Work, work and more work
I just totaled up the hours, and in the last eight days, Fiona and I have together put in a total of forty-eight man-hours dealing with grass, mostly in the back 1.5 acres; mowing it, raking it into piles and hauling the piles away. There’s also been a lot of weed-pulling, largely of that nasty and aptly named ‘catchweed’ (Galium aparine) that keeps popping up everywhere, and cutting back all the blackberry runners trying to invade from the neighbors’ properties, but most of our time has been spent just on dealing with grass.
And we’re far from done; I estimate we’ve got another twenty man-hours of work in the next few afternoons and evenings before that back acreage is tamed enough that in the future, all that will be needed is to keep it mowed down along with the yards closer to the house… which will take about 7 Hours Every Week on the riding mower, for all of summer and autumn. And of course there’s all the weeding of the rhododendron beds and non-lawn areas around the house, that’s got to be kept up… Ohhh, my aching back.
I’d love to just let that back acreage go to seed and focus only on the house, which needs SO much work done on it before it’ll be ready to be put on the market next year, but the real estate agent I’ve spoken with strongly advised to keep the back acreage maintained as much as possible; if I let it go now, the resulting mess of chest-high weeds would be even harder to tame next spring, which is when I hope to put the property on the market.
I guess most of the work that needs to be done on the house-installing a sink in the downstairs bathroom and replacing most of the basement ceiling, painting the walls and ceilings in the living and dining rooms, wallpapering and re-tiling the main bathroom--will have to wait until late autumn and winter. In the meantime, there’s still more of Andrew’s stuff to sort out and pack, and I need to thin out my and Fiona’s belongings as well, to move into a much smaller-and much more manageable-house once this place is sold.
And all that is on top of working 40 hours a week and commuting, which includes ferrying Fiona back and forth. If anyone out there is still wondering why I haven’t been writing fics lately… :-(