Direction Connection

It’s a long story that starts at the farmers market and ends with unexpected mulching, but I think it’s best just told in pictures.

This is what the flower bed in our front yard looked like after I spontaneously decided to weed it. As usual, we neglected to take a true “before” picture, so you can’t see all the junk that I pulled out of it. I disturbed an ant nest and found lots of other critters while I was at it. I may have also killed the rose bush our landlords planted, we’ll see.

This is what it looked like after we planted things:

We bought the plants at Barnes Supply Company, which is a feed & seed store that’s less than a mile from our house. We get our pet food there too, and the Josie-dog always likes to tag along because they give her even more biscuits than I do. We actually made two trips there yesterday — the first to buy herb seedlings to plant (my attempts at seeding them myself failed yet again), and the second, post-mulching, to buy flowers for the flower bed and a birdfeeder for outside the office window.

I hadn’t intended to mulch, you see, much like I hadn’t intended to weed, but our very nice neighbor saw us working and came over and offered us mulch from a pile he has in his back yard from getting some trees cut down. Melissa did the shoveling and I dislodged the mulch with a hoe, and we used the trusty wagon to haul it from his yard to ours.

[We first spotted the wagon at the Atlanta Pride festival, being pulled by a woman in a gaggle of lesbians, and it was love at first sight. It has since been dubbed the lesbian wagon. Every time we use it, we get to make use of a new feature, it seems -- yesterday's feature was the sides that swing down. If you line the wagon with a tarp, fill it with mulch, take it to the place that needs mulching, and then swing down the sides, the mulch sort of falls out like magic, and it is exciting. We do know that we could also use a wheelbarrow for this purpose, but it would diminish the joy.]

Anyway, here are some of the flowers and herbs that we planted. The herbs I can identify; the flowers I picked based on how pretty I thought they were, with no regard to whether they would actually grow, let alone thrive, in the setting I’ve chosen for them, so I’m afraid you’re on your own for figuring out what they are.

Thyme

Parsley

Flowers & herbs in planters

?

Some kind of heather

Not sure but it looks good with the marigolds

Birdfeeder; bird came separately

OK, now that we are really and truly very near the end of Buffy, we need to replenish our Netflix queue. I noticed tonight that we had only one movie in our queue, and it was not even one that sounds particularly interesting to me. So I raided the queues of my only two Netflix “friends,” Julie and Ange. Now I am up to five movies. Help! Does anyone out there want to be our Netflix “friend”?

The last post was Rebecca’s attempt to encourage Josie to communicate about her relationship with Rebecca’s new toy. The new toy is a robotic vacuum. Yes, my techie-geek girlfriend has actually insisted that we invest in a robot to vacuum our floors (avid readers of our blog will take note that this is in keeping with the pay-someone-else-to-mow-our-yard theme). The contraption is called the iRobot Roomba Discovery Vacuuming Robot. Rebecca convinced me to make this purchase because (1) we got 20% off at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and (2) she put it on her credit card at 0% interest, so we don’t actually need to pay for it until August.

I was initially unconvinced of the wisdom of this purchase, but it’s turned out to be a very good thing for me, because Rebecca is now taking an unprecedented degree of responsibility for the welfare of our floors. I will now be researching any and all gadgets that might motivate her to clean other aspects of the house…a scumbuster for the tub? A gadget related to scooping the cat litter? The possibilities seem endless. Stay tuned…

Hi. This is the Josie-dog. Now, I know you’re thinking that I am a dog, and so I can’t use a computer, but I have been watching the people, and it is not that hard. Plus, there is something that I need to say.

See, a couple of months ago, the people got some new animals. I was jealous, I grant that, but I made my peace with the cats. They were afraid of me at first, and I didn’t even try to use that to my advantage. I’d lived with cats before, and while they are snobby and not nearly as devoted as I am, and they get to be on the furniture and I don’t, I do get to go on trips with the people while the cats stay home and clean themselves, or whatever it is that cats do when they are alone. So it is not all bad. Sometimes Myster (the people think they are clever, spelling her name like that, but really it used to be spelled Mister until the people realized that Myster was actually a girl — silly people) will give me the time of day, and I think we have formed a special, if unspoken, bond in the time we spend watching the people eat and hoping they will feed us.

So anyway, the cats. The cats, the cats were fine. But now there is this new thing. It is smaller than the cats, and white, and round, and it sits quietly in the corner most of the time. I am pretty sure it is not another cat, and it may not even be an animal, but it is very hard to understand what it could be. Every morning for the last three days, one of the people has gone over to it and touched it. And when the people touch it, it starts moving and beeping like magic, and then it makes this awful noise. And then it wanders around the house aimlessly, running into things (including me!) and then changing course arbitrarily, like it has no idea where it’s going. Can’t it see I am a dog and it should be afraid of me like the cats were? The people act like there is nothing strange about this, and I follow them around the house trying to tell them, but they don’t seem to understand. It is very disconcerting, I tell you.

I have noticed that the people (well, the person — only one of the people ever did this) haven’t been pushing around the loud scary machine since this thing arrived, so that is good. When the loud scary machine comes out, I get shaky and try to hide, whereas if this thing will just stop running into me, I think I can come to terms with it. Plus, it seems to unnerve the cats, and, secretly, I kind of like that.

About a week ago, Melissa and I realized it was time we admitted something to ourselves: we were never going to mow our lawn, and we needed to suck it up and find someone who would. I was tasked with sending an email to the neighborhood list in search of an unsuspecting teenager who would tackle our overgrown lawn, and whoa! There are a lot of people in our neighborhood who want to mow lawns. Kids, grown-ups, people’s neighbors — within a day I had more emails than I knew what to do with. We settled on Ellie and Sam, who made a very convincing pitch to do the mowing for $5 less than we were offering. They’re still getting the full $30 (actually, for this first time they’re getting $37, because we feel guilty for letting it get so overgrown, and we have seven extra dollar bills between us) so perhaps they were just clever that way.

The point of all of this is: we are the grown-ups who hire teenagers to mow their lawn. I am sitting here at my desk, doing work, and Sam is outside mowing our lawn. This is a strange sensation. And, as Melissa says, that is all.

Rebecca is posting about this right now, so I won’t steal her thunder by saying more…

Well, we’re kind of running out of steam on the whole watch-all-7-seasons-of-Buffy-over-the-winter deal. We’re solidly in season 7 now, but haven’t been making much progress lately. Part of the problem is that the weather is getting nicer, so we’re spending time outside when we otherwise might be watching Buffy. And this is good; we’re not complaining. Buffy was just supposed to get us through the winter, and we really had hoped to be finished by now. The other problem, quite simply, is that we’ve become distracted. You see, we’ve discovered Lost. And Rebecca is hooked. I mean, she’s addicted.

We started watching Lost before the weather got nice, when we had our bikes set up on resistance trainers in the spare bedroom/linen closet/fitness center/TV-watching room (we need a bigger house). In the morning, Rebecca would watch a 40-minute episode while riding about 8 miles on her bike. Then I would ride when I got home from work and watch the same episode. That worked for a little while. But then last Thursday, we rode 16 miles outside, so the next night we reasoned that we were entitled to watch two episodes of Lost. And we rode 40 miles on Saturday…you can see where this is going. Lost is our new Buffy.

We’re going to finish Buffy, though, really, we will. Soon. I mean, after all, I suffered through Season 4 (even though at one point Rebecca suggested that I just read the Wikipedia summary of Season 4 so we could move on to Season 5, thereby putting an end to the Season 4-induced cringing and groaning). If I don’t finish the whole series, all of that will have been for naught.

Since our initial foray into sorbet-making, we also have tried strawberry sorbet, and the lemon sorbet is just better. We made some tonight, and it was yummy.

So far, we have learned several things:

• Including alcohol in the sorbet mixture is critical, because otherwise your sorbet freezes hard as a rock and you can’t eat it unless you plop the whole thing in the blender and puree it, and then it’s more of a smoothie than sorbet anyway, so it doesn’t count.
• The cheap plastic takeout containers are not good for storing sorbet. They become brittle in the freezer, and break on the slightest provocation. Although we have learned this lesson, we have not yet figured out an alternative. We’re going to have to keep getting takeout, because we’ll eventually run out of containers.

That is all.

I have decided that my previous posts have been too lengthy. I am attempting to remedy this.

We rode our bikes for 40 miles on Saturday. Actually, it was only going to be 39.15 according to my bike computer, until I insisted on taking the long way home from Locopops’, AND riding around the block another two times until my tripmeter turned over to 40 miles. Rebecca told me I could just tell everyone it was an even 40 miles, but I wasn’t going for it. She rode her bike in little circles in front of the house until I finished.

We’re going to do it again this weekend, I think.