Staying busy

Progress photos.
Progress... photos? Progress?
I don't know what day it is half the time. I'm marking the days on my calendar by the number of contacts I have with people outside my house. The last time I put gas in the car was a month ago.

Things are getting a little squishy here, folks. Not going to lie - the Betty Crocker box brownies are the way I'm getting through all of this.
I have managed to wrestle my brain around a few things. Mostly outside stuff now, because that takes very little active brain space for me. I did get the mudroom as done as it's going to be without appliances.

So much spackle.

Paint!

Dry fit of the access panel, no top trim yet.

Painted panel, trimmed out, and upper trim!

Ta Da! This room is DONE.
Except for you know, the fridge.
And the washer/dryer.
(Come on, Covid check. I can stimulate the economy with one phone call.)

After that, I did do a little work on the office, stripping trim. Stripping trim is dirty, tiresome and tedious. Particularly trim that's been caulked together.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

What's this? They put the top bit of trim along the upper edge of the older bottom piece of trim,
but because the house had settled and the lower trim wasn't even anymore, they filled it with caulk?
Oh Hey Look! I see what a case of caulk disappeared!
I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't worth ripping this nonsense off the wall and just replacing it.

Ahh, the poor alligatored windowsills.

Stripped. I must have pulled 8 coats of paint off of this.
Or maybe they just upended the can when they were done with the room on the sills.
More gaps, full of caulk.

I mentioned the gaps full of caulk?

The cat is perfectly over this "Working From Home" nonsense.
Me too, sweetie. Me too.

Last weekend, I tired to right my mental ship by doing outside things. I ordered 3 yards of mulch, because the smell of mulch makes me super happy, and I was intent on spreading it hither and yon. But the beds needed tending before I could do that, in good faith.

My mulch replaced the gravel that had been in this very spot.
Here it is, weighed down before the big blow monday.

This is the part I dealt with last year, so i could just put a nice 3" coat over the top.

I don't often consider my house from this angle. I wish that darn radon pipework wasn't there.
It's a smart little house from this side.

Liberate the hosta! There's a metal pipe sticking out of the ground here. (septic in the back)
The pipe doesn't move much - wiggles slightly, but will not come out. There's a few pieces of wire twisted to it.

I cut. and cut. And divided. And divided some more. I save 6 chunks of hosta for me, and put the rest on the road.
I must have made 30 splits between this and the lower part of the upper bed.

With mulch! Yay!

Only part of the haul I put on the road.

Now I'm out of little plastic bags.
I reserved enough for litter box duties.

No good before picture. There was no edge. Just weeds.

This is where the rhubarb lives. I don't know how to use rhubarb,
but I think this year will be the year to figure it out.

Mulched! You can see where the rhubarb is peaking out,
and the rose in the middle that I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional.
I've pruned and fertilized it because there was a little bamboo stake I found in the ground with it,
as well as large old rose (?) stumps. We'll see.

Since I can't go anywhere. I made Jurassic Park in my flower bed.
The slates are heat rocks laid there for my friends Sampson and Delilah,
the ribbon snakes who eat the pests in the gardens.
I'm hoping to get a picture with them and the dinosaurs.

While hauling the hosta around, I remembered it was edible when young, so I tried it roasted. I trimmed and cleaned it all up like a real vegetable.

It was ok. Had a funny bitter back-of-the-tongue quality.

While I was digging all over the place, I kept finding bits and pieces. I put them in a little pile and then cleaned them up.

Things found this Easter weekend:
A jar, intact! Marked "Richard Hudnut New York". Empty of treasure.
A small collection of coal slag, which I couldn't figure out until I stumbled on the half burned piece. (Below jar)
A pair of wire snips, fully rusted shut.
A tiny little coupling thing - brake lines?
A tiny ball, too light to be a marble. A whistle pip?
An amber bottle shard that says "REGISTE..."
A large plate (?) fragment, with the slightest bit of blue glaze at the edge.
2 unmarked shards of porcelain(?) One on right looks to be a child's sized thing.
1 piece of porcelain marked "M_ER\ Porcelain\ FO__Y-_IMO\ FRANCE
1 unidentifiable piece of ferrous metal.
1 brass threaded pipe bit

Quick internet search only turns up Limoges France as a place that
produced hard-paste porcelain starting in the later 1700's.

So that was fun. Nothing was found in any great concentration to suggest a privy. Probably just "fill" from somewhere else. The jar was found wedged in the corner of the old barn foundation on one of my many trips to the compost. It stands to reason that it was the New York perfumer Robert Hudnut, from the late 18-1900's. A quick visual search turned up no identical bottles. Apparently he was a colorful fellow.

So that's about it. Trying to work, stay busy, and not worry too terribly much, though that increasingly difficult. The cat is out of chicken, to tonight I must brave the market.

Or hold up a locomotive.  One or the other.

Stay well, stay safe, stay home if you have a choice.

Let's talk more about plants.

Specifically, let's talk about invasive plants.
My big pains are currently:
Oriental Bittersweet
Multiflora Rose
Privet
Burning Bush
Garlic Mustard
Onion Grass

You will notice that my Arch Nemesis, Poison Ivy, is not on that list. While it's a terror for me personally, it is a native dweller. That it makes me itchy and crazy is not it's fault. It's just doing it's job (too well).

Invasives are just that. They invade a space that was not theirs, usually introduced first as ornamentals to people's gardens, and then escaping into a world that is not prepared to deal with them, where they wreak havoc on the native ecosystem.

 Let's take a look at the first. Bittersweet.

Fruit
(https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/oriental_bittersweet_an_aggressive_invasive_plant)

Foliage
(https://bygl.osu.edu/node/814)

Vine (strangling a tree)
(http://mdocs.skidmore.edu/crandallparktrees/invasives/oriental-bittersweet/)

This has edged out wild grape (native) and Virginia creeper (native) as climbing vines in my yard. It smothers and strangles trees - the birds eat the seeds and spread it everywhere, and it can regenerate from the smallest piece of root left behind in the soil. I suggest going to the links below the photos for more reading.
I've been cutting and pulling this pest since the week I moved in. One of my neighbors tentatively approached me and said, "Just so you know, I cut these vines, some might be on your property..." and I was all, "SIGN ME UP LET ME GO SHARPEN THE LOPPERS."
We've become good neighbors.
Some of the other invasives I try to contain and groom back into submission, but I do not suffer bittersweet to live. I'm surrounded by Land Trust land and trails, and they are choking to death with Bittersweet and Burning Bush (it's too timbered for Rose, or that would be in there too.)

Multiflora Rose is another one I don't suffer to live. Promoted as a "living fence" originally, the birds and rodents also eat the fruit and spread the seeds, and fallow pastures are smothering in it. It's terrible, sharp, and loves forests edges and abandoned fields.

Foliage, flowers
(https://extension.unh.edu/blog/invasive-spotlight-multiflora-rose)

Fruit
(https://neinvasives.com/species/plants/multiflora-rose)

There was a patch of roses I thought was cultivated at the top of the driveway when I got the brush off it last year, but the more I look at it, the more I think it's volunteer Multiflora. I'm keeping a close eye on them this year, and we'll see . There's more two large mounds of confirmed mutiflora that I need to take care of this year, probably this fall. I've already taken two down.
These will also reseed, and regenerate from the root. Generally pulling them up and burning them, or chemicals are needed to deal with them depending on how much of a foothold they have.

I'll scatter other invasive posts going forward. A lot of people don't realize that their landscaping can be harmful to the rest of the world.

(Don't get me started on Japanese Barberry. Luckily I don't really have much of that here.)

Plants!

The one little primrose that survived the winter.
I love primroses.

A Mock Orange sprout I started for my friend Misty over the winter.
Big fan of the "put a rock on it" trick.

Not sure what this is yet. It's in the bed I just uncovered last fall.

the Intentional Rose is putting out some new growth.

My steps. They badly need to be rebuilt if I want them truly functional,
but they are going to stay like this for a while.
I am going to pull up and redo that walk at some point this summer though.

Yay! The daffies I stuck in along the road wall are coming up!

Forsythia is doing it's thing.
As soon as it's done, it's getting scalped.

I love the little grape hyacinths that come up randomly everywhere.

I have no idea what thought it would be a good idea to nibble on this mini daffy.

The Naked Lady foliage came back up!

Silvermound. Mounding.

The creeping phlox, looking half dead.
I'm told this is what it does.

My lemon thyme is trying to come back. There's little red new growth on it.

The lilacs are getting larger.

I put the pig back out with my pinwheels for fun.
It gives people something to smile at when they drive by.

I'm not sure what these are exactly, but it appears to want to bloom.

Also don't know what this is, but it's everywhere in that most recently uncovered bed.
We'll find out! Maybe windflowers?

Keeping On

The nice thing about not commuting is not sitting in the car commuting. It get me back 40-1:30 every day, which is awesome. Also means I'm not putting miles on the car or burning gas. Yay!
I'm been doing a lot of other things with my time and nervous energy.

I've been finding more flowers.

Everywhere.

I've been going for nice long walks in the woods and finding interesting things.

There was drywall last weekend.

And so there's spackle this week.
My life is could be told in layers of spackle.

I started stripping the trim in the office. It has already started stripping it's self, as you can see.
Fun fact - the profile on the wainscotting on the right doesn't match the profile on the left.
The left has a bead between the board surfaced, the right does not. The right appears to be older.

Moving right along. There's no good lighting in this room,
so I can only do it for about an hour after work every day right now.
Which is fine, because stripping is tedious.

Some random ink marks under the lowest layer of pain on the "old" side of the room

Today I decided to get outside and see the sun for a while. Lots of things had left me frustrated, so I took it out on the dirt. The bottom of the driveway wasn't very pretty, so I started there.

There's no good before picture, but when I did start digging, I immediately hit this pipe buried next to the driveway.

You can see the pipe in the far left. How much you want to bet if we dug up the driveway, that pipe follows the crack diagonally up the driveway?

Back filled with stone left over from the Not-A-Flowerbed.
Added benefit to this project - it used up the rest of the stone and got it out of my driveway.

Much cleaner, with less scraggly grass that never grew well because of road salt.

I'm sure this weekend will see more flowers, more stripping, and more mischief.
Until then, be smart, be safe,  and stay healthy.

Well, now it's a sprint.

Long time, no chat.
Things have changed a bit in the world since the last time I posted.

Early last week, we were made aware that someone on my floor at work had contact with someone who had contact with someone who was at the Biogen Meeting in Boston, now famous for it's  Covid19 load. (That's me being 4x removed, if you follow.) I appreciated the transparency.
Last Thursday (3/12) my employer sent out an email encouraging us to work from home until further notice. My direct boss followed it up telling us that we were more than encouraged; please take home anything we needed in order to do our jobs.
I packed up, hoofed my big monitor out to the car, and after a quick stop at the market, came home.
I have been pretty much home ever since, except for one early morning run to the hardware store, and on a different day, an early morning run to the grocery store. I've been in pretty restricted isolation mode for a week now. (Which, funny, isn't so terribly different than a normal week, except for the working from home part.)
I did go check on my two sets of neighbors who are of a dignified age (from a safe distance) and let them know if they needed anything, just call.

I'm pretty much set - I have enough food for the cat, the fish, the snail and myself for probably about a month, more if I had to. (Heck, I've got enough food for the fish for years, he only eats 3 pellets a day, and shares the pellets with the snail.) I tend to keep a well appointed paper product closet, so that was not a concern.
I started some lettuce and tomato seeds, we'll see where those go. The lettuce seed was store bought, but the tomato seeds were saved from last year. It's kind of an experiment - I fermented one batch of tomato seeds, cleaned and dried them, but the other batch was just cleaned and dried. Science!
I have some Long Island Cheese Pumpkin seeds I saved, and some zuchini I bought that I should start soon. But then I will have to figure out where exactly to plant them.
Anyway.

A tangelo seed I started on a whim from a store bought fruit.
I now have 7 perky little tangelo seedlings.
More science!

Because I was bounced home and have to work here for quite a while now, I've been trying to situate an office of some flavor. I had been plodding through the bedrooms upstairs one at a time, fixing the walls and painting.
Now the room that I currently use on the first floor as a bedroom has to become the office. It's one of the few places with more than one outlet and it's the easiest place to run a hard wire internet connection to that *isn't* my living room.
Working from the couch isn't sustainable - one week was enough.

The run to the hardware store was for paint. I hit the point of the spackle in that back bedroom being good enough for government work, (it is far from perfect, please don't judge me on this room.) I got the same shade of green as I did the other two small rooms, Benjamin Moore's "Silken Pine". I had considered picking out another color, but now being under the gun (and not wanting to linger around the paint swatches everyone else has touched) I got what I know I like, and we'll see how it looks in room #3.
Primed the room, 2 coats of B.M's Muresco ceiling paint, 2 coats of Silken Pine on the walls, and a dollop of High Gloss Super White on the ceiling trim.
Put all the electrical back up and on, and the room, save for dealing with the chimney and the dragging doors, is done.

Before.

Before. The whole room really did deserve to get skim coated.
I got about 70%.

After. That far wall was the one the insulators blew through.

After. The furniture still needs to move around.

Chimney still needs attention.
Considering seeing what the brick work looks like underneith the plaster.
(All I have to do is keep vacuuming it and I'm going to find out!)

The view back out into the hall. The next room on the left is Windy's Room, then the stairs,
and then no-outlets Harry Potter Room at the end (which would be a perfect office except for that no outlets and no wired internet part.)
After the window, the "master" bedroom is on the right.

Once I get the furniture from the soon-to-be-office upstairs, I'm going to do a quick scrape and spackle of that room, slap some paint on it, run the ethernet cable and call it functional.
I'm hopeful Ian can come out this weekend and help me move furniture. I can do most of it except the floppy mattress and the steamer trunk (which might have to stay down here.)


In other news, spring is starting to do it's thing. The lilac buds are getting fat, the forsythia is going to burst any day now. Bulbs that I had peppered around the place are starting to surprise me.

Tiny little dwarf Daffy. I think I got one of those $3 pots at the supermarket and stuck the bulbs in,
not expecting them to come back. Surprise!

The Poppy I moved from the (now gravel) Not-A-Flowerbed in the fall came back!
I had heard they are super fussy, I didn't have much hope.

The cat has been regularly worshiping the stronger rays of sun.
This was a surprisingly candid moment I was able to catch.
Shortly after, she fell off.

I had a bunch of work done in the mudroom. If Ian can, (after wrestling furniture) he's going to come out this weekend and help me drywall it (so I can mud it and paint it and maybe finally get some appliances!)

Be safe, stay healthy, (wash your hands!) and I'll see you all soon.

Plodding along

It's been a while since I posted - I got sick the last week of February, so doing house work was completely out of the question. I've been plugging away at the spackle in the last bedroom since, but that is slow going because of the dry time between coats.
I don't really have any picture of that - beside, all you'd see is the same wall, (but slightly white-r.)

One thing I did get done this past weekend was a trip to a local lighting store. I'm going to rejigger the bathroom a little bit, and it needed a new light. The rooms in the house are so small, and the ceilings sort of low that I need light fixtures that aren't going to overpower the room. So many of them are so big and chunky - that's not going to work for my space. So I wound up with this one - 

I'm not terrifically keen on the clear shades, but I couldn't justify paying 2x the price for something I didn't like as much with white glass shades.
Got the fancy Edison-look LED bulbs to go with it, even.

Earlier in the week I'd had the local Gas Guy come out to quote putting propane in for cooking - It's not so bad, but a lot of work will need to be done to the kitchen first.

Eventually -
New Fridge and stacking washer/dryer in the mudroom.
Blow out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, tile the floor, swing the stove to the wall and put in a new stove with microwave/hood vent.

But tonight - more adventures in spackle.
Someday, I won't have any more walls to spackle.
That will be an exceedingly good day.