Further Pondification

Iris albicans (Cemetery iris)

It was another shovel-centric weekend. We started digging the deeper levels of the pond, shaping and compacting the 1-foot shelves as we went. Strangely, even though we'd had a week to recover, this shorter round of pond-digging seems to have hurt more than the initial dig. I guess our muscles haven't hardened off yet.

The pond--getting deeper

Matt did the bulk of the digging (that shapely hole to the back right is his), while I roundup'd the future pond bed, grass-n-roses bed, WTF bed, driveway bed, and A/C bed. That also hurt. The roundup spray backpack is really big! (God, I'm soft. I've been reading up on Cajun history, and my forebears were out there clearing mature live oak forests all by themselves, and draining marshes and building levees. THEY wouldn't balk at one puny pond, and they probably weeded their plots on their hands and knees--not with some chemical. I'm reclining indolently on the shoulders of giants.)

Matt's admirable shovelwork

Although the beds aren't really prepared yet, we went ahead and put the Bauhinia mexicana we bought in the ground. Now that we've cut down the ligustrum, we need something treeish to provide a backdrop to the pond--so we need our little Bauhinia to haul ass, growth-wise. So that it will look like this specimen from Zilker Botanical Gardens ASAP.

Bauhinia mexicana at Zilker

The cemetery irises are still in the early stages of blooming. I am SO pleased with these plants. Their foliage is evergreen, and they form tidy light green clumps that help to create year-round greenness in the shade bed. And now that they're blooming, I like them even better.

Cemetery irises

View from Above

Oh, I was so virtuous! I researched egg-intensive recipes to use up the overabundance of eggs from our CSA! (Lemon-basil popovers--good--and--not so good--"Floating Islands"--alarming poached foam blobs bobbing in a sea of yellow custard. Along with brains in aspic and Jello salad with marshmallows, Floating Islands is one of the food textures I ardently hope to avoid for the rest of my days.) I biked to HEB instead of driving! (Better for the environment! Better for my health!) And I risked life and limb to apply more roofing goo to the garage roof. From which sticky and tar-encrusted perch I took this picture.

The Rose Garden Grows Up
Doesn't the rose garden look pretty? (The bit that isn't blocked by my car, at any rate.) It makes me so happy these days. Things are blooming all over the place. Matt's been weed-whacking the property aggressively, so much of the summertime shaggy brownness has been replaced by a trimmer greenness. The roses are putting on size and filling in nicely. The passionflower keeps blooming away with its big extravagant purple flowers. That particular cultivar is our only answer to the gorgeous, jewel-colored, luncheon-plate-sized clematis that people grow in England (those jammy bastards!) Our "Maggie " propagule (earlier known as "Mystery Red Cabbagey Rose"--propagated at the 11th hour from a hand-me-down shrub with a terminal case of Horrid Fungus--is small, but its three or four little limbs bloom constantly. The trellis, up which two '4th of July' roses are slowly climbing, gives the pleasant illusion of a modicum of privacy, as we had hoped.

And we sit out in this newly temperate weather, watching hummingbirds and herons and painting buntings (well, technically, just the one painted bunting), eating the sometimes tasty and sometimes foamy and disasterous products of our recent adventures in local food, and admiring all the blooming things. And life seems good.

Roofing Goo
Our shack/garage has always leaked, so for ages now we've been meaning to seal up all the seams in the metal roof with roofing goo. Hooo-wee! that's a messy project! Roofing goo is this thick, rubbery sticky mass, like a cross between melted mozzarella and tar. It's so cohesive and springy that it doesn't want to stick to the places you smear it, but it does make ineradicable and self-propagating messes on any other surface that comes near it. My clothes were full of it, my arms were coated in it, and I had to cut some out of my hair.

You may have wondered, how much roofing goo (technically, "roof patch") do you need to seal the seams of a battered old metal garage roof? Well, it took me three cans to seal up one side (i.e. one-quarter) of the part of the roof over the original 1-car garage-shack. Mind you, I was also applying seriously copious quantities to the valley where the old shack's roof and the new(er) 2-car shack's roof meet, so without the valley, it probably would have taken 2-1/3 (1-gal.) cans of goo.

Extrapolate that over the entire garage minus the ~2 cans Matt had already applied, and it comes to about 16 cans of goo for the rest of the project. Leapin' lizards, Daddy Warbucks! That is going to take a very long time to complete. And at ~$15/can, it going to cost around $240.

And, depressingly, when we're done, our garage is going to look like a monochrome Mondrian. Which means we'll need to paint it silver with some sort of metal roof paint.

Oh, sigh....

Or maybe we should just paint on some red and blue and yellow squares and do the thing properly. Why be bourgeois?

Biking Around Elgin
I've meant to do more biking now that we live in a small town and can actually run errands on our bikes--and without getting run over, either. I need a new bike (mine is a boy bike hand-me-down with one of those awful bars right where one's most delicate parts are. It is also 2-3 inches too tall for me, which makes stopping at intersections a real production), but I first need to ride my old one enough to justify the purchase. (I'm going to get one of those endearingly dorky-looking 1950s-style cruising bikes with a big metal basket. My current model is a torture-machine of a mountain bike.) On top of that, now that it's actually pleasant outside, I find, to my amazement, that I actually want to go biking. It's kind of fun.

So I bought a new, extra-cushy granny-seat, a new set of lights, and, to Matt's infinite amusement, a pair of padded fingerless biking gloves. Oh, yeah.

Pegboard, baby.

In what I suspect may be solidifying into an annual tradition, Matt & I once again cleaned out the garage for New Year's. (It's an overrated holiday, anyway. I never got the point of parades that didn't throw something, and beans and cabbage are a lousy excuse for holiday food. Nor do I understand why we all become Scottish for a few brief moments at midnight every new year. Nothing against the Scottish, but WTF? Why not Welsh? Or Lithuanian, for that matter?)

The highlight this year was installing pegboard. Oh, yeah. Our hand tools have moved out of their bins and into their own custom-designed individualized little condos. Look how pretty:

A symphony in pegboard

We have such richness of screwdrivers that we're going to have to go back to Lowe's and buy two more screwdriver racks to accommodate the entire collection. And now that we have more bin space, perhaps we will buy some of those cunning little plastic chests of drawers to sort out our massive nail and bolt collections.

Also, now that we've cleaned there's plenty of space to park the new Pony and our two bikes, reproachful in their deflated tires and spiderwebby spokes. Perhaps this year we will actually start riding them again?

The garage, you may recollect, is actually in 3 parts because sheds kept accumulating on top of sheds during the garage's lifespan--kind of like coral. Corrugated, lopsided, dilapidated metal coral. So on New Year's we cleaned up the large main storage room. Remaining are the workshop, chaotic with shadecloth rolls, partially stripped doors, and barbecue implements, and the mildew-infested central section, which can't be really be reclaimed until we finish tarring the roof. We hope to make some progress on these two sections this weekend. This means that our New Year's Resolution has taken on a chronic sort of quality that I distinctly disapprove of. I don't want the damn thing hanging over my head till Valentine's Day--we'll have to get an early and merciless start tomorrow morning and kick that thing violently into shape.

Meanwhile--and I stress that these are not Resolutions, but merely a list of suggested activities--here is a list of some stuff that we should probably tackle this year:

(1) Gutters. Gutters, gutters, gutters, gutters, gutters. And the prerequisite replacing of the fascia.
(2) Do Something about the home's energy inefficiency: install storm windows, call out an HVAC dude to check the heater and ductwork, and fill in all cracks, crannies, and crevices.
(3) Complete the walkway to the wee pond. This may necessitate first replacing the pond liner, possibly with a larger one.
(4) Add a 6th Mutabilis and finish the edging around the Mutabilis bed.
(5) Replace hideous and disfunctional tub fixtures in both bathrooms. This includes repositioning the shower head to a height comfortable for individuals larger than hobbits.
(6) Stain adirondack chair given to me by Matt for my birthday and buy a companion chair, ottoman or 2, and small table.
(7) Obtain effity-effing bay laurel and chitalpa. I've been meaning to do it for months and it keeps not happening. WHY? Absolutely necessary to give any semblance of coherence to rose bed and blue-and-purple bed.
(8) Fix upstairs toilet, which clogged, then started leaking.
(9) Finish irrigation system
(10) Get Javier to hang doors. Then stain and varnish them.
(11) Work on door between kitchen and hall.
(12) Finish baseboards.
(13) Make & hang curtains in study.
(14) Buy blinds for guest room.
(15) Start on curtains for dining room & living room.
(16) Get handyperson to open windows currently painted shut. Buy latches for newly liberated windows. Replace cracked panes.
(17) Install Archduke Charles hedge at end of kitchen patio.
(18) Finish paving kitchen patio (edge area, put down paving sand, replace stones, fill in with crushed granite.)
(19) Make a start on creating a permanent structure for the Orangery.
(20) Create shade garden around new shade patio
(21) Create walkway from drive to front sidewalk.
(22) Touch up exterior paint, expecially doors.
(23) Replace warped shutters
(24) Wiring work to eliminate exterior refrigerator's dependency on garage light being on in order to operate.
(25) Possibly replace outdoor fridge with chest freezer.
(26) Install Asko dishwasher
(27) Install ventless gas fireplace/stove in living room and small gas bathroom heater in mbath
(28) Get HVAC guy to install vent in mbath
(29) Install buffalograss in front yard

So that's daunting.

Let's stop and appreciate what we've accomplished in 2008.

(1) Acquired roses necessary for gazebo, Mutabilis hedge, and new trellis
(2) Built new trellis
(3) Completed shade patio
(4) Finished (at long last) refurbishment of porch glider
(5) Electrical work including elimination of inexplicable and dysfunctional breaker box under house, addition of outdoor outlets, addition of outdoor ceiling fan, and installation of (rather horrible) doorbell.
(6) Permanently fixed master bath toilet after finally securing competent plumber
(7) Replaced venerable but hideous 1974 sofa with New Hotness.
(8) Created walkway from study door to shade patio
(9) Laid a vast and almost-all-inclusive irrigation system
(10) Planted 7 trees, including 'Little Gem' magnolia. Most survived the 4th droughtiest summer on record.
(11) Acquired riding lawn mower
(12) Installed blown attic insulation
(13) Began Hill Country xeriscapic bed along fence
(14) Began patching leaky garage roof--about half done
(15) Acquired new built-in bookshelves and file drawers.
(16) Stained and varnished same.
(17) Built (admittedly underutilized) compost bin
(18) Cut opening in back of gazebo
(19) Had antique doors dipped and stripped
(20) Acquired, through Ladonna's good graces, valences for kitchen, mbath, and gbed.
(21) Sprouted Crinum macowanni seedlings
(22) Installed new vanity in gbath
(23) Removed gutters
(24) Finished light pole bed
(25) Matt built hoophouse (greenhouse)
(26) Matt tore down remaining hurricane fence

Goo on the Roof and a Smidge of Fall Color

I like having multiple projects going at once. If you get bored with one, you can switch to another. If you run out of supplies/funding/ideas for one, do something else that requires less material/money/vision.

So it is that this weekend found Matt monkeying around on the garage/shack roof, applying roofing goo. We currenly have 2 other major projects in hand (removing the last traces of paint from the antique doors Mom & Dad gave us last year and installing new gutters), but we needed a third to round things out.

The garage is a vexatious pile that causes me all kinds of indecision. Here's the thing. It's rickety, has an ugly leaky roof, and is too short. Because it's so short, there isn't really room for normal garage doors with a normal garage door opener. I haven't spoken with any garage door specialists (in fact, I don't even know what the proper name for a garage door specialist is--some sort of carpenter? A gates-and-large-doors contractor? Some dude sub-contracted out by Sears?), but I'm hoping that we could someday install non-corrugated metal doors that open horizontally on the kind of hydraulic arms that the special people in gated communities use to operate the gates that keep out the peasantry and other such undesireables.

And then, too, maybe we could replace the corrugated metal walls with actually siding. And maybe someday we'll re-do the roofline to eradicate the stupid valley where the water collects on the rare occasions that it rains. Instead of having two separate roofs that just happen to be joined, we could just have one, whole, unified roof.

The garage/shack with the Mr. Marek's rather nice Chinese tallow behind it. The garage/shack is a composite of two shacks, unconvincingly joined in the middle. The valley is right over the Studio-to-be.

But then I think, is it really worth it? We're talking about an excessively short ramshackle tin shack with antediluvian wiring, rotten timbers, and a rusty roof.

So maybe the thing to do would be to tear it down and build a new structure on the cement pad. It would be normal height, it would have new wiring, it would have a rational roof, and we could design the floorplan ourselves.

But then that would cost tens of thousands of dollars wouldn't it? Which we don't have. And then again, would it be worth it? I mean, as a structure that houses our spare crap, it currently does (most of) what we need it to do: stand up and hold stuff.

So I go round and round. In the interim, we're trying to enhance the garage/shack's functionality by enabling it to stand up, hold stuff, and keep the stuff dry, which will be a nice upgrade. Thus the roof goo. It's this weird tarry stuff that comes in a paint can that you smear into the crevices of your roof's metal sheets using some variant of a wooden spatula.

If we decide (as I expect we will) to just make the most of the structure we've got, then the roof goo is the necessary prerequisite for gutting and refitting the craft room/studio/call-it-what-you-will.

See, although short, rusty, and rickety, our garage/shack (oh, hell, let's just call it a shackrage) actually has some nifty features. It's got a spare fridge that holds our Costco provisions. It's got a two-car garage with wooden bins lining two of the walls. It's got a separate 1-car garage with a wall of pegboard. And in between, it has a third room with actual sheetrock walls and a linoleum floor. So while we don't actually use the shackrage for storing vehicles, we are able to get a lot of use out of the rest of it.

Unfortunately, thanks to a seive-like roof, that nice central room is currently a foul and pestilential fungus fest. There are holes in the ceiling where the wallboard disintegrated, there are puddles and streaks of black and green and purple mildew all over the walls and ceiling. If I have to go in there, I take a big lungful of fresh air at the door, dart in, grab whatever I need, and dart back out while doing as little breathing as possible.

All of which is too bad, because I really need a place to set up a stained-glass making workshop, and Matt needs a space (other than the kitchen countertop) to practice Gourd Art in all its dremeling, supergluing, gourd-innard-shredding glory.

So we need to tear down all the sheetrock, maybe rip up the linoleum, douse everything that remains with 100% bleach solution, and start over. But we can't do that until the roof is hermetic. So. Step 1: goo the roof. Step 2: get some rain so we can test the integrity of the roof goo.

("...get some rain..." Oh, I crack me up.)

...And that's why we've got two other major projects going on at the same time.

Grasping at Straws

Someday, when our landscape is more mature, we're going to have glorious fall color all over the place. For now, we just have tiny little smidgens of glorious fall color: one red leaf on the red oak, a bit of orangey tint on the margins of the Lacey oak leaves, one yellow bur oak leaf.

Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa)

The interesting red petioles on our pomegranate

'Tuscarora' crape myrtle

One of our pecans

Lacey oak (Quercus laceyi)

...and the grand climax, our Texas red oak (Quercus buckleyi)

New Year's Resolutions: CHECK

The key to New Year's resolutions is to make them short, one-time activities, instead of chronic, life-changing shifts in habit and discipline. Flossing every day, balancing your checkbook weekly, consuming 5 servings of vegetables per day? Not going to happen, my friend.

Cleaning out the garage, on the other hand--that's manageable.

The last leg of our move-in back in April was, frankly, a bit rushed, so at a certain point we just started shoving stuff in the garage. There were so many variables and so many things dependent on other projects (to pick an example, we can't set up my stained glass-making station until we tar the garage roof, gut the craft room, install new sheetrock, and paint, maybe tossing in some new linoleum just to mix things up) that all the unfinished odds and ends just piled up. There were 2 desks, a shelving unit, a large gas grill, TWO superfluous microwaves, an extra dryer and TWO extra washers, a second fridge, two bikes with deflated tires, and six antique doors awaiting restoration. Plus a heterogeneous collection of tools and hardware scattered indiscriminately among the nice wooden bins that line the garage walls.

Sweet Jehoshaphat.

What's worse, it was a depressing accumulation of decaying good intentions, a reproachful, pulsating blob of creeping guilt every time we opened the doors.

And there were cockroaches. I hate cockroaches.

SO, we decided to take control. At first our conflicting problem-solving methods were a source of friction (I wanted to strategize, Matt just wanted to move shit out of the way), but finally I settled down to labeling the bins for maximum efficiency and ease of use (I love labeling things!) and let Matt shove heavy things around to his heart's content.

And at the end of the day, we had all our tools, hardware, and other maintenance doo-dads (two sets of casters, anyone?) neatly organized in a logical, and clearly marked order. Ah, the sweet and balmy breath of organization! We found things long missing, completely cleared the floor, and 86'd some of our duplicate appliances.

Not the washers and dryer, though. I think there is an ancestral drive in the Vest line--perhaps acquired during the abstemious days of the Great Depression?--to accumulate capital in the form of extraneous appliances and vehicles. (I know, I know, acquired traits are not inheritable--THANK you, Dr Lysenko.) And this drive of his is running afoul of my own--rarely expressed--genetic predisposition to eradicate unnecessary stuff. (That particular gene comes from my clutter-loathing mother and spends most of its time with its eyes screwed shut and its fingers in its ears, trying to ignore the cheerful shambles in which the rest of my DNA is happy to live.) But I've had to accept that the only way I'll get the washers/dryer out of the garage is if I pry them out of his cold, dead hands. I'm not quite there yet, so the machines recline in triumph, smugly and pointlessly consuming 56 cubic feet of precious garage space. (Can that be right? 56 cubic feet? My math gene has absconded with my tidiness gene for a much-needed sabbatical in Havana.)

Nevertheless, it was a good day on the local freecycle.

We also pruned the big ligustrum on the east side of the house (not for beauty, but to foil any carpenter ants who thought they could sneak in via the roof), and Matt added some poles to his greenhouse for his hanging baskets.

The ligustrum, partly pruned. Looks a little lopsided, but we gave those ants what for.

So our garage is navigable and orderly, and as of the evening of Jan 01, I had completely accomplished my (short) list of 2008 New Year's resolutions.

I feel smug.