Was useful this weekend
Saturday Dad got back from Hong Kong so we picked him up and fed him dinner.
Saturday night stayed up 'til 2:30 with my Sister talking, writing, encouraging, hand puppet playing about her relationship stuff for four hours.
Sunday morning got up at 7:00, did yard stuff. Weeded and mowed two sections, overseeded the bare patches, filled in the holes from the weeding, pruned a bit, picked up the twigs and branches that fell over the winter to put into the compost. It turns out that the grass catcher that I got for the push mower isn't actually compatible with it, so I ended up doing the slightly environmentally embarrassing thing of using the yard waste vacuum thing to suck up the grass clippings. Since the daily highs have been mostly between 10 and 20 degrees for the past couple of weeks, I decided that it was about time to wake up the compost heap. In this case, that meant taking the frame apart, setting it up again about one compost heap's width (~2 metres) over, and using a pitchfork to put the pile back in - aerating it, breaking up the chunks, mixing things up. As expected for a pile with a non-stoichiometric ratio of carbon hydrogen etc... for a hot bacterial fast conversion, and a lot of leaves that weren't shredded before going in, there was less than ideal drainage, so the pile had wet spots, dry spots and matted leaf lumps. On the bright side, it smelled right - forest floor like - and there were lots of fat worms tunnelling around in there. I hope that I didn't hurt any too much, though that's not that likely. If today's progress is representative, I've got about three full days of weeding left. Possibly more.
After a snack, an hour nap and a shower, we went to Longo's to get a bouquet for Mum to give to her for Mothers Day, on the way to the airport, where we picked her up. On the way back home, we got a call from Dad that told us that Grandmother's oven alarm was going off after he'd reset the clock after the power outage and he couldn't talk her through turning it off, so we stopped over to handle that. Drove the family to dinner, came home, wrote this. Now I do my version of fall down go boom.
Saturday night stayed up 'til 2:30 with my Sister talking, writing, encouraging, hand puppet playing about her relationship stuff for four hours.
Sunday morning got up at 7:00, did yard stuff. Weeded and mowed two sections, overseeded the bare patches, filled in the holes from the weeding, pruned a bit, picked up the twigs and branches that fell over the winter to put into the compost. It turns out that the grass catcher that I got for the push mower isn't actually compatible with it, so I ended up doing the slightly environmentally embarrassing thing of using the yard waste vacuum thing to suck up the grass clippings. Since the daily highs have been mostly between 10 and 20 degrees for the past couple of weeks, I decided that it was about time to wake up the compost heap. In this case, that meant taking the frame apart, setting it up again about one compost heap's width (~2 metres) over, and using a pitchfork to put the pile back in - aerating it, breaking up the chunks, mixing things up. As expected for a pile with a non-stoichiometric ratio of carbon hydrogen etc... for a hot bacterial fast conversion, and a lot of leaves that weren't shredded before going in, there was less than ideal drainage, so the pile had wet spots, dry spots and matted leaf lumps. On the bright side, it smelled right - forest floor like - and there were lots of fat worms tunnelling around in there. I hope that I didn't hurt any too much, though that's not that likely. If today's progress is representative, I've got about three full days of weeding left. Possibly more.
After a snack, an hour nap and a shower, we went to Longo's to get a bouquet for Mum to give to her for Mothers Day, on the way to the airport, where we picked her up. On the way back home, we got a call from Dad that told us that Grandmother's oven alarm was going off after he'd reset the clock after the power outage and he couldn't talk her through turning it off, so we stopped over to handle that. Drove the family to dinner, came home, wrote this. Now I do my version of fall down go boom.