Backyard Bust-Up

AV and I moved into a house that was definitely fit to live in on the inside. A fresh coat of paint, new locks, and our own clearing away of the previous owner’s aesthetic choices were really all we needed to get in the house and feel at home. There are still several outstanding projects inside – we have to hang our art, the baseboard mouldings are sorely in need of fixing – but it’s all very livable. I’m grateful for this, because I couldn’t live or work in a house that was in a half-livable state of affairs.

One project that has required our attention, though, is the backyard. There was a sandstone path leading from the house to the garage, a concrete sidewalk that went to nowhere, and weeds. Weeds are everywhere, and there was once grass too, but when we left for our three-week tour of the Americas the backyard died under the stress of too many hot days. When we returned, AV started working back there in piecemeal fashion, taking up the sandstone path and bringing a power chisel to the existential sidewalk.

Just before our housewarming party in July, we built a couple of planters using some of the concrete and a sandstone slab to give an additional step into the lawn. Yesterday, we worked for a paltry two-and-a-half hours and achieved the following:

So we’ve constructed a porch using the sandstone slabs and some random bricks that were in the back yard, and we’ve made for ourselves a little fire pit using concrete. The best part of all of this is that the money we’ve spent to make this subtle change was related to plants and soil for those plants. We were enterprising enough to use everything else from the backyard as-is.

What was exciting for both of us was the change that resulted from just a couple of hours of effort. Once we finished the porch, I got to planting some pachysandra on the north side of the garage that had been waiting to be planted for over a month. A giant pile of dirt was smoothed out, and voila! Another bed for plants needing partial exposure!

AV and Lilly barely make it into the photo here!

There’s still a lot of work to be done – there are some troublesome shrubs on the back of the garage with huge stones that need addressing. We seem to have a drainage problem off the south side of the house (probably requires a perforated PVC pipe to get that water back into the ground), and we still have designs on beds for next summer’s vegetable garden and a compost bin. But those will come in time. Today AV and I get to enjoy our porch and enjoy it for the many days of sunshine and pleasant evenings left between now and December.

If it’s not one jail, it’s another.

Last year, just as AV and I were preparing to move out of Capitol Hill the city and county of Denver began building their new jail five minutes away down 13th Avenue. We weren’t excited about the jail being a stone’s throw from our traditionally, ahem, “eclectic” neighborhood, but when we moved we crossed recently-released (alleged) offenders wandering through our alley at night off the list of things to worry about. Oddly enough, the new jail sits directly across from the Denver Mint. I’ll leave comment on that for another time.

The local alternative weekly’s coverage of the looming apocalypse Democratic National Convention has uncovered the City’s planned holding pen for protesting ne’er-do-wells who end up on the wrong side of the law. Turns out, it’s just down the street from where we live now! That’s just great – people keen on disruption (and possibly violence, as I’m sure not every protester coming to Denver practices satyagraha) have to get back to their asphalt sleeping grounds by the Pepsi Center, and they’ll have to come through my neighborhood to do it.

I was *really* hoping that during the week of the convention I could hunker down in my house, which (as it is perched on the edge of downtown) is removed from the absolute madness that is planning to turn our little town upside-down. Instead, it’s come into our backyard. Here’s hoping that by revealing the destination of the so-called “Gitmo on the Platte” it gets moved somewhere else.

Eastenders: Moving

Over the last week I’ve been taking day trips over to our former residence to pack. Although I managed to get the entire kitchen out, the rest of the house was confounding. AV explained that it was a mess, and I just couldn’t see past the mess. With his help last night, we packed up all the books and just about everything else. There are 21 boxes of books, one more than last time. And this doesn’t include the 150-200 books we culled for donation.

I don’t feel bad about having so many books. Books do not qualify as waste, ever, and last night as we were going through the shelves it was like Christmas. Both of us found things we had forgotten about or had been looking for … it was great! I was looking for Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire for some bedtime reading (I’ve read These Happy Golden Years so many times I have it darn near memorized) and AV found it on the back row of a low shelf.

We also found a whole pocket of Kobo Abe that AV purchased when he was reading all noir a couple of summers ago. I did a project last fall that included Teshigahara’s film adaptation of Abe’s The Face of Another – the movie is spare and sharp and totally gut-wrenching. I probably should read the book.

I also managed to box up our DVD collection which is pretty specialized, except for my insistence that we do not sell back “The Mummy” or “The Mummy Returns.” I have not watched even a fraction of what’s in that collection, but I know AV has watched a lot of it and that’s impressive to me. Like with the books, I found some things that are beautiful and worth watching again: Miike’s Bird People of China, for example. When our nephew AK learns to read with more facility (subtitles), we’ll sit him down with Ozu’s Good Morning JUST BECAUSE OF THE FART JOKES. And because that movie is one of the very greatest ever made.

It’s easy for me to get sidetracked, but somehow I’ve managed mostly to avoid it. I have a “drawer of accomplishment,” which is a plastic file cabinet drawer that contains my diplomas, my photo with Alex Trebek, a really nice evaluation I received from a student last semester, and other little trinkets. I haven’t gone through that drawer at all, but I received in the mail yesterday that drawer’s latest addition: the agony and duress-causing final for my Heidegger seminar. I got a pretty good grade, so it will go in the drawer.

Speaking of the mail, we will not miss our mail person. I have never seen so much ripped and bent mail in my life, and funnily enough we couldn’t find a place on the USPS website to call and complain. It’s almost as if we were being punished for living in a multi-unit residence.

The movers arrive tomorrow morning. We’ll pack up the truck and be out of our little capitol hill house.

Eastenders

We have been in the long (five months) process of finding a house to own and live in. I’m relieved to say that we were successful in this endeavor, and now occupy our own 114 year old house on a tract of land in a pleasant, east Denver neighborhood. A friend of mine said that psychologists report that buying a home is as stressful as the death of a loved one. Judging by the number of total meltdowns I’ve had in the last week, I can attest to this fact (or my best guess).

There’s a lot to say about the new house, the new neighborhood, leaving the old neighborhood, being neighborly (our neighbors seem very nice), and maybe how buying a house fits in with simple living. Based on what I’ve read here, I’m now disqualified from the “voluntary simplicity” movement on a large technicality. I hope to say some more about these things on this blog.

I expect that being an adult will be the source of some hilarious stories. Like the time I ran the Yaris into the garage less than two hours into owning the home (a big scratch on the car, but the garage is still standing). Hilarious! Or, how about the first night we slept in the house? I had a surge of adrenaline in half-sleep (NO fun, BTW) thinking someone is coming into my house. I don’t know the new noises yet, and I’m fairly certain that I slept with one eye open. So I didn’t sleep last night. Hilarious!

On hearing the news about our new house, a friend and member of my thesis committee called us “bourgeois creeps” and urged us that we would soon be making many trips to the hardware store. The latter prediction came true.

Another friend of mine (surprisingly, I have more than one) asked me if kids and the minivan were next. I reported that I’d just like the minivan. A minivan full of books. When I was a kid, we called that the bookmobile.