Summer is officially here, and it has brought the first heat wave for our area. Something tells me this is going to be another scorcher of a summer, especially since we had no winter at all.

With the heat on, I’m pretty much over yard work at this point. I got my side gardens started and some flowers finally growing. Now I just have to hope they don’t become food for critters as they usually do. I also got grass growing where there was nothing but a few patches of crab grass. Take that John! He didn’t think I’d get it to grow in the shady areas, but I did. It just took a raking up several inches of rotting leaves and branches, and a lot of seeding and re-seeding. There are still a few bare patches, but I’m hoping they will fill in eventually.

The only thing I didn’t get to was the side of the house where I have a million saplings to cut down. I’ll wait till a nice cool day to do that. Plus I’ll need to put on pants, socks over the pants cuff, and deep woods myself to keep ticks away . . . then scrub myself with poison ivy scrub afterwards to be safe. Not something I’m itching to do right now.

Oh . . . my first tomatoes are growing too! I am also trying peppers this year in the garden as well. So far that plant doesn’t seem to be growing very much.

Now it’s time to finally move onto some house work I’ve had on my list for the past three years: the two downstairs guest rooms. At this point I think the only thing I’ll get done is packing up stuff, moving it to the basement, and throwing out or donating a lot of other stuff. If I can get that done, then I know what John’s project for his time off in the winter can be . . . helping me actually make those two rooms into real rooms. They both need a repaint, and he just loves picking out paints for rooms. Plus we’ll need to probably go furniture shopping at some point for some more book shelves, a desk and a new dresser.

So I finally went out and tilled the land in my garden area. Last year I planted tomato plants in above ground pots and in a topsy turvey planter (which finally dry rotted and needs to be trashed). This year I might try a few in the actually ground and see how they fair. I have a few new topsy turvys to use as well. I killed all the weeds a few weeks ago, and finally removed them the other day. I think this weekend should be safe to plant!

I am also trying to “repair” parts of our yard. Over the years weeds took over, and grass died out. I really just want to call a landscaper up, but I’m not working thing summer (by choice), so that’s not another bill I need right now. Plus the satisfaction of doing it myself is something I’d also like. I can do other things than just kill plants . . . . John! There are however piles of crap/branches and trees John sawed down this winter than do need to be carted off, and those will require hiring someone.

This past winter we finally got my old bed out of one of the spare rooms and down to my mom who wanted it for her guest room. That has cleared up a lot of space in that room. John also went through some of his crap piled up in there, and cleaned many parts of the basement out over his break. So one of the other tasks to do this summer (which was in fact on the list for LAST summer) is to get both rooms downstairs cleaned out and organized! One will be a guest room, the other is going to be a study for me to do work and store my books, DVDs, video games, etc . . . . I however need to buy a new dresser for my clothes (the one in there is falling apart), pack up a ton of stuff and move into the basement, and of course throw a ton more of stuff out . . . oh and paint one of the rooms.

Hmmm, something tells me a lot of this still won’t be done till next summer! I will try my best. As I said, with the rooms opened up, it’s a lot easier. Also ONE of the people storing stuff in our basement has actually expressed an interest in coming to collect it finally. That’s progress. John told me “See, aren’t you glad you didn’t throw it out?” Actually no, because I could have told the person “Oh I thought you forgot about it, it’s been years!”

I have other things to blog about. But since I have so few to blog about these days, I’ll save it for later. That and I don’t want to jinx things!

Literally . . . not figuratively. Since he’s on break from work, John has had some ants in his pants. He’s channeled that into some much needed housework, much to my delight. So far he’s ransacked the basement, and it looks so good! Make no mistake, it still needs a lot more work. But not only can you walk down there now, it doesn’t look like an episode of “Hoarders.” We had so many cardboard boxes we had saved after buying various things (computers, electronics, kitchen gadgets) and empty kitty litter containers down there. It was NUTS!

We still house way too many things of people who don’t live here. I’ve threatened before to have an ebay sale, and I still might. He says once I do that, they’ll show up for their things . . . but he doesn’t have their numbers to call them to come get their crap either . . . . Their loss! This isn’t a public storage, they didn’t sign a contract . . . sue me These aren’t things that have been down there a few months either, we are going on a decade at this point. Yeah . . . do you think they remember? Once we can get their crap out, we can actually get some more shelves put in, and organize our own crap better.

The other major project I’ve been itching to do for almost two years now is to redo our two guest rooms on the first floor. Unfortunately we probably (i.e. we will) need some room in the basement for that, as things need to be packed up and moved down there. Oh make no mistake, a lot of stuff in these two rooms also needs to be junked! Then we need a few new pieces of furniture, namely a desk (as one room will be a study/office space with a pull out sofa for emergencies). We also need a new dresser for the other room, as the old Ikea ones are falling apart and take up too much space. I admit, they house a lot of my crap right now, and I need to go through and trash a lot of it. I am going to try to slowly work on things with the hope of having both rooms fairly set up by summer. The first order of business is cleaning out the closets in both rooms, as they can become good storage space.

One day soon, our house will be how John I envisioned it always could be

John got me these GIANT wall decals of Wonder Woman for my birthay. The one of her is so f’ing big I currently don’t have a free wall to hang it on in the Wonder Woman room! I guess I’m going to have to step up my plans for turning it into the office area, and the other spare/junk room into the downstairs guest room.

I also really love the artistic/design of these. I think when I finally get that Wonder Woman tattoo I’ll use bring these in for the artist to use

So before I headed off to Virginia, I had moved all the potted flowers I worked on growing to the barnyard area so they’d be easier for John to water, everything in one place. Yeah, unfortunately some rodent creature also decided to make them into a tasty treat. Seriously? My growing plants/flowers are more appetizing than a field of growing plants and veggies? It’s like shoplifting from KayBee when Toys’R'Us is nextdoor! I was FURIOUS! So I had to cart all the pots, some giant, back out to the front yard where they first started. What sucked was the gobbler decided to choose the day after I transplanted a lot of them from the larger containers to smaller ones, to keep the larger containers from being over crowded. I’m pretty sure it’s a groundhog. So far since they’ve been out front, no real problems. I just have to see if they heal from being chomped so much. I am planning to plant stuff in the ground next year, once the ground is cleaned up and ready of course. I just decided to give some potted flowers test runs this year.

The front porch, which you can see has been stripped of ivy, and the ivy stripped the paint. Also the front bushes, the bricks I’m gunna eventually use to line the garden area then mulch.

Thanks to the heatwave, the sixth one we are on now, I basically stopped doing yard work. It was just too nasty. I figured let the heat kill all the weeds, overgrowth and crud; it will make it somewhat easier for me. I’ve sense moved my focus indoors. Most people never realize unless I show them that we actually have a second bedroom downstairs, aside from the Wonder Woman room. It however has become a storage nightmare. The Wonder Woman room is too honestly. I can make it look nice, just don’t open the drawers or look in the closet

Even opening the door to the room is a nightmare . . . . don’t because the cats like to rush in here and then it’s a bitch to get them out!

I have wanted to organize it and the other room for YEARS now. In fact I had told John over the winter we were to get things in order . . . it didn’t happen. So I went out and bought a second bookshelf. I had wanted, and blogged, about a book shelf for the living room/dining room corner for awhile. Especially during the Christmas season to put the never ending nativity on. I never got around to it, and never wanted to make the purchase. I had been eyeing a nice looking one at Le Tar Jay for a year, but then I saw the cheap 26 dollar version. 120 dollars for the exact same thing, just with molding to make it look pretty . . . or 26 dollars for the plane jane version. Hmmmmm. Yeah if I’m paying over 100 dollars for furniture then assembly should not be required! I went cheap.

John of course did not like the cheap. Ewwwww pressed wood! Ewwwww! Well the 120 dollar one was pressed wood too, just like anything from the Swedish Superstore would be. I told him he was welcome to go out and buy something nice and fancy if he wanted. He also complained that I wanted to stack it with DVDs and videogames. Currently they are separated and either on an bookshelf in the Wonder Woman room, or in several different drawers in the TV cabinet. It can be a bitch to go searching for what I want, but John’s point is “they are hidden away rather than on display, which makes us look like grown ups.”

Well first, the only people who see inside our house are my friends. They look through these same things as much as I do, so I feel they’d appreciate the organization Second, who cares what the inside looks like when the outside looks the way it has for years Third, John is the King of Clutter and has no room to talk here really, cause I know I’ve blogged about his mountain sized piles of unopened mail that cover his desk. They get so bad that I end up having to go through it all and throw out (sorry recycle) countless dollars worth of unread magazines he subscribes to. I just glanced over there right this minute and their are packages on the floor and stacks on the desk I can see. Pfffft!

I told him that I would eventually move the book case out of the living room (though I might need another for Christmas!) and into one of the other rooms. However before those rooms can be cleaned, shit needs to be put in order! I want to put the DVDs/Videogames in the living room, use the Wonder Woman Room bookshelf for actual books, and the TV cabinet for CDs (which again are ALL over this house). From there I can begin dealing with the closets and drawers (which ALSO have CDs, videogames, old computer components). I’ve bought a few plastic bins for some of this stuff. The drawers which hold a good number of my clothes are actually collapsing. I need a new set of drawers honestly and soon. The ones I’m using now? “Pressed wood furniture” from Ikea . . . that belonged to John . . . yeah . . . . grown up stuff

My eventual goals for the two rooms, probably not to be fully realized till next year cause I only work on them in spare time, are to use the cluttered room as a guest room and turn the Wonder Woman room into an office and if needed a guest room. There is a pull out couch bed in the cluttered room I’d move into there.

As for other stuff, the second boot camp begins in four weeks and runs two weeks up until the start of the fall semester, when I go back to teaching. It’s my last hurrah of getting a bunch of stuff done and in order. The jobs for fall look good, 2 classes, both the same class, both I’ve taught before. I had tooled with changing the books, but killed that idea. I have the lectures and class done as is, I don’t have the time or desire at this point to change it and all the lectures. Yeah I’ll tweak them, but I don’t have to rewrite them. Then 2 classes at least in the spring, hoping to get one more.

So I’ve added three new categories to the blog. Yard Work, House Work and Gardening. Because my regular life is so dull and blogless right now, these three things outside of work/school are all that I’m kinda doing (aside from hanging out and seeing movies with friends, which I guess I could post reviews of).

Today I bought two 120 gallon (I think?) composting bins. I figured I needed to do something with all this yard waste I was compiling, and dragging it to some dump site was not preferencial. John has a paper shredding fetish too, and we’ve just been recycling it all. Now I can add this in to the compost bins. I put them together today right before a friend came over, then we went to the movies. So I haven’t begun filling them. I’ll add photos of them to this post in the AM.

I have totally hacked away at the garden from the previous posts. Tomorrow I plan to dig up all the roots and hoe/rake the whole area clean. Then I’ll mix in some weed killer/preventer into the soil to make sure nothing comes back. The dog house I’ve flipped. It’s too heavy for me to move on my own, but so old and rotten I think I can demolish it and move it out piece by piece. Tomorrow I plan to clear out the whole garden, rake the ground smooth, and fill in all the gopher holes and stuff. Then I wanna put the bins in the corners and begin filling them. I’m not going to tear the fence down yet, but I am taking down the chicken wire that’s up along it (too hard to see in the photos). It’s just a weed enabler at this point.

My writing retreat for school begins next Monday. I’ve decided to use all day tomorrow to work in the yard. The weekend might bring storms, so I don’t know if I can do much then. I’ll begin preparing for the retreat then. When I start the retreat I know yard work will cease during the week as it’s an all day thing. I wanna clear out as much as I can before then and get these compost bins started. I’d like to move my tomatoes into the garden too for maximum sun. I’ve also got two pots of tomato seedlings I started I might be able to transfer into the ground soon, to give a good comparison to the topsy-turvey. Unfortunately it’s late in the season for planting, so I don’t know if I can start any other garden crops. Suggestions from experienced gardeners welcomed though!

Once the garden is sorted, I’ll start on the rest of the nightmare of a yard! I will have a beautiful garden again. I showed a friend photos of what it looked like years ago, she just said “WOW, what happened!”

I have a whole other post on an non-related note to make. Short version, I still have not set foot into the establishment, and it’s going on a year now. I am however doing their website once again. As I said, there is a reason/story behing it to tell.

From Left to Right First Row: The composting bins, A shot of the garden now, after rolling the doghouse out of the corner, a shot of the backside of the garden fence (the pile of twigs used to be by the fence and created a home for far too many critters, so it had to go)

From Left to Right Second Row: Two photos of the same areas above, just the after shots Oh and I guess I should have put sunblock on huh?