Bad Blogger

We had a little project this weekend and I was so worn out from it that it's taken me three days to get up the energy to write this blog.

Remember this?


One of my lovely readers (I have Fives of Tens of them, you know) suggested filling in with lava rock to discourage regrowth of what I now call the Ivy Scourge. Awesome idea, but Lava rock isn't free and guess what we had on hand already?

Brick. That's a pile of previously-applied brick in the corner back there. I didn't think to get a decent shot of the pile beforehand. Mostly because it had a metal washtub and a bunch of wood on top of the brick.

We also found brick here:

(we found a nest of garter snakes there, too)

and here:

Yeah. We dug those up. I've always wondered why our useless gardener uses the weed-whacker back here. At first I thought it was because of the randomly placed rosebushes, but now I know it's because once you remove a layer of overgrowth, you get equally randomly placed paths of brick.


Funny story about this area. See all that random, weedy growth behind the brick "Wall"? We started asking the Landlord to pull it out (since it's choking the fruit trees) when we moved in. In January. He came by last week and finally pulled out HALF OF IT. Not kidding:

(see that dirt half on the right? We have a useless gardener and a landlord who is perpetually half-assed about things. If it didn't hurt so much I'd bang my head against a wall.)

Now, I know that this whole "Gardening" thing is new to me (and exciting!) but even I know that the proper way to plant ivy (aside from Not Planting It At All) is NOT to put it in a planter and set it on the ground and forget about it. We unearthed, and then had to unearth, so many of these. Some salvageable, but mostly they'd been chewed to bits by the aggressive, invasive root system of The Scourge. I *hate* Ivy. And I don't hate a lot of things. But this is a plant that will grow INTO the stucco on the side of your house. It will choke out your fruit bearing plants. Its roots will ingest (I saw it) any little piece of whatever that they can't push out of the way.

After the apocalypse, it will be the cockroaches, spam, and Ivy.

Any, on more pleasant topics: the after pictures!


It's prettier from the front. And hey, we were working with salvaged brick. And also, I know that I need to prune that growth from the base of the pomegranate tree. That's technically the gardener's job. Unfortunately, he's a lazy bastard and the landlord is the one who hires/fires him...you see where my frustration lies.

Emily is about to take matters into her own tentacles....um, hands.

These Walls

Before

After

Inspiration here. The good thing about this little setup is that I can add/replace/rearrange with little effort. And repaint, as soon as I get my head around what color I want it to be. Because I'm so very much Not and Oatmeal Person.

This is in the office. To my left is my desk, to my right is Husband's, and at my tooshie is his 88 Key Synthesizer setup. So I put all of our music-related images there. All 4 of them. He had more posters but I'm not sure where they are....On the left is a sketch of Rogue that he got at a comic convention when he was in Middle School (I think.) The artist passed away a year or so ago so I had it framed for him. I actually really like it.

Still to come:



And this has just come onto my rader:

Our mail slot. It was brought to my attention today that when the owner was rolling oatmeal onto the walls he didn't so much as pull out the nails...and as you can see from the chipping - he just rolled over the mail slot and then pried it open after the paint dried. I want the paint removed from it. Going to have to figure that one out. Any tips on getting paint off metal? Thanks.