I didn't get very far last year with the expansion of the <tongue-in-cheek> north patio, what with Saturn squaring Uranus and my credit card being hacked and ravens pecking at the utilities pole and knocking out all power to the house and all, but it's quite peaceful around here at the moment and Sunday morning, with the subject aspect 18 hours from perfection, seemed like a good time to pick up from where I left off and get going on it again.
It's got a life of its own, really. I was going to say it's organic until I just looked the word up and realized it isn't, except I just wrote it has a life of its own - anyway, it's not like I had a plan in mind when I started it and every time I work on it I think of something else to do with it.
On Sunday I decided I would make it much bigger than I once thought it would be; that way there wouldn't be so much to water, especially since when the irrigation system was put in it went only as far as - surprise! - there were plantings, leaving quite a big area of bare earth. It was that bare area I realized I could cover with paving stones, and as there were half a dozen piled up, left over from not finishing last summer, that's what I started to do till it got too hot to be outside.
Then it was take down the heavy winter curtains in the living room, give them a sniff to see if they smelled of smoke (they didn't), fold them up and put them in the drawers under the bed and hang the floaty white gauze summer ones, something I've been saying I was going to do every day since I got here.
This made the old sheet that passes as the curtain for the front door, and that never got replaced with its winter counterpart that matches the curtains I'd just taken down, look even worse than it used to, and that reminded me that last year I'd bought a length of cheap pretend Broderie Anglaise, which I found and laid (lied?) on the floor on top of the old sheet to measure.
There was a small cut in exactly the right place, so I'd obviously attempted the replacement when I first bought the fabric. This time I completed the cut and put up the new door curtain, and decided to wash the old sheet one before it went to the thrift shop. I have to walk through the dining room to get to the washing machine, and this made me realize how brown the supposed-to-be floaty gauzy white curtains looked in there.....
I could go on, but if you've read this far you've probably gotten the idea. Reading it through, it doesn't sound like much, but considering I feel as though I've been lying around here in 95 degree heat like a beached whale for two weeks, it was a nice little gift of sustained energy, especially as once it got cooler again in the evening I went out and lugged a few more rocks around to try to make some barriers against soil erosion.
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