Our flowers are in bloom, with a vengeance.
Yellow and white (daffodils and tulips)
Purple and blue
And some of my favorites, the white bleeding hearts
There are more flowering now – many more tulips, the pink bleeding hearts, the invasive bamboo, the invasive pig’s wort (not likely to give us flu, I’ll have you know), and the invasive bishop’s weed. I love the flowers but the weeds? I could totally do without those.
Earlier this fall we had to remove two very old, very tall, very pretty, and very dying ash trees from our backyard. I was bereft – there was such a horrible hole in the yard, in the sky, and in my heart.
After several weeks of me pissing and moaning about this, Amy finally threw up her hands and said, “Fine! Let’s go get a tree!” We talked a bit and decided on either a red or sugar maple. So last Sunday, we headed out to one of the big local nurseries. Alas, they didn’t have any trees onsite. We headed down to the local nursery that’s a lot closer to us (but doesn’t have the same widespread reputation) and hit paydirt (literally – everything was 25% off, so we got to buy a more mature/expensive tree!) They had several types of both red and sugar maples on-site. After an hour of thinking and debating, we decided on a lovely little Green Mountain Sugar Maple. It won’t get as big as either of the ash trees, but I think it’s going to be simply beautiful. Here it is being delivered and planted.
And here it is, looking towards the back of the yard and then towards our house.
Why yes, I do love it! It’s going to take many years to get a lot bigger, and I can’t wait to see it grow.
This weekend we did a ton more stuff on the house and in the yard.
- Holly and Libby finished scraping and priming two of the three other side of the house that still needed scraping.
- I painted most of the south side of the house and about half of the front of the house.
- I picked veggies at the farm, including 10 pounds of tomatoes!
- And Clark trimmed and removed about 7 or 8 smallish diameter trees, a couple larger trees that were overhanging the neighbor’s pool, and the big arborvitae that was trying to take over the northeast corner of our house.
Yeah, as you can probably tell, Amy’s sister and her husband came down Saturday and Clark went to town with his chainsaw. He actually came back today and finished up all the stuff he couldn’t get to yesterday. While I know we needed to do a lot of this trimming and tree removal, it still pained me. What pains me more is that we’ve got two HUGE other trees that need to come down behind the garage because they’re dying and dropping branches. Yowza. It’s gonna be nekkid back there!
Photos eventually – I’m too pooped to pull out the camera cable…
How is it that Amy and I can spend days and days and days (all last weekend [3 days] and all this weekend [3 days] plus time after I get home from work and time when she’s around during the days and it’s not raining) working on the outside of the house, and all that we have to show for it is the back of the house scraped, primed, and painted and one side of the house scraped and primed? The back of the house doesn’t even have two coats on the whole thing, and I haven’t started trim yet.
Either we are too particular or this is a lot harder work than we anticipated. I’m going to go with a healthy dose of both those things.
Remind me again why we decided to paint the outside of our house. It’s a time vortex.
Even though I haven’t posted in over a month, I’m still around. My time has been taken up with: hockey (camp, games, and tryouts), a trip to Acadia National Park, and work.
To keep you entertained for a moment, here’s a macro of a lovely hydrangea in our yard during a respite in a big storm:
And here is a sailboat from when we were up in Acadia National Park. It’s the Helen Brooks, a Friendship Sloop owned and chartered by Amy’s brother Karl.
Until such time as I blog again, ta!
general, house | Megan 04/30/2009 | 
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