Bowing to Reality

I spent about five hours on Saturday pulling weeds (especially the healthy amount of blackberry and ivy starts), which means that our gardens are lovely and that I finally got a good look at our roof from the back side of our house. Wow.



Note especially the red-from-pine-needles roof, and the trees sprouting in the gutter at lower right. Hmmm. Apparently we need to run a tighter ship in September – none of this was there four weeks ago!

Between the sight of the roof, and watching our neighbour and his electric blower, I finally caved and gave my blessing to buying a needle-blowing noise-machine. I’m still not proud that we have it in our garage, but realistically, you just can’t do that many square feet of roof with a push broom (and we’re allegedly 10 years into a 30 year roof, so I’m sure that every acidic pine needle that’s blown off is a blessing). Kevin was thrilled – he knew exactly the model he wanted. We still had a $50 gift card from Sears due to the water heater fiasco last fall, and so it was free. Nice! Here he is, blowing the last few needles from the roof.



It seems to work on gutters, too, or at least the top portion of them! We’ll do a more thorough pass of them in a week or two once the tree guys come to take out the four trees. We’re taking out two on each side of the house – 3 80-100+ foot pines and one sweetgum. We’re planning to get the stumps ground on the west side of the house and ignore the eastside for now. But I’m sure the tree-removing will produce more pine needles than we’ve seen so far, so the new blower will get quite the work out. :-)

One last question – does anyone in the Pacific Northwest have suggestions for removing moss from a roof?? The internet says a lot about vinegar (bonus points for being cheap), but I’m all ears if you have better suggestions. It’s only October and we already have a bumper crop.

The Great Tree Massacre of Aught Eight

Our neighbour, Paul, asked us today if we would mind trimming back the lilac the lilac next to the driveway, since he was having a hard time reaching his gate and mowing. They're good neighbours, and I appreciated that they waited until after the blooms were done, so I went out about an hour later with the clips and pruned it back and up. The entire thing looks a lot more even now, which is nice, and I think that it will get more sun which should help with the last of the very persistent moss.

Once I was outside, I weeded the front gardens, pruned back a few bushes that had gotten gangly, and then decided to finally just do something about the maple. Two branches later, I can present before and after shots:
View from the street, before:



... and view from the street, after:




View from the house, before:



... and view from the house, after:



The ground actually gets sunlight now! I think that going up another branch in the middle would entirely be a bad thing, but at least now I can walk under it without stooping, and maybe we can scatter some grass seed and have a chance of it growing. :-)

By that point I'd filled one yard waste bin and decided to move to the back. I pulled weeds from the rock wall (you wouldn't believe the number of ivy starts that grow here in a week), pruned the Japanese maple, trimmed the lilac at the side of the house up a bit, and then decided to cut down a tree. We have a pine tree right outside our bedroom window that is just below the maximum size before you need a permit. The poor thing is surrounded by five enormous trees, and tried to compensate by growing as an "L" – it only has one branch, but that was as big as the trunk.



So, I cut it down, snipped and sawed it up, and had just about filled the second yard waste bin when Kevin got home from golf. He did a good job being impressed at all my progress. :-) I mentioned that we should probably think about cutting some of the branches on the larger pines at the side of the house – there are a bunch that hang over the roof and side yard, blocking light but not providing any privacy. I'd sort of meant it as a project for another day, but he was enthusiastic starting (and I know better than to stop a project like that when it has momentum!), so he spent another hour cutting down branches – he ended up taking down about 12 big ones from the roof, and then I took down another two from the ground. Even at 8:00 pm, there was an impressive amount of extra light. I can't wait to see how it looks tomorrow morning from the bedroom.

Here's Kevin sweeping up pine needles, and our new sky view! (Plus good perspective just how big those trees are – he's only about 10' away from that trunk!)




And here's about a third of the tree carnage. It looked like a major hurricane had hit.



I spent about another hour clipping and sawing the branches into three big piles. There are also branches that fell in the front yard that I didn't get to before we lost the light. Delicious hamburgers on the grill for dinner, and we are both going to sleep VERY well tonight!

View in early June

It has been raining, cold and dismal here for the last week, but we're finally at the time of year where everything is so green and the flowers are so bright that it's not so bad. Here's the view of the front yard from my computer/sewing machine>



With all the flowers are starting to fall -- I'll miss their color. They were so saturated and brilliant while they lasted.

Peer Pressure

I’ve been really impressed with our neighbours so far. They seem to religiously clean the storm drains, brought some really cute kids around trick-or-treating, and are pretty industrious with the yardwork on the weekends. We came home a few days ago to a package on the front porch – someone started a holiday gift-giving chain letter. You discover a package of candy on your doorstep, with a sign that says “Ho Ho” and instructions to make two new signs, bake or amass treats, and put them on the doorstep of someone else on the block in the interest of “cheer and goodwill”. Once you’ve participated, you put the HoHo sign on your door so that people don’t regift you. Well, one day became two and Kevin and I became more and more stressed. (Usually, the words “chain letter” have no power over me. Apparently this whole “neighbourhood” concept is a brand new beast.) Our package had a slew of chocolates meant to be melted in coffee, plus a mini-stash of Halloween candy (a foil-covered chocolate eyeball, a butterfinger, some smarties…). Our kind of people, but still.

So, Kevin went to the drugstore to buy chocolate in pretty boxes, and I hauled the old calendars out of their niche in the closet, and made these.



Chainletters or whatever, I think they’re all sorts of pretty. The calendar was a collection of paintings by Alfredo Arreguin. The pictures I chopped for the yellow page were a jungle scene, so there are plenty of monkeys, toucans, and leopards. The violet page has salmon leaping through lots of spray.

And, I finished the squares! Here’s a way-too-blue photo of the new triangles after I cut them.



I decided that I needed one more purple square, plus more yellow (luckily I have the old yellow castaways) before I’m done with what I need for the sky-mountain join.

Week Eight

Yeah! A win! (75-68) This was a bye week for a lot of my players, but I was so impressed with Brees (who thought I'd ever say THAT?!) and the Patriots defense for floating things along. I picked up yet another new tight end off of waivers, who did well by scoring a point -- not super, but no real complaints. LT was a little slow, as was Stallworth, but I was so pleased to see Reggie Brown have a good game, even if he was sitting on the bench. (And the Eagles won -- nice!)

QB
	QB Drew Brees, NO	30
RUNNING BACKS
	RB LaDainian Tomlinson, SD	9
RECEIVERS
	WR Marty Booker, Mia	1
	WR Donte' Stallworth, NE	4
	WR Muhsin Muhammad, Chi	2
	TE Matt Schobel, Phi	1
DEFENSE
	D/ST Patriots	18
KICKER
	K Stephen Gostkowski, NE	10
BENCH
	QB Damon Huard, KC (BYE)	0
	QB Jason Campbell, Was	0
	RB Marion Barber, Dal (BYE)	0
	RB Michael Pittman, TB	0
	WR Deion Branch, Sea (BYE)	0
	WR Reggie Brown, Phi	11
	TE Alex Smith, TB	0
	K Matt Stover, Bal (BYE)	0

For visual interest, here are the five enormous trees in our backyard:



...and the even huger ones in the side yard.




Our town has rules about how many trees you can cut down, but since we have a largish lot, we get to take down up to eight a year. All of them have to be replaced with smaller trees (unless we want to pay a fee to the town). Get rid of the monster dark pines and gain some fruit trees? Or some small maples? Anyone have small, hardy tree varieties that they can recommend for the pacific northwest?

Finally, something for the blog

There's so much going on here (hint: a house!), but I'm feeling leery about jinxing it and a bit reticent about posting all of the details for the world to see, so blogging has suffered. If we get past the inspection details, and financing, then I’ll definitely start posting more frequently (endlessly?) about choosing appliances and little home projects. But as much as I’ve been scheming, I’m trying not to be too public just yet, lest it all disappears.

So, between THAT excitement, and a big crunch at work, and a secret gift knitting project, I’ve had nothing particularly bloggable. Kevin’s been taking a game development certificate at UW for the last year (it ends tomorrow night), and had a ton of work left for his final project, and I was feeling overwhelmed with too many new concepts and half-way-along research (insulation, and slabjacking, and kitchen renovations, and energy efficient appliances, and curtains, and garage storage systems, and carpet, and utility sinks to name about a tenth of the topics I keep getting waylaid by). So, I decided to take the day and make progress on the quilt.

As you may remember, I had almost finished the near-shore land, and the lake (4 squares remain of 32), when I realized that I’d made all 28 squares of my yellow and blue sky four strips too small.



Since I’d sewn the squares together already, I not only needed to add the extra strips, but first had to rip out all of the seams holding the squares together. And since these were my first squares, and my piecing was pretty wobbly, most of them were a fair bit under 5”x5”, so I’d actually put multiple seams between squares in hopes that it would make the quilt less rippable. So, yesterday, away I went with the seam ripper:



I’d finished the blue and was really getting going with the yellow, when I realized that I’ve never liked that blue to yellow transition, nor the two half-blocks sewn together, and so I should take this as an opportunity to fix things. So, I started eight yellow squares from scratch:



And before I knew it, the daylight was almost gone (especially now that the sun is setting at 8 pm! So sad.), and I had eight full yellow squares. I spent the rest of the evening working on the 16 blue squares – even with only one round left, all of that matching and sewing and pressing eats up time. But now I’m so happy with it.



The best part is that the yellow is so much smoother now. The first version, with its half squares, didn’t allow for long vertical strips, and so the long horizontal strips got lost in the busyness.
I also have a new plan for the yellow-to-blue transition. Hopefully it will work, and I can show you in a few days. (You can see the beginnings of blue encroaching in half of the yellow squares…)