Batten down the gutters and light the driveway

6:15 pm, a fall evening in Monument. The store, the post office, and the school are all closed by now. The light is fading and the street lights pop on and start buzzing. The streets are completely deserted. A lone SUV drives through town. A stranger, or a tourist. You can almost see kitchen curtains fluttering as folks discreetly peek out to see who it is.

The sky is darker than usual tonight. A thick, greenish, bumpy cloud cover has rolled in, bringing a still humidity with it. The talk of the town today is that the weather service says we're getting our first big fall storm this weekend. We haven't been through this yet, so we don't know if the predictions of 1 inch of rain are exaggerated. The reports also say that there could be freezing rain or snow above 5000 feet. So, we may not be going anywhere this weekend.

I feel like there's so many summer things we haven't done yet, and so many things we were supposed to get done. I wanted to go back out to the orchard and pick some more of those incredible peaches, and some pears too. I hope the rain doesn't ruin them. Maybe I could can enough jam that I'd actually be willing to give some of the bounty away. The river has been really low since we moved here, but we still haven't gone fishing. We could go down to the pond, and we haven't done that either. I think I've only gone swimming in the river once since we moved. I haven't even gotten on my bicycle. And I feel like I owe our dog a lot of long walks that were promised to him before we moved up here. Somehow I thought I'd have all this time on my hands, and somehow it's just not working that way, at least not yet.

We have made one sightseeing trip out of town. We went up to the Tamarack fire lookout last week. It was a fun little day trip. We got lost in the forest and ended up way out on some unmarked logging road. I got to really exercise the 4x4, even put it into granny gear a couple of times. That was fun! It felt like we were really, really out on the edge of nowhere, until we saw this sign:

I felt a little bit of triumph; I'm not sure how many people have ever seen this sign. And then we turned around and bounced back to the main road, and took the right road to the lookout. The side road up to the lookout was almost as bad as the unmarked road, if not worse, so I got to do some semi-technical driving. I'm not sure if Gavin had as much fun as I did or not. He stayed pretty quiet and held the dog on his lap. The tower itself was kind of anticlimatic. The view is hugely expansive, mountainous, green, but somehow not very dramatic. The most interesting part of the tower is all the inscriptions people have left over the years. If you want to leave lasting graffiti on a galvanized structure, use pencil.

Back home in fall chore-land, the storm is threatening and the wind is kicking up a little. We scurry around the yard, trying to take care of things that have been ignored for too long, before those big cold drops come splashing down. I cleaned out the gutters and downspouts. This would be a small job, but it expanded to include raking the roof of probably 10 years' worth of debris. The debris is backed up from the gutters to the low slope roof over the deck. Then it is backed up onto the high slope part of the roof too. When I rake it off, I find a huge patch of rust on the roofing. Must be from all the years of moist leaves leaching acids onto it. I hope that cleaning off all the stuff doesn't cause it to leak.
The downspouts are so clean it looks like no water has ever been in them. Which is possible, judging from the years of thick, mossy layers of leaves in the gutters. The downspouts drain directly onto the shallow foundation of the house, which is badly eroded. Our eventual plan is to fix the grading of the yard and fill the holes in the foundation with concrete, but we haven't gotten there yet. For now, I am attaching some roll-out things to the ends of the downspouts and hoping that some of the water will seep into the ground instead of running right back under the house.

We spent some time this past week trying to eradicate the puncturevine from our driveway. They call it goats-heads here, and that's an apt name, since the thorny seed looks like a goat's head, and the "goat" part of the name sort of suggests the devil, and he must be behind the design of these things, for they are pure evil. They pierce feet and shoes and bury themselves in carpet only to emerge in the middle of the night. The thorns are longer and pointier than a rose thorn, and are prone to breaking off under the skin. Each vine bears about a million seeds, and it is impossible to pull up a vine without stabbing yourself bloody and scattering the seeds all over the ground. We pulled up almost all the vines, leaving a solid layer of thorny pods on the driveway, ready to sprout next spring. We already know that Roundup doesn't work on these things. We were thinking of using a propane torch to burn the seeds off the driveway, but apparently they like fire. Something called 2-4-D will kill the plant, but the seeds still remain viable for up to 5 years. We could salt the driveway and they wouldn't come up there, but then we'd just track the seeds everywhere and we'd never be able to go barefoot again. After this rain, I hope that the dust on the driveway will settle and we can use the shop vac to vacuum the seeds off the gravel driveway. This sounds a little odd, but maybe it will work. Seemingly our only other option is to walk across the driveway and then pick the thorns out of our shoes, over and over again.

I spent a lot of the rest of this week reading Square Foot Gardening and planning our vegetable garden for next year. The author suggests that the novice gardener should begin with one 4-foot square plot the first year. I've got about eight plots planned out. Is that too ambitious? I am having these visions of quart jars full of delicious tomato juice, dill pickles, and green beans, fresh sweet corn on the grill, juicy red tomatoes warm from the sun, and roasted acorn squash. It's like Norman Rockwell and my grandmother have hijacked my imagination and won't let it go till I ransom it with bushels of green things. I am also looking forward to trying some things I've never seen in a store- Cucumis melo promises to be an exotic new fruit, luffa provides food and scrubbing sponges, and who knows what else I will have to have once the seed catalogs get here. Maybe I do have time on my hands.

In Town and Out

We are slowly dipping our toes into the community involvement stew. Gavin is now the assistant coach for the junior high flag football team, and he is really digging it. The kids are all pretty cool, good attitudes and everything. I got athletic too, for one night. There's a town volleyball league, just for fun... they say. Maybe when the bruises are gone I'll try it again.

The monthly fire meeting was this week. Noone has really told us what the routine is for these meetings, but I gather that one of the monthly tasks is to start up the fire truck and drive it around the block a couple times, just to keep it running. We got some instruction on how to operate the manual choke, how to finagle the clutch when switching gears, and how to use a flashlight to view the dash controls. The truck is circa 1962 and could use some TLC, but it's what we've got for now.

The other agenda item at the fire meeting was preparations for this weekend's fall festival. With a demolition derby, an 8K/5K run, and events in the park all requiring presence of an EMT and fire equipment, and the usual requirements for being available for emergencies, both the local fire and EMT would be stretched pretty thin. So the fire chief and another local are bringing their own fire trucks to the derby, and there will be no ambulance for the derby or the race, just EMT's with ready bags.

Gavin and I volunteered to man the sign-in table for the run, and we ended up timing the finishers too. Somehow I roped myself into filling in the ribbons as well. I think I screwed that up, but fortunately everyone was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Since the sign-in thing had started at 7:30 am, we left after the race and pretty much called it a day. Missed the derby and everything. I can't believe I missed a chance to watch car crashes. We missed the evening street dance too, although we could hear it from our house. By about 9 pm, we were hearing a lot of whoops, hollers, and karaoke, but it had all died down before midnight. Possibly because that's about as late as anyone can stay up here... or maybe because it was about 30 degrees last night.

Fall has definitely arrived. Ah, fall. Time to enjoy the changing of the seasons. Time for some yard work, out in that crisp cool air. Time to bleed on the driveway.

All the time in the world

Last weekend we went to a wedding in Sacramento. So, while we were there we took care of some business and got to see some friends too. Gavin got an emergency root canal- ouch! I think he feels much better now, so it was worth the chasing around to get it done. We haven't been capable of doing any chasing around, here. I don't know if it's a lack of motivation or sense of urgency, or just the fact that the bed is so much warmer than the outside world...

Even with no job and almost no obligations, I still have an ever-increasing to-do list. And somehow even though most of these tasks have no immediate due date, all the ones that do, are late. Like, I still haven't gotten health insurance for us. We are covered by Cobra of course, but I'd like to think I can do better than $650 a month for us...!

My studio is still not assembled. Thanks to my friends and our recent Sacramento trip I now have a chest of drawers in there, which helps a lot. But the floor is still a foot high in debris and miscellany.
My house is a sea of boxes and moving wreckage. The very first thing we swore that we'd do is clean the carpet in the living room. And no, it's still not cleaned. The horrifying shag carpet in the bedroom is still in place, and the second bathroom does not show any signs of a remodel in progress. The main bathroom still has leaky fixtures, and the kitchen sink is still woefully inadequate.

Of course, the list has gotten longer as we've been here. We have also discovered that the electric stove is in shambles, and the little bitty freezer in our side-by-side is just not going to cut it.

What have I gotten done, you ask? I took the plunge and opened The Evil Box, to see if there's anything to be salvaged. The Evil Box was a gift (of sorts) from my ex-boyfriend. I never opened it, but I gathered that it contained a duplicate of every single photo that he and I took during our 4-year relationship. He even captioned them. The box weighed about ten pounds, so you can guess how many photos were in there. Geeez. All this had arrived at our house more than three months after Gavin and I were married, and caused no small amount of annoyance. So the Evil Box went to the back of the closet and stayed there for five years. By now, I am not annoyed anymore and I'm ready to sort the photos. A lot of them recall foolish wardrobe choices and not so good times, and they have gone straight into the shredder. But a few are worth keeping, some of the captions actually made me laugh, and some of the photos of my ex are downright hysterical, in a woodland-troll sort of way. Moral dilemna: Would it be wrong to post those online?

I painted the cabinet in the bathroom.

Compared to my to-do list, these accomplishments are pretty puny. Hopefully I will be picking up speed and creating a virtual whirlwind of functionality around me very soon. Or not. Perhaps I shall just stay in bed, it is very warm here, and I wouldn't mind a few more hours of sleep.

For the sake of reference, here's the list:
Clean living room carpet
Tear out bedroom carpet (and replace, if we can agree on something)
Set up my studio
Set up the utility room
Set up my workshop in the basement
Install fog lights in Gavin's truck
Create a retaining wall around the walkout basement
Replace whatever rotted wood in the decks
Add some crucial flashing to the roof & walls
Fill the washout holes in the foundation
Clean the gutters & downspouts
Install downspout rollouts so the foundation doesn't wash out again.
Kill all the puncturevine and burn it and its seeds
Set up watering for the back yard.
Build raised planting beds for next year's square foot method garden
Build a deer proof enclosure around the planting bed.
Examine the hot tub hanging out in the manger to see if it can be salvaged. If not, give it to someone who can use it as a water trough.
Walk the property, assess and fix up the fence enough to keep in our future goats
Pick up the garbage on our property. This is everything from beer cans to cars (not kidding)
Remodel half bath to full bath, which will allow us to tear out and replace the full bath.
Replace kitchen countertops, flooring, plumbing, stove, and hood. Hey, at least the cabinets seem fine.
Refinish kitchen cabinets (D'oh!)
Get a new computer desk with enough space to pay bills
Get a dining room set and actually establish a dining room.
Demo the kitchen suspended ceiling and install new lighting
And so much more.

Outta time for listing, gotta go get things done!

Future posts brewing on:
I'm a know-it-all architect and oughta just go with the flow
Flora and fauna
"Git offa my Prop'rty!" (Fuzzy Lumpkins)

Regrets

Now that we are out here, it's time to start assembling a daily routine and figuring out what we are doing with ourselves. So far, it has mostly consisted of puttering around the house and spending hours and hours on eBay drooling over things that we could, but probably won't, ever buy. That's not much of a way to spend a lifetime...

After our big shopping trip last week, I acquired a few little things at the Goodwill. Just a wooden spice rack and some other grubby goodies. I thought about how I used to paint little things on every thing I owned before I used it; just a way of personalizing or adding a little extra color and originality to every thing you look at.

Sitting down with the spice rack and my paints, I started daubing at the colors, mixing up the shades I like, a bright orange and a soft blue. Looking at this palette knife I'm using. I have had this for almost 20 years. The stained and bent brushes I've had since high school, and the unused ones that I've bought in the years since then, hoping to open up my creativity, hoping to allow myself the time to do this.

I started to realize just how long it had been since I'd felt free to do this with my time. I'm not sure I can remember the last time I sat down with a couple of things and just felt free, just smacked some colorful paint all over them, just because I wanted to. I can't remember the last time that I created something artistic without second-guessing myself. Without thinking of someone else and whether or not they will like it. Whether it's a friend or a professor or an unknown potential customer, I have always had someone else in mind. Now that I am sitting here and I am determined to make something for myself, I don't think I even know what I want. I'm not sure that I even know what I like anymore. The last time I asked myself what I wanted in a design must have been a very long time ago. I am pretty sure that I was 17 years old and had not yet gone off to college.

With the brush in my hand, I start feeling doubtful, even panicked. Was my own sense of design and my own artistic vision stopped cold by the confines of academia, or did I just grow out of being artistic? That freedom of vision, was this just part of being a teenager, or is this something that I can regain? And if so, how? What does it take to rescusitate a creative urge that has been ignored for 15 years? When it comes back, is it still relevant?

Right now I am just feeling a lot of bitter regrets, which bring fear and self-doubt over me in waves. I fear that I set aside this part of myself for so long that I won't be able to regain any creativity. I wonder what the hell I have done with the last 15 years of my life. I mean, all I want to do right now is be 17 again and start over. What if I could have gotten here, then? How much better of an artist would I be? Could I have found a niche and matured in it? Can I get there from here, now? What if I can't??? Was I even an artist to begin with? Who am I kidding? How can a 'real' artist survive for 15 years without creating anything? Is "too busy" a legitimate excuse for anything in life?

We have been talking about opening a coffee shop. It seems like every time we talk about it, I have an ambitious new idea for something to incorporate into it. Something challenging and crafty that's not entirely creative. Something... practical. Like baking artisan bread. Or growing organic vegetables and making soups. Canning fruit and making jams. Whatever. All of these things have their appeal. We could make any of these pursuits generate enough income to get by.

All of this business (busy-ness) could take up all of my time and leave me with little time or energy to daub paints, mix colors, think up new themes and images. I could forever avoid taking the ultimate risk and really seeing if I can do it. I don't know how I'm going to clear away the distractions and spend the time with the brushes and paints, getting reacquainted, trying to open up my vision. I just know that it's the most important thing to do.