Monday, April 17, 2017

April 17, 2017 - A Thousand Unedited Words A Day in April

April 17, 2017
So I am officially sucking at hitting my thousand words a day. If I actually have someone out there whose reading these and, dare I hope, maybe even enjoying them enough to look forward to them, I apologize for my horrible reliability right now. I can’t believe it myself. If you know me at all, you know I’m kind of Type A. Without yoga, I’d be a raving lunatic or would have popped a vein in my head years ago. On the one hand, this…gift, has given me the drive to plow through hard stuff in pursuit of a goal, accomplishing a few feats some might call impressive, and overall tending to get a lot of stuff done. Combined with my Type A-ness is a LOT of energy. I almost never run out. It takes a lot, and in the past, I’ve found that I can generally be exhausted and keep right on plowing anyway because once I have a goal in mind, I put my head down and just go and go and go. Employers love me. I drive Darren crazy.
When Nila was truly little, I only slept about 3 hours a night due to the fact that she woke up almost every hour and I had a significant back injury that woke me up even when she didn’t. I was still working, still trying to do everything (I always have). I bet you’re expecting to hear how I came to my senses and started relaxing and resting like I should have. Well, I didn’t. Instead, I pushed, pushed, pushed. One day, I was standing in the shower and once the warm water made it from my shoulders to my legs, my knees buckled. The warm water had triggered the muscles to relax and they leapt at the opportunity, even though they were still supposed to be on the job of standing me up. Like I said, without yoga….
Which brings me to my whiny excuse of where be my thousand words for the past days three? Did you know I just moved into a new house a month ago? No? Well, the house, like many houses in D-town, offers many opportunities for working on a place and making it our own. I’ve been working my tail off. Whether it’s cleaning the entire house top to bottom because the people we bought it from didn’t. (Example: Day 1 of the move in, I was exhausted and all I wanted was a hot bath. I told Darren, I’m going to take a hot bath, I walk into the bathroom and see the soap/scum wring in the tub and shouted out, “Right after I scrub this tub!” Ewwww!) The whole house was like that. So while unpacking and trying to make house livable, I’m also having to scour and degrease everything. And patch the holes in the walls or cover them with art work. The biggest thing however is the yard. First, I didn’t actually realize we had one. When we bid on the house back in January, we were just thrilled to find a place that didn’t openly need to be gutted, set on fire or exorcised (it just needed to be cleaned) at a halfway decent price and we just bid on it. I though CDOT owned the wild tangle of swamp behind our house.
While looking at the Plat to find access to nearby open space, we made the exciting discovery that that swamp of prickles and stickers was all OURS! So I promptly went down there and clambered through the sticker bushes to see what there was to see. The Plat had shown an actual creek to be meander around the boundary and I quickly found it, but also found that it was clogged with chunks of concrete, empty 5 – gallon paint buckets, old tires and logs. One tree had actually been cut and left to fall right across the stream bed. All of this junk tossed into the creek had caused the creek to leave it’s natural path and flow across what would have been a meadow, if not for the ejection of the stream from it’s bed.

So, I’ve been down there almost constantly, pulling out all this junk and using most of it to bioengineer a berm to guide the stream back to its homeland. Once I achieved that…and I HAVE, I waged war against invading, opportunistic stickers and prickers, pulling fallen dead wood and throwing everything into three piles of dead wood and sticker bushes, one of them being 12 feet high. The fire department is overseeing a controlled burn I’ll be doing on Tuesday to get rid of it. My lot is surrounded by steep hills covered in the gamble oak. There’s no dragging that stuff up to a chipper, so don’t ask. I’m also setting short, stone steps up one steep hill so it’s more accessible by us bipeds. In the front yard, I’m racing time to get a garden going where I can at least grow greens and maybe carrots and beets. and I’ve been at it everyday while fulfilling all other life expectancies, except this one I made to myself. Not good. So I’m trying again, but I already have plans to redo the challenge in May. You know, do it till I get it right. I’ve just been too danged tired after carving yard. But here’s the really cool thing. I have carved a yard, and I’m creating a little sanctuary back there that I never thought was an option in the beginning. A passionate landscaper and gardener, I’d accepted that I wouldn’t be able to do those things at this new house. At least not more than the front yard. We planned to live in this house for a couple of years, fix it up and flip it when we found the dream spot where I could have fruit trees, gardens, bees, etc. Now…maybe we found our dream spot…and a little crik runs through it. 

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