A little bit of everything

I didn't really have a good plan headed into the weekend. With the heat, I wasn't sure what I was going to do when. I needed to mow the lawn and do some trimming (2 weeks is about 4 days too long to let that lawn go right now). I needed to treat more Poison Ivy I found (I mentally note living Poison Ivy when I'm in the yard and wander around once a week to squirt new patches.)
Over the course of the weekend, I cleared the 10' left of the back wood line to the little path to the composting foundation. Under the blackberry and multiflora rose and poison ivy, I found a pretty little spiraea - a friend of mine versed in these things thinks it's S. latifolia, "Meadowsweet". (Thanks Camille!)

The bugs love this bush. Bumbles and all sorts of flies all over it.
Curiously, no honeybees though.

Little by little, I'm reclaiming the edge of things. Not having a truck to haul things away to the brush dump is starting to be a real impediment. I have to start seriously thinking about what is going to replace my trusty '07 CRV - at 270k miles, with a shot heater core and a dead AC compressor, it's going to be time soon. I like the idea of the Ranger or the Tacoma - not too big, but big enough to haul away all the yard waste with.
I did the mowing and the trimming around the pop-up rain drops, and cleared away the ferns that were encroaching on the left side of the driveway near the shed.
I also decided that this was the weekend to do the basement stairs (since it was cooler and drier down there than upstairs.) I don't have any before pictures, but image it a dark chipped grey. There's no good ways to photograph this (no light in the stairwell, I should fix that) but there's the after:

Washed, primed and painted a light "thundercloud" grey in the Benjamin Moore "Patio Floor" paint line. Now it matches the door to go out the bulkhead, and that pleases me. As a glossy, it should be easier to keep clean. I also painted the two support posts at the bottom of the stairs to match - they had be kinda-sorta painted over the years - (really I think it was someone just cleaning extra paint off their brushes) - but now they are nice and clean too.

Speaking of the basement, I managed to hit 45% humidity in the basement last night! For the first time since installing it, I heard the dehumidifier click off for a little while. 

I've scraped all the rest of the devil's spackle off the wall in the upstairs bedroom (taking bits of the wall with it as I went, grr,) and purchased a 3.5 gallon bucket of regular old dust-control drywall compound. Hopefully that will start to come together a little faster now.

I installed a wifi repeater, so now I get internet all over my back yard. That wasn't really the purpose though - the point was to put up a Ring device to monitor who might be behind the house. Now I've got a lot of great short videos of me mowing the lawn and watering the flowers. It's entertaining, if nothing else!