let's start with the yard

Does everybody remember last year, when the backyard looked like this?


Or worse, the year before, when we got a visit from the county because our neighbors were so irate about our backyard overgrowth? It looked like a jungle out there. The weeds in the very back were so high they were over my head, and threatened to completely engulf our little outbuilding. The aluminum shed next to the garage was rickety and rusted. The giant hole in the ground from where we took out the old aboveground pool filled with water at least once a month. Our friends' children took great delight in 'fishing' in it with fallen branches from our wildly overgrown trees, but the rest of us were not so pleased with it.

Enter the landscapers. We took down the aluminum shed ourselves, one hot and sweaty Saturday afternoon, but they did the rest. They filled in the pool hole, cut down the trees that were weed-ish in origin, and scraped the entire back half of the backyard. A concrete guy came out to jackhammer up and haul away the concrete slab the shed had been on -- that was a WHOLE NOTHER adventure. Don's grandfather poured that slab, and to economize he filled it in with whatever he could find. There were tire hubs, chain link fencing instead of rebar (almost every link had to be snipped, as the jackhammer didn't fit between), and all sorts of other things inside the slab, which went from a reasonable four inches or so thick at the front to over eight inches thick at the back. It took forever to get it out.

In the meantime, the landscapers seeded the rest of the yard and covered it with straw. When the concrete was gone, they did the same for the small patch where it had been. The picture below was taken shortly after that, while the final patch was still growing in. The whole thing is grown in now, and it looks lovely - when they mow, we end up with stripes like a baseball field!


Talk about a difference. We had a party here a few weeks ago, and people spread out all over the lawn without fear of falling into a hole or tripping over debris. It was amazing.

Future plans include getting rid of the old electrical line for the pool and shed, and the corresponding posts, plus probably cutting down the old flagpole. We'll eventually tear out the little outbuilding - originally, we thought to keep it and refinish it into a separate office or studio, but instead we'll tear it out, finally dig out those old footings, and put in a semi-inground pool. That may happen next year, depending on our financial situation. We'll also have to talk to our neighbors about replacing the falling-down chain-link fence, preferably with something a little taller and less transparent. In the meantime, we're enjoying having a vast swath of grass to look out over whenever we glance out back.

we've been busy

Normally, when I go without posting for months at a time, it's because there's nothing happening and I just can't bring myself to whine about it online. This summer's hiatus, however, has definitely been the opposite. There has been SO MUCH going on here, and I feel tres guilty about not posting and telling what few readers I have left about it.

Here's a list of some of the stuff that's been going on here in the last few months:

-As you may have noted in the last post, Don and I finally got married last week, in a civil ceremony at the courthouse. If you are related to me, you will probably find a wedding announcement in your mailbox soon. If not, you'll have to live with the online version. Being married isn't very different from being engaged for seven years, other than the Big Name Change: I'm Jamaila Brinkley now.

-I've had a host of health problems since May; two emergency room visits, countless doctor appointments, and more blood and urine tests than anybody should ever have to go through. In early May, I had my second kidney stone (the first was about six years ago). The followup for that included a cystoscopy, two rounds of antibiotics, and a great deal of nausea, most of which turned out to be unnecessary. During the CT scan, they happened to find out that I have gallstones lurking menacingly around inside of me, too. I'll be having gallbladder removal surgery sometime in the next year, although it's not urgent. In the meantime, I can't have alcohol, caffeine, or extra-greasy foods -- turns out that the gallstones' interactions with those things have been why I've been nauseous practically all the time for the last three or four years. Who knew? Right after all that had gotten cleared up, in early August I abruptly developed gout in my foot, a genetic inheritance I had no idea I was due for. I couldn't walk for two weeks, and slept on an air mattress in the dining room. It was all very exciting.

-While I was battling all of these health issues, somehow -- you're not going to believe this -- the rest of the subfloor and ALL of the framing got done. Yes, we have walls, even though they're just studs. But you can actually see the shape of the rooms in the house!

-After the framing was done, right in the middle of my gout issue, we got PLUMBING. Or rather, we got rough-ins. The plumbers came out, politely ignored me flailing around on my dining room air mattress, and roughed in the plumbing for both upstairs bathrooms. There's a little more rough-in work to be done -- the master bathroom tub was delivered later than expected, and we haven't ordered the master bathroom vanity yet, so they'll be coming back, but most of it is done.

-Our old fridge died, to nobody's dismay. We bought a new fridge, and while we were at it, rearranged the kitchen and finally opened up the wall between it and the dining room. It's a much more pleasant place to cook and clean and hang out now, and the new fridge is AMAZING.

-Right after my gout healed, we went on our annual vacation to Deep Creek Lake with friends, and had an amazing, relaxing, wonderful week. I also turned 27 that week, which was less exciting.

-Don passed Spanish (I know, I couldn't believe it either), and at the beginning of September embarked on what will actually, truly, really be his last semester of college. Undergraduate, anyway. He's applying for January admission into UMBC's graduate program in Human-Centered Computing, and he's really excited about it.

-The last post before my unexpected hiatus announced that we'd hired a landscaper to come in and wrestle the backyard into shape. He did it at the very beginning of the summer, and we've been enjoying it ever since - along with his remarkably reasonable rates for biweekly mowing services.

I've got pictures in various stages of editing for almost all of the house updates; I'll try to post visuals to get you all up to speed right away. I'm sorry to have been gone so long, and to have let so much get done without documenting it here; it got harder and harder to put together an update as more and more got done and we got busier and busier! Right now we're facing a brief plateau as we get ready to get the electrical work done, so I'm going to try to get everything documented and up to date and then we'll go from there.

getting to be the season

It's that time of year. The Outside Times have begun. We're striking preemptively this year, though. Yesterday we met with a very nice landscape guy. In addition to lawn service -- cheaper than both of last year's people, no less -- he also provided us with a quote to do pretty much everything that needs to be done in both the front and back yards to finally wrest control of our landscape back from the jungle. He'll be tearing out half-dead shrubs, removing chain link fence, filling in the hole from the pool (hallelujah!), clearing out vines, gigantic weeds that have turned into trees, and random rubble, and he'll be scraping and re-seeding pretty much the entire backyard. By the end of it, we'll have a very large expanse of grass, and nothing else. Which is exactly what we want, for now.

I just emailed him and accepted his quote, and we're talking timeframes now. Don wants to tear out the rusty aluminum shed in the middle of the yard and jackhammer up the concrete pad it's resting on before the landscape crew starts work. So we've got to figure out when we're going to do that, and how much notice we need to give the crew, and how long the work is going to take, and all the other stuff. The tedious administrative details (and hefty chunk of money) can't dampen the sheer glee I'm feeling over the thought of having a real backyard by summer, though. Backyard barbeques! Crab feasts! Touch football! Picnics! You're all invited.

er... hi

Oh... hi, Internet. You're still here? Been here all along, you say? Waiting patiently? Thinking about leaving for greener pastures? Sorry about that. I don't really have an excuse. I've been unmotivated and lazy, plain and simple. Yes, there's been a lot going on -- a busy convention season for Anapurna, submission and eventual wins on several big proposals at work that I can't talk about, helping Lindley and Molly move into their respective new places, planning a vacation, writing chapters one, two, and four of a novel (yes, really!), and of course house stuff -- but I've posted through busy times before, so really it comes down to me just not feeling like it.

Sorry about that.

But all is not lost. I've finally broken out the camera again -- we won't talk about the layer of dust that was on the case -- and I'm going to try to get everybody up to speed with what's been accomplished during our blogging hiatus.

First up: more demolition. I know, it's the last thing you'd expect to read about on this site! Har. We're looking forward to the day when that 'demolition' tag in the tag cloud over on the right isn't the biggest thing on the page, believe me. But there are only a few more things to demolish, even though it feels like the dumpster is a permanent part of our driveway. One of them is the old deck that Don's grandfather built to connect the poolhouse to the now-absent pool. A little crowd of friends came over rather unexpectedly one day (quite a while ago, I admit it) and made a huge dent in the tear-out-the-deck project. There's still more to do, as you can see, but it was an unexpected and appreciated windfall of help.



Coming soon: HVAC drama (big shock), window drama, and a new attic ladder with refreshingly little drama.

fancy a swim?

We've had a lot of rain in the last few days, and our lovely backyard water feature is full. Picturesque, no?

is there something smaller than baby steps?

The HVAC guy is scheduled to come out next week to finish up, after much stalling and failing to call back and various other delaying tactics. We'll see if he shows up. I have a strong suspicion that our curse has struck again -- our last phone call appeared to catch him in a hospital. But it's not ALL the curse.

Don is trying to convince his dad to come over this weekend to get fill dirt and fill in the giant hole in our backyard where the pool was. I don't know if it'll happen or not; I think his dad wants to get a bed liner for his truck before he starts hauling any dirt around. And I KNOW he'd rather have Don get some burly youths over to help with the shoveling (like that'll happen). So we'll see.

Not a great deal going on otherwise; the depressing trend of mouthing platitudes to each other and others about how the house'll be awesome when it's done, and how we'll be living in luxury "soon" continues. There is no definition of "soon" that actually matches when this disaster will be over with, of course.

Oh, and the cat caught a gigantic bug in one of the upstairs bedrooms last night. And meowed pathetically until I came and inspected it before she killed it. That was fun.

in which our collection of backyard animals grows

We ran out to get some food last night -- McDonald's, if you must know -- and pulled back into our driveway to discover a VERY LARGE ROTTWEILER and his equally large ferocious looking friend wandering happily around in our yard. The rottweiler had a collar; the other dog didn't. I think Don almost had a heart attack when they showed up in the headlights as he pulled into the driveway. We have no idea where they came from; they must be neighborhood dogs, as they certainly looked domesticated and well-fed. They trotted around in the yard for a while wagging their tails and looking for somebody to REND THE FLESH FROM, and then headed out down the driveway while we sat quivering in the car. [Don called his dad, who recommended that we a) throw hamburgers at them and run for the door or b) sacrifice whoever was in the passenger seat. We chose to wait them out, instead.]

Hilariously, one of the damned cats who normally inhabit our yard peeked out from behind the shed while the dogs were wandering around. It looked annoyed at the intruders, who were presumably keeping it from performing its usual ritual of sleeping on top of Don's car and leading him on fruitless chases around the dumpster.

Fortunately, the dogs didn't stick around or notice that there were food-like smells coming from the car, but it was a moderately terrifying ten minutes to be trapped in our own driveway. Don spent the rest of the evening muttering about fences; I think he's planning on turning the entire property into a gated estate now.

presumptuous squirrel

Don took this picture on Friday. This squirrel sat on the picnic table in the backyard and stared at him insolently for like an hour. You may have to click the picture to get the full size version.

monday morning weekend recap: other people are more productive than me

We weren't as productive as Don had hoped this weekend, but we definitely accomplished some stuff. On Saturday we lounged around, feeling guilty the whole time that we weren't getting anything done but enjoying ourselves anyway. Sunday, I woke Don up at 8 AM (I'd been up for a while already but I let him sleep a little more) and we headed outside. We ripped off the very last part of the back deck -- you can sort of see it in this picture from last summer during the Great Possum Debacle. We threw out the broken grill and broken dryer that the previous owners had left, heaving them into the dumpster with great joy.

While Don worked on tearing out the deck, I cleaned out the mudroom. I think Don had hoped to start the demolition in there, but we just didn't get to it. But everything that was in there is gone, generally to places where it actually belongs, which is good. So it's ready for whenever we do get to the demo (next weekend? Anyone want to come over and help?).

All that was done by about 11:30 in the morning, so we headed out for brunch at the diner and then went to Home Depot, where we picked up a "professional" four-gallon backpack sprayer and some weed-killer concentrate and some herbs and potting stuff. While Don mowed the backyard and then strapped himself into the sprayer and ventured off into the jungle, I planted some basil, thyme, and rosemary and set them out on the little concrete landing off the back door. We'll see how this growing experiment goes.

As we all know, I'm not very good with plants. I have watering issues. But Lindley came up with the notion of leaving a filled watering can right next to the plants, and putting the plants next to the back door where I'll always see them when I come in and out of the house. Hopefully, since I'll see them I'll remember to water them, and since the water will be right there I won't neglect it out of laziness. Cross your fingers -- herbaceous lives are at stake.

On a side note, Ariana apparently has a lot more to show for her weekend than I do -- and check out her kitchen! White cabinets with glass uppers and black countertops like that are EXACTLY what I want, and I am taking this opportunity to point out to Don that Ariana and Jeff's kitchen doesn't look "foofy country" at all just because it has white cabinets. I'm just saying.

springtime: or, the time when i stop being allowed in the yard until november

I made what will probably be my last foray into the yard for quite some time last weekend, to take some pictures of the flowers that have managed to bloom despite proximity to me. Look, they're pretty:


Not so pretty? What happened to me the last time I ventured into the yard once the plants came back to life. So from now until approximately, oh, next winter, I'm not allowed in the yard. Sigh.

Hopefully once the interior is done (next year? maybe?) we'll be able to start clearing out the devil weed poison ivy and put in a real yard. That I can go into. Exciting!