscure) Arthurian knights from Malory. Ten points to anyone who can guess what they are! Also, check out those vents--the cats love them (hence the cat bed in front of this one). Next time, when we're in the dining room, I'll show you the cats' favored sleeping-place.

And I'll leave you with the view from the living room into the dining room. We painted both of these rooms (as well as both bedrooms and the bathroom); the walls in both of these two rooms were originally white with brown-beige sponge painting. Not particularly attractive.


Pardon me while I bask in the beauty of my home....