I’m awash in daffodils, petunias and surprise lilies, but my favourite non-wild spring flower…just two. Purple hyacinth. Still, pretty, and will soon bloom!
Plowing the back forty. Hehe. Worked like it was supposed to; hundreds of little holes and what appear to be little poops all over the yard. Remains to be seen whether it’ll help, but Parview’s dirt is sad and needs all the help it can get. Outside of the patio flowerbed, I’ve found one single worm, when I dug up some weeds today. One worm in all the digging I’ve done. Sad dirt.
I’m not sure the manufacturer had two drunks in mind when they wrote the instructions, but aside from being missing two bolts and nuts (not our fault!) we got it assembled, and each of us ended up with only one small cut. Our blood will be in the very soil of Parview!
I dug the bed for my beloved cosmos, and marked one for joe-pye and boneset that I’m not sure about yet, and if I don’t dick around too long (just woke up from a lovely nap), I might just get the milkweed bed dug today, too. Just one for now, though!
I didn’t do the bed for joe-pye and friends, but I did do the milkweed bed. I’m exhausted, and really just want to nap, which is why I didn’t take a picture of the milkweed bed, but I told P. to make me a drink, so I guess I’m up for a little while longer, at least. Anyway, three biggest flowerbeds are done–well, the one along the fence will be long, if not wide–and hopefully, we’ll at least have a half-assed Bistro for 2014!
The old lady’s lilac did survive the winter, and I had the landscapers place it where it won’t have to strain to reach the sun anymore. It’ll get sunlight from sunrise to probably an hour before sunset. I think it’ll be happy there.
Well, mostly. I fucked up my system even worse, trying to fix it, but this morning, I managed to get it mostly working. I have both monitors, I can log in and use Netflix, so that’s good enough for now. It’s using the Nvidia driver I installed manually and won’t let me change it, but that ain’t broke, so I ain’t fixin’ it. I don’t like Gnome 3.10, but maybe it’ll let me switch to Flashback now. Dunno…trying to get ironing done so I can have tonight OFF! I’m not really sore from yesterday, though, which makes me very happy. P. got me 10 pieces of glass yesterday; if I finish ironing in time, maybe I’ll do a couple more today!
Nothing like putting in a new flowerbed in neglected dirt to remind you that you’ve been lazy all winter, and didn’t do shit last spring/summer because you were recovering from surgery! My biggest flowerbed is dug, at least, though it still needs soil and sheep poop, and it doesn’t look like much, especially around my hopefully-still-alive honeysuckle. I ran the tiller for 3h, then spent another 3.5-plus, sanding another chair, but I have to clean bathrooms and vacuum tonight, so I can’t finish hand-sanding and paint. Maybe I’ll have enough energy after cleaning to reupholster a chair seat or two. Maybe not…dunno, since I may actually be dead and just haven’t realised it yet! Anyway, here’s my morning’s work!
P.S. I also bought a plug aerator that tows behind Hot Rod. I used all 102 of my Amazon points, so I actually paid about $120. Anything’s gotta help the sad, wormless, decent grass-less dirt in that yard! That whole, big flowerbed dug up, and not one single worm to be found!
I should not have been watching Netflix when the update manager asked me if I wanted to update, because I didn’t even look at the list of updates. In the middle of whatever it was doing, Netflix suddenly died, and I had to reboot because my screens were black. by “reboot”, I mean hold down the power button until the system shutdown. That is hardly the recommended method but nothing else would have worked because I couldn’t see anything! The next time I tried to boot back up, my graphics were funky; my screen was duplicated instead of being spanned across both monitors. This is not a good thing, but I’ve had to fix worse fuck ups. It might have been easier if I had been able to see my mouse pointer, but I couldn’t. Fortunately I was able to fix the interrupted update with good ol’ dpkg from a root session in recovery mode. I booted up again and managed to navigate well enough to open a terminal and type in a command that made the mouse pointer reappear. I still get an error about screens not being found, but I think I can fix that by switching the driver to…whatever it isn’t right now. Nvidia or Nouveau or whatever. Don’t know yet because I’m on a coffee break but I’ll try when I go back in the house. Anyway, whatever I did isn’t forcing me to switch to that stupid Unity desktop. That’s good enough for now, and henceforth I will pay attention before I click “update”!
I went out after work and finished putting the black plastic down where I want to kill off grass for milkweed, and then raked up a metric fuckton (fucktonne?) of leaves, sticks, sweetgum balls and sunflower shells. Baby tulip tree has buds in spite of the abuse it suffered getting here, and so does the lilac. I think my spicebush is okay, but I see deer nibbles, so I may have to wrap them in chicken wire or something. Butterfly bushes appear dead, but they always do, and I’m too scared to go hacking at them. No activity yet on the Rose of Sharon, but the branches are still flexible, and that shrub is lazy when it comes to getting started in spring. Time will tell. During my raking, I also uncovered some green stuff that I didn’t even know I had. I knew I had a couple of peonies, but beside them I uncovered something that looks like it’s in the lily family, and something that looks like daffodil or narcissus, but doesn’t look exactly like either one. I’ll do some googling and see whether I can find out what they are. Since it was 70 degrees today and sunny but tomorrow is supposed to be 40 degrees with snow, I covered the mystery green stuff and the new sprouts of the peonies with chicken wire and plastic. If they had been exposed to the cold all along, I would have left them alone, but they were insulated by piles of leaves, so they need protection from the cold, since the tender new sprouts are not ready to handle cold and snow. Anyway, it felt good to get out and work in the yard even if it did remind me just how out of shape I get over the winter. I’m probably going to be sore tomorrow, but at least I’ll be sore because I was working in the yard that I own!
I scratched one a little because the slot was too tight and I had to wrestle it in, but I finished the glass I had. Four down, only twenty-eight to go! I went outside to look, and they’re as much nicer than the curtain-things from the outside as they are from the inside. Possibly more. Anyway, P and I like them, and we’re ultimately the only ones who matter! 😀
