August 01, 2009

4:00 p.m.

4:00 Bells

It's been another full day so far. Hauling truckloads of stuff to the dump from my house and my sibling's old house, lifting heavy metal with a tractor bucket and some chains, feeding worms to chickens -- who are now happily roaming around the back yard -- and occasionally scritching a cat. I'm about to go home and steam clean some of the icky pantry so I can at least use the counter. I will still cover it with something; it needs to be sanded and refinished apart from the sterilization. Anyway the steaming will help.

After that I think I will call it a day. I need to color my roots but I'm just not up to it today. It takes me a good hour. I'd rather spend that hour hooking up my DVD player and shampooing one of my new comfy chairs for later use.

Ants are still plentiful but most of them look dazed now. I've had enough of stepping on them in my Crocs and vacuuming them up. I'm keeping Ant Death bait out, of course.

It rained so heavily yesterday, all day, that the trench in the front yard got an alarming amount of water in it. The front gutter is now working beautifully, and since we opened the inlet to the underground diversion pipe, the one Marc accidentally severed with the Dynahoe (when we were digging out the poo pipe) because it goes RIGHT ACROSS the lid to the septic tank, all the rain water just pours into the trench from that gutter. I went out and shoveled enough mud into the middle of the trench to make a dam, so the water would pool only on the side farther from the house. There is still an inch or so that's not cemented on the house side. It might have been unlikely that the water would have risen enough to spill into the basement, but I was going out for a few hours and not taking any chances. There I was, in my boxer shorts and pajama camisole and a rain poncho, and my Crocs, shoveling rocky mud into the trench in the downpour. It was quite funny. "I's a homeowna now," I said.

Anyway it worked.

I'm muddy and sticky and sun-glowed and it's time to go home and wash up. I get to cook for myself tonight -- I have a salmon burger in the minuscule freezer compartment of my fridge, and some zucchini and yellow squash. I may also bake a sweet potato. Life is good.

The church bells are ringing across the street.