- Spray unwanted weeds in back/front with RoundUp.
- Get a haircut
- Shop for washer/dryer. Top loading, none of the front loaders are as reliable as the old top loader designs are, a front loader that lasts more than five years is a rarity and there are 20 year old top loaders still happily sloshing along.
- Get marigolds for front flower bed to freshen things up
- Figure out what to do with the big empty space on the left of the fireplace. Put a TV there? I won't watch it, but my mother might when she comes to visit. Put more Ikea book-cases there? I suppose not entirely incompatible with television idea, with modern flat screens... but I'm trying to cut down on my physical book habit and go more to eBooks, which are more environmentally friendly since I already have the computer to read them with...
- List all the random mismatched cups/glasses/mugs on FreeCycle, maybe someone needs more cups/glasses/mugs and doesn't mind that they don't match. (I had way more than I needed so culled out the mismatches).
- Move the book-case in the spare bedroom to the master bedroom, place it in corner by the dresser
- Fix the cracked leg of the bedframe with mending plates.
- Go get wood screws to screw mending plates to bedframe (grin!)
- Unpack enough tools in the garage to find the drillbits to drill the pilot holes to screw the wood screws into for screwing the mending plates to bedframe (heh!)
- Check the mail at the old place
- Unpack books to free up space in garage, since now the book-cases are where I want them to be.
- Get one of those cool chairs from Ikea to fill in the space by the doorway in the living room.
Temperature today in San Jose is supposed to be in the low 90's. The new place doesn't have air conditioning, it was built before air conditioning was needed and while it'd be trivial to add air conditioning (the furnace unit in the utility room is fairly new and has the chamber for the evaporator), it wasn't needed historically in this area (SF Bay Area), which has a mild Mediterranean climate. Global warming, anybody?
-- Badtux the Busy Penguin
Badtux, I've lived in the valley since 1981 and there's always a few days of 90+ weather in the spring and fall. Still, most of the summer you shouldn't need it.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you're settling in! How are the boys doing? Have they found new kitty-nap places or have they reestablished the old ones?
They were very happy when I got the futon reassembled because that's one of their prime kitty nap spots. They also do the bed in my bedroom and the chair in my bedroom, also previously favorite nap spots. Thus far they haven't established new nap spots, just restablished occupancy of some of the old ones.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to beat the heat this afternoon by going shopping (grin).
Time to go, just finished eating lunch (Korean side dishes from the Korean grocery down the street)...
- Badtux the Busy Penguin
Roundup is teh EEEEEVIL!
ReplyDeleteI enjoy hand-to-hand combat with weeds (Queen Anne's Lace root systems are the worst) because it feels like I'm doing something real when I get my hands dirty grubbing those things out. I don't believe in "past lives" or any mystical BS like that, but I do believe that all of us carry the "successful survival strategy" genetics from generations of ancestors. So that's a biological basis for "past life" feelings.
And it feels strangely satisfying to me to dig around and make things grow. In the thousands of years when my ancestors were surviving well enough to have children, I reckon most of them must have been growers. (OTOH, the idea of hunting things has no resonance for me, so the relatively short time that our species has had agriculture must have overwhelmed the uncounted millions of years when my forbears were meat-killers.)
One more thing: Ikea is teh EEEEEVIL!
Please don't tell my front loading Kenmore it was supposed to die 2 years ago, it still works like new.
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree with Bukko, but really all you need is some work to develop your turf properly, the grass will squeeze out most of the weeds on its own.
Bukko, the weeds I sprayed are in the cracks between the pavers or are in an area where nothing is supposed to be growing and where I can't dig (the area close to the foundation where the termite barrier lies under the surface). I haven't touched the weeds in the flower beds I'm going to plant, because I'm going to dig all that up anyhow when I amend the soil and put mulch on top after I plant what I'm going to plant.
ReplyDeleteMontag, I have one small patch of turf out front, that's it, and I'm not worried about weeds in the turf. The rest is flower beds or vegetable beds depending upon what I want to put there. Unfortunately a previous tenant used the back yard for his dogs, and while most of the back yard is pavers for a large patio, the flower beds on the sides are overgrown with weeds and full of holes where the dogs dug. So I'm definitely going to be doing some moving of dirt around. *Plus* an idiot former tenant put a *tree* right under the utility lines that is now about 6 feet tall. I'm going to pull that tree out and replace it with a shrub, maybe one of the more upright cultivars of rosemary because otherwise it's just plain trouble...
Roundup?
ReplyDeleteWhen I lived in San Jose in the mid eighties, I remember working on a tan in November and again in March. That leaves three months for "winter".
ReplyDeleteIt didn't usually get too damn hot but I can also remember smelling garlic in the summer time.
Tux if you are replacing the tree, may I suggest Mock-orange, genus Philadelphus. It is a shrub that would only need occasional pruning for height if it gets too high but one week a year in the spring it looks and smells wonderful.
ReplyDeleteBBC, Roundup is one of those *herbicide* thingies. Which does *not* have anything to do with Herbie the Love Bug.
ReplyDeleteMontag, I'm thinking about planting edible stuff, thus why I was thinking about a rosemary bush. Rosemary grows well here, at my last employer there was a rosemary bush in the patio area that was like five feet tall and almost as wide. Just the thing to fill in the corner of a yard where you want something to fill in that big empty area, but not something that'll grow tall enough to reach the power lines above.
'Nucks, sadly the garlic fields are all gone. You can still occasionally smell garlic, but only because some of the more avant garde landscape designers have started using it as a flowering plant in the summer, having noticed that when it "bolts" it has pretty flowers and a nice smell and that it is a quite hardy and low-maintenance perennial in our climate (there aren't a whole lot of bugs that like garlic-breath). It's not the right time of year to plant garlic, but I will definitely consider planting some once fall arrives.
A fireplace? Coolness, congrats!
ReplyDeleteMy friend mentioned something about marigolds being great for a natural bug repellent in a food garden. That and mixing up the different plants together.
I tried gardening but the ground squirrels run this place, so that was a no-go.
Best of luck :)