Oh, huh, without noticing it everything in the kitchen’s fine now except two “work stations” worth of counter space and the floor, I think by now I’ll need to go and give the other rooms another pass before I call the house put away though. And I half-did the garage in passing last week, but I need to finish there.
You still occasionally see Internet Tough Guys threatening to show up at my door and I’m like you show up to my door and you either start off appreciably below me or teetering on an edge it’s really easy to push you back from, it’s hard to be too intimidating then
And I KNOW the obvious move is to start off down but barge in when I open the door.
Appreciated all the little white flowers that just fell on the tree in the middle of the backyard, must not have been back there this season in prior years.
I tolerate a pretty dirty kitchen floor while Karafuto l’s still in a not-final state but even then I really need to go at it again soon, but it just highlights how much further along in general I am than last time, whole areas once full of waiting tasks now clear, shelves rearranged and shit parked on counters moved in, even got a USB-powered scrubber staff so I can get a good deep clean this time.
Ah okay, my bathtub drains all day now.
In February it started only draining once a day at like midnight, then it didn’t drain at all for a few months and I had to bail it out, then it was midnight only again, now it’s full time once more.
Got that?
…but what could that be?
The sewer line from my house to the main has been cracked by roots. Most of the year, it’s above the water table, so when the bathtub drains some water flows out into the soil.
The non-draining parts are in the heart of the wet season, when the water table is above the pipe, and there’s not pressure to drain.
And the “midnight only” parts? Well, midnight is when leaves open their pores for gas exchange, releasing oxygen and taking in carbon dioxide. They wait til then so they lose a minimum of water this way but they still lose a bunch, so to replace it the roots slurp up more water… which, if the soil water level is just a bit above the pipe, brings it briefly below, and the tub drains.
I was told about the pipe by my inspector when I moved in, I’ve held off until I’m further on planning the basement (/2nd floor) because I might want to get a bigger one put in for capacity with multiple units, interestingly last spring I had no tub problems but I had to keep plunging the toilet cause it didn’t have enough suction for turds, but that hasn’t been a thing this year.
Karafuto somehow gives me like +15 Woodcraft
Okay I don’t think any of the lavender is even in bloom right now and already the scent coming in the window is calming. Excellent call on that one.
Alright, lower backyard is fully ready for the last pre-dry season trim, then finished digging the hole for all this lavender under my sittin’ window (need more topsoil tomorrow tho).
Then it seems the woodchips jamming Darwin’s tailgate finally rotted enough to open it, that’ll make it easier getting bedloads of mulch and of topsoil for finishing Blueberry Hill.
So tomorrow mowing, potting some doomed annuals to save, finish lavender planting, then finally on to the retaining slope of Blueberry Hill and planting these first few bushes.
Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!
The interior of Karafuto keeps getting better as I continue to go through things I’ve dragged around for decades and either finally use them or say “what the hell, I’m never using this” and throw them out
Ah, man, a few trees where over the last few years I had trimmed major branches or multi-trunks and opened up big gaps in the canopy but told myself the adjacent stuff would grow to fill in and this year yeah.
Taking off lower branching also saw to it that root-reserve spring growth was preferentially focused up high, there was one pinnate-leafed one where I found that one branch doesn’t fully block sun and all the parallel ones had been additive, but having thinned them out the remaining ones sent off lateral shoots that are growing to thatch the whole canopy together.
More petty-ante backyard shit, also lately I’ve kinda been rearranging a few things and realize I’m not too far from completing the kitchen, which is the last room never-sorted, there’ll be some post-last-time cleanup in the other rooms too but still
Been tidying up the backyard but every day thinking “oh while I’m at it you know what I could do?” and putting more on my plate.
Sorting through the longer calf-thick branches I had out seasoning. Debarking and I notice all these with dug-out burrowing insect trails just under the bark, later filled in with mud; might be able to do something neat with staining to highlight them.
That “grass sickle” might really be a martial arts weapon but it does in fact cut grass, got all the spots the lawnmower’s bad for and laid the cut grass atop the wood in the hollow of Blueberry Hill.
Tomorrow dragging my good garden cart (like a 2-wheeled wheelbarrow) to the little nursery down the street to buy some pots and potting soil and transplant some annuals currently in places that’re gonna be wiped out in the remodeling.
This is what I get to look at out the window. When I moved in that woodchip path was mud, there was a tangled stand of so many trees of heaven their (also tangled) roots put out enough poison to kill grass, both sides of the path (the far side is wildflowers now) AND the ledge within the retaining wall were overrun with dandelions, deadnettle, nettles, other broadleafs, bittercress, seafoam, and crabgrass, a thick tangle of blackberry canes hung off the fence on the other side of the chimney, that bush in the foreground was grown high enough to block the window, and the trees had a ton of thin, twisted, dead, witchy branches at window level and an overgrown carpet canopy up above blocking light and making the whole area look like a cartoon haunted forest.
But that allllll changed cuz of me!
Just now realizing, probably months after the fact, that my ladder has been stolen
Because I was moving it around so much that even going from one yard area it wasn’t to another place it also wasn’t didn’t seem raise any suspicions until I specifically looked for it
Alright now that it’s accumulated enough dust the glass isn’t crazy reflective, this cylinder of unpolished rocks (rather, a selection of, matching room colors) was exactly the one more item I needed for mantelpiece balance.
Misplaced one thing it would be kinda weird for someone else to find in my parlor today but found another.
Have been suspecting that the normalization of kitchen cabinets has something to do with keeping rodents out and in 2023 with a cat the remodel might just be shelves
Big fan of cabinets with pull-out shelves.
Yeah I am totally TJ-at-Monticello up to getting clever custom stuff done. The backyard is already going to have a stair from the upper to the lower part with a banister with a counterweighted internally-mounted pulley so you can bring out a platter of food and it’ll smoothly glide it down to people eating there (where I intend to have a banquet table maybe convertible from a weight bench?)
