Lovely in Springtime (06-20-11)

Here are some photos of the house at its best, when everything around is in bloom...

Stranded at the Rural Auction (03-29-11)

I was at the rural auction, killing time while waiting to be picked up by my husband and... (Ahem... a long story...).

Inside the big building where they have the household goods auctions, I surveyed the scene. At the auction, week after week, one sees the same people, the junk and the antique dealers, the occasional curious, farmers, field workers, and many Hispanic, Ukrainian or Russian immigrants. It's a large loose group of people, some one says hello to, some one avoids, some one hands off unwanted purchases to... But everyone is there with the same purpose: to make a deal, to find the perfect, -or almost perfect- item, something to fix, to re-use, or to re-sell.

Inside the auction building

There is something heartbreaking about the sorry possessions strewn around, the scratched furniture, dented appliances, faded clothing, ribbons and threads, used toiletries, greasy pots and pans, chipped plates, broken toys, and other junk, sold off by the box, the sad remnants of torn, displaced lives.

A Day of Work (12-31-10)

I spent all morning and most of the afternoon trying to get some yard work done before there is another freeze. Lots of work today: I turned the dirt over in the garden area, to discourage the weeds from settling down for the winter. I stacked up away from the house all the wood logs Gary had split and left near the carport. I carried a lot of the wood debris left behind the studio (aka shed) by previous contractors to the side of the trailer, for a future trip to the dump. Valérie and Julia brought all the trimmed rose branches from the rose garden area and put them in the trailer, with the rest of the yard debris. Then, I went down to the rose garden and trimmed half of the lavender shrubs at the front of the property, and the big hydrangea near the front porch.

One of the pipes at the back of the house behind the laundry room may have burst: there was a long trail of ice along the side of the house, not a good sign...

On a positive note, the outside of the studio is finished, as far as the missing bats are concerned. My friend Julie Olson gave me the phone number of a carpenter who seems to know what he's doing (a nice change, since the last 10 months have been been a wild ride). He worked pretty fast, with no gloves on. Yet, it was so cold in the morning, I couldn't even feel my fingers inside my gloves...

My Front Yard (11-18-10)

I was trying to draw my front yard with a fence on the side (there is none presently).

Ideas for a Fence (11-18-10)

I was trying to draw my front yard with a fence on the side, to try to get a visual idea of what a fence would look like in the lower part of the property. Right now, there is no fence because the old fence erected in the early 1980s was all rotted out and had to be taken out. Unfortunately, for lack of funds, there is just not a way to get a new fence at this time...

Fence idea.

The House in the 1980s (ca. 03-10)

When we moved in the house, we found an envelope the previous owner had left to our attention on the kitchen counter. Inside, some papers pertaining to the history of the Rupert house (the original owners), but also this photo of the house and the property in the 1980s. The rear part of the property has been sold off, including the small structure with a tree in front (demolished to build a house). We still have the large structure with a lean-to behind the house. The oak tree in front of the house is still there, as are the other trees in the photo.

Sad day: the Rosa Mulliganii came down (08-30-08)

This is totally hearsay, but this is as I understand it: the people who seemed (semi-)interested in the house apparently came to see it with their parents, and the parents may have preferred another house that had just come on the market, etc. Result: no offer.

In the meantime, since we had apparently nothing better to do today, we spent the afternoon cleaning the yard, and filling the trailer with year debris.

G. cut down the climbing rose (rosa mulliganii) from the cedar tree, a sad thing, since it took me 14 years to get that thing to climb up and stay in the upper branches rather than snagging me as I walked by. (Picture me standing up on a chair and trying to get the long thorny shoots to loop over the cedar branches with a rake held up high over my head, and them cascading down on head). Anyway, we did this after an arborist had assured G. that the rose would eventually block the sunlight from reaching the branches, and thus impede needle production, etc. So, it's been all cut down. G. was very happy, I guess, as happy as anyone can be after quasi-nagging me for 14 years about how the rose-this and the rose-that, and he finally got to take it down.

Looking up this rose on the web tonight, I just found out that it is the "perfect" rose to grow on cedar trees. Whatever. I have, like, so much moved on mentally that I don't care. All that's left is the base and the roots, and that, I am going to dig up and take with me wherever I go. No point leaving anything that people won't appreciate. Call me cynical; I just take comments that my yard is a "jungle" rather personally.

In the end, and surprisingly enough, the yard looks bigger. Let's see if that gets us some traffic, haha, and maybe people will notice that there IS a yard, all 60 x 100 of it.