He's flying over our heads in a million pieces!

Because we're painting the house, Greg felt like it was time to finally fix this nonsense that Comcast foisted on us.

Cables across the front of our house.

Cables across our threshold.

Cables across our chimney and across the side of the house . . .

. . . which came in the ceiling of our basement and ran across the length of the room because Comcast doesn't care what your house or rooms or cables look like when they are charging you $85 an hour to give you overpriced cable and Internet service.

So Greg donned this suit, crawled into our scary crawlspace, and ran the cables the right way.

He cheerfully informed me every time he found another spider egg sac, ensuring that I will never ever get in there to help him.

But sometimes your dude is in the crawl space and you're in the office, trying to fish a cable out of the wall and you're trying to figure out where the fuck he is, and you keep tap-tap-tapping on the floor, as if that will help, and he's like, "Heather, that's not helping. I'm underneath the bathtub pipes and I can't hear anything," and sometimes you drill too many holes in the wall trying to figure it out.

But that's okay because I am good at patching holes. Or I am willing. And that's a good thing because we made a LOT of holes in the basement.

I don't even want to explain what happened here, but it involved an unexpected horizontal beam that necessitated a six-inch hole in the middle of the wall, the purchase of a 45-degree drill attachment, and more patching. But we now have a hard-wired ethernet connection to the basement and the office and Greg has plans to install network drops in every room of the house, but probably through the attic next time.

Oddly, my sewing kit came in handy with all of this work. We used the forceps my mother gave me (super handy for sewing AND retrieving cables from the wall), safety pins for attaching the Cat 6 cable to the fish tape, and a seam ripper for undoing all of our safeguards with string.

We're so tired but we have almost no visible cables on the outside of our house and Greg can copy files quickly between his XBOX and his computer and I didn't care about any of this, but it was great to be the helper instead of the instigator, for once. And now I don't have to feel bad when I inform Greg that we're spending next weekend removing sod, right?

(Hat tip to Jess for the Willy Wonka reference in the post title.)

It has to get worse before it gets better

Our house looks like a crack den right now.

And we still don't have colors picked out.

Paint swatches!

Get your judging pants on. Our house painter put up some swatches yesterday..

Scene 1:

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

I think it reads a little grayer on the swatch. For the record I hate the trim color. This is the painter's favorite.

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

Scene 2:

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Scene 3:

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Scene 4:

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

This last one definitely reads kind of purple. It's very pretty (I think it's my favorite) but I worry we'll be "that purple house." And of course, all the this is conjecture because everyone's monitor will render the colors differently. But tell me what you think anyway. Or if you know where I live come by and look underneath the kitchen window. But not IN it! I hate it when you do that, it's so creepy.

I'm hoping the sun will come out soon so we can see how it looks under something other than clouds. And we have the samples here so I'll paint bigger swatches once Greg and I actually talk to each other (we're like ships in the night this week) and see if he hates all of them. It's possible.

Things lost, things found

I was cleaning up the vegetable beds last fall, a messy process full of soggy rotting tomatoes and fruit flies. At some point in the day I realized that my garden claw was nowhere to be found. I checked the roof (I've left it there before), to no avail.

 

I don't even know.

 

I suspect it is currently being composted by the city of Portland, having made its way into the green yard debris bin.

I recently misplaced my favorite ring that I bought at Chichen Itza. The ring fits me loosely in the morning and snugly by the end of the day, which means it's never quite comfortable on my hand. I told Greg that I couldn't find it anywhere and that I was "pretty sure I did something weird with it." 

As I was readying to weed this weekend I slipped my hands into my gardening gloves and made a fist to loosen the mud dried on them, which caused pain to flare across my middle finger. I pulled out my hand and there was my ring, which had slipped right onto my finger without me noticing.

 

 

I ran into the house, laughing and laughing, so I could tell Greg. This was the same morning I freaked out because I saw a common robin for the first time (he was unmoved in both cases). Say what you will, everything is more magical when you go through life not really paying attention.

And then later that day I misplaced my weed popper. So it goes.

Our Portlandia episode is airing!

 

We were starting to worry that the episode of Portlandia they filmed at our house ended up on the cutting room floor. Set your Tivos for episode 7: "Motorcycle." It looks like it's airing here on February 17th. Check your local listings.

Leap year

There's an old adage that in the first year your plants sleep, the second they creep, and the third year they leap. For some of the plants I first established at the house, this should be their leap year. Our weather has been lovely this week--cold but clear, which means perfect for weeding.

I have never been so happy to weed! It was so nice to be in the yard again, muttering to myself and saying hello to the plants that are starting to poke out of the ground. We have lots of bulbs now starting to show, and the flowering currants and elderberry bushes are budding.

The winter-blooming daphne is *this close* to erupting in blooms and the stonecrop is forming rosettes--hooray!

I spent all day removing popweed (Cardamine hirsuta, street name: Jumping Jesus) and Herb Robert (Geranium Robertianum, street name: Stinky Bob). I also put down Sluggo, the only insecticide I'll use. I had a moment of panic where I wondered if I was weeding all the forget-me-not that I sowed last fall. That's the problem with wild flowers--how do you know what's a good seedling and what's an invasive weed?


Remember when my aging next door neighbor thought I wanted her Doug Fir removed? She called a surveyor and had him mark her property lines, so I couldn't "take over her yard" like she claims I'd like to do. I carefully pruned only the roses on my side of the surveyor's white post. After I pruned them hard last year and didn't kill them, I became emboldened and pruned them even harder this time. I might actually remember to fertilize them this year but I'm not holding my breath.

I also did silly things like crumpling leaves that had accumulated under the shrubs by hand. Last fall I put uncomposted leaves on the beds, which is generally not advisable. In the wild, leaf mulch breaks down quickly because animals walk on it. In our urban and suburban yards, it just sits there and attracts slugs. But: if you put out a bird feeder nature does what it would do in the wild. To wit:

What used to be three inches of leaves now looks like this

So next fall I'm going to put out fresh leaves and a million bird feeders and I will sit back and know that I'm feeding the wildlife AND my plants.My transformation into That Crazy Bird Lady will be complete. I can't wait.

Also, remember my bird bath that I spent $5 on and drove all the way to a trailer park in Cornelius, which took two and a half hours during rush hour, and then I had to patch it with Liquid Nails so it would not leak? It holds water! So my cheap scavenging on craigslist, while dangerous and unattractive, totally works.

Because I grew up in a cave

I'm a little embarrassed; I'd never actually seen one of these in real life until this guy showed up in my yard.

Turdus migratorius

Robins are HUGE! And yet he got scared away from the birdbath by a teeny tiny bird (I'm terrible at identifying birds so whatever scared it away still gets IDed as a "cute brown bird."). Silly robin. I love having birdbaths; now I just need David Attenborough to show up and narrate.