Category: Family & Home

Never dreamed having a lawn would be so much work. We apply great amounts of energy, water, nutrients and still it goes brown, dry, splotchy. Research: Lawn mites? Enough water? Thatch? Aeration? Soil penetrant? Dude at American Soil Products suggests it’s just too old — lawns apparently have lifespans. Said it’s probably time to rip it out and start from seed (he’s not a sod fan). Not ready to go there yet (the back yard is new sod six months old, it has its own set of problems).

Decided to resuscitate the decrepit, corroded, half-working original sprinkler system — manual watering is just too much labor for our schedules. Timer works fine, but the heads are whack. Took a vacation day and dug out 12 old Champion heads, installed new Rain Birds. Better, but needs tuning. 90% of the job is locating and digging out the old heads through rocks, under sidewalk underhangs, creeping roots…

Three trips for teflon pipe tape: Once when I ran out, again when Miles absconded with a roll, and the third when a roll vanished into thin air. Looked everywhere, time running out, gave up, got in the car again. As soon as I pulled into the street, saw it in the middle of the road — it had rolled into traffic and been run over. A bit crunched, but still teflon-y enough to work.

Amazed to study the water bill for May and June — we averaged 190 gallons per day, most of that going into the lawn I’m sure. And here we are concerned about low-flush toilets and the Water Miser setting on the dishwasher. With the century’s impending global water crisis, we’ll all have desert-themed yards soon anyway. Now I see why so many retirees decided to do the yard in a quaint gravel theme — throw on a few dead pine cones for good measure and call it a day.

Digging out the rootballs of four 15-ft. Lilly Pillies in our yard, a nightmare. Big thick roots entangled with those of a 15-ft. Laurel – be sure to cut the right roots. What’s that? A pipe from the defunct sprinkler system, don’t mess with it. Oops, up against the foundation. Soil hard as clay (because it is). Saw blade clogged and dulled with dirt. Two weekends on this now, and still not done. Some home improvement jobs just thankless. Making way for a new and improved, less Euclidean front yard.

What I love about Home Despot is the fact that they’ll take anything on return. Last week bought a Mutt for chopping out rootballs – like a hoe with a thicker, sharp blade that’s straight rather than L-shaped. Of course couldn’t resist using it as a prybar, and promptly broke the handle. Didn’t have the receipt. HD took it back no questions asked. Now I’m part of the problem. The woman in front of me brought back three houseplants she hadn’t watered. They were dead, Jim, dead, but HD took them back no questions asked. Now that’s customer service.

   

Miles and Amelia went to the Museum of Children’s Art to try their hands at painting. Michael the painting gorilla got nothing on them. So joyful. The era of refrigerator art has begun. Miles also got his first haircut recently – bittersweet to let go of original curls. He’s not a baby anymore – he’s a little boy.

Miles is learning to talk backwards. The donkey says “Haw Hee. Haw Hee.” If you ask him to say “Doggie,” he reports back: “Geedaw.”

He also likes to do this ecstatic whirling dervish dance, head cocked back, eyes on the sky or branches above, smiling so huge you’d think his head would pop, until he falls backwards or sideways to the floor or lawn, laughing uproariously.

Words cannot describe how much we enjoy his company. Most. Fun. Ever.

After almost a year of DIY projects, finally hit one we wish we had paid to have done. When we installed the lawn, moved a ton of small rocks in 50% soil off to one side of the house to “deal with another day.” That day came. Had a handyman do a removal estimate, he wanted $250 for the job, which sounded way high. Decided to do it ourselves. Rented an F-250 and banged some planks out of the side fence to create yard access. Spent the entire day shoveling densely rocky soil into and out of buckets, into and out of the bed of the truck. Hot. Sore. Sweated buckets. Hard work is generally satisfying, but we all have our thresholds. Met mine today.

Wake-up: The city dump is expensive! I remember going as a kid with dad, it was $5 per pickup bed, flat fee. Now there’s a long menu of fees at the entrance, all kinds of prices / cubic yard per material. Interestingly, they now charge $30 just do dump a single computer monitor (that’s a good thing). Anyway, spent $65 on the truck + gas and $80 on dumping fees. Next time we pay to have stuff hauled.

Tips: A) Don’t mix dirt/rocks with yard waste – not only do you get charged more to dump, but it’s a bear to get out of the truck bed. B) If you can rent a dump truck rather than a pickup, DO IT. Spent hours getting intermingled dirt, rocks, and yard waste out of the truck, when one pull of a handle could have emptied the bed.

After chopping down a tree/bush thing today, we found a bird’s nest and put it aside. We thought it was sweet. Then I went to rent a truck. I returned to find Amy crying. She had found four tiny baby birds on the grass — they had been cast from the nest to the ground when the tree came down. No bigger than thumbs, and half that length. Two were dead, the other two were begging with their tiny soft beaks for food. Pink skin and tiny tufts of hair. Amy cut up a worm and put it in the nest with them, but they didn’t eat it – they needed to be regurgitated to. Brand new to the world, and already their fate seemed sealed. We could only imagine what the mother bird would think when she returned to find not only the nest gone, but the whole tree. She probably went crazy with confusion and grief. Poor innocent things.

Our side fence was sagging into the yard, looking sad. Removing the original posts was going to be impossible without renting a jackhammer. Decided to put new posts in between the old ones. Project started last weekend, finished up this morning. Like most home improvement projects, hidden variables got in the way, things didn’t turn out as planned. This time they turned out better.

Note to self: Next time you need to stir mix-in-hole concrete with your hands, put on a pair of gloves first. The lime in the concrete does a number on your skin, even though the gravel has a way of diminishing the profile of raised blemishes. Two days after replacing fenceposts, hands are sorry. Seemed innocuous enough at the time.

I’m always amazed by the extreme sensitivity of our cheapo baby monitor. From across the house we can hear Miles’ every sleeping breath, a rumble when he turns over or pulls a blanket closer. If a cat is in the room with him, we can hear every smack of its tongue as it bathes. I’ve even gotten feedback loops passing through two closed doors, just from room tone.

Last night we were bugged by a mosquito in our room. Then this afternoon we were gardening outside, Miles was asleep inside, and the monitor was with us, competing with traffic noise. And then suddenly we could hear that damned mosquito buzzing around in his bedroom, clear as day.

Hearing an indoor mosquito from outside makes you realize what it must feel like to be to a dog or other animal with super-hearing — and how little information our ears usually give us. Kind of spooky.

After Miles’ first birthday, he started running and climbing like crazy, got his first haircut, learned to love the bathtub, visited his great grandmother, started brushing his own teeth, and wants to do pretty much everything himself.