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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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11:09 p.m. - 2003-04-13
Mike and I have been adventuring around our new 'hood. For all that the new place is out on a country road, one of 7 roads in the WHOLE township, we have speedier access to commercial places than we do here in the Big White House. The butt end of our new road dumps out near the Interstate, right at an exit from the Interstate no less. So there's some fast food joints, a humongus truckstop (cheapest gas in the county too! whoo!), a different Shoprite from my old one, and a strip mall attached to the grocery. Oh, and dangerous-er and dangerous-er, not only is the truckstop open 24/7, so is the McD's drive-thru. That's right, ole LA will be hearing the siren song sung by those skinny little wickedly delicious fries at 3:00am. Man, oh man. When I went cold turkey from Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia I thought my covert 00:00 Dark Hundred junk food trawls were behind me forever. Though perhaps eventually I will get too fat from scarfing fries to leave my house and the words "Super Size" will only refer to my ginormous underpants. Things are blooming at the Hobbit House. Literally hundreds of daff spikes are up and I saw the first yellow blossom today. The crocus are open and the lawn is covered with wee tiny purple star flowers. I've been gardening in my own pathetic black thumbed way. Mike had the chainsaw out today and I grandly gave Caesar thumbs down to a couple really trashy weed trees. I've also decided the evil, clothing snagging, deer gnawed, car scratching bushes next to the driveway have to die. Alex says the bushes are kin to kite eating trees. Mike looked at those miserable excuses for herbage and said we’d need a backhoe to get them out. I twitted him about his lack of Paul Bunyan sensibility and mildly asked why I’d blown all that dough on a Stihl chainsaw when I could have just bought him a Ginzu knife and would have gotten the bamboo steamer too. Mike didn’t take out the bushes today, but promised he would soon. Next to the front porch stairs are 3 tiered, semi-circular planting beds. Thanks to the stalling by the previous owners that held up our closing for 7 months, the beds were completely weed choked. I mean once the binder was signed they no longer felt obligated to do a damn bit of work around the place nor were we allowed to do any ourselves so the yard was totally neglected for over half a year. The leaves from last autumn are knee deep, the bushes (even the nice non-evil ones) are raggedy and out at the elbows, and the matted shaggy lawn looks like the Sargasso Sea. Not much I can do about most of it, but I’ve been working on the planting beds. Each tier is fronted by a low fieldstone wall. I’ve been sitting on the sun warmed stones and pulling up the weeds within my reach. Good for my soul to be out there after the long dark winter. I sit carefully so as not to disturb the moss. It’s too picturesque for words that moss. Today I got out a hoe with a forked thing on the other side of the blade and started loosening the soil. Deep and almost black, the soil in the planting beds is luscious. It was heavenly to work with a garden plot that wasn’t 3/4’s gravel. I turned up an occasional bit of slate, but that was it. Quite different from the sorry assed pathetic things I’ve been wrestling with here for the last 11 years. Mike has called my laughable planting beds: the Botanical Blackholes of Calcutta, LA’s gravel garden, and Dachau and Buchenwald. He’s also stood behind me mournfully humming “Taps” while I sank my hopeful, yet doomed annuals into the bitter, rocky earth. But THIS year things are going to be different. I’m not going to do anything crazy or be lured by doctored pictures of peonies the size of Audrey from “Little Shop Of Horrors”. I am going to plant geraniums. I have geraniums on my kitchen windowsill that have stayed alive under my inept care for 9 years now and am serenely confident that even a dunce like me can grow geraniums in such a lush medium as offered by the new planting beds. Geraniums in the lower two tiers and in the top one I’m going to plant a dwarf weeping cherry. It’ll be really pretty and quite in company with this wonder of a yard I have now with its boxcar sized lilac bushes, tulip magnolia trees, a mini orchard of 4 apples and 2 pear trees, and some badly neglected climber roses on the rusty trellises lining the equally neglected garden walk that runs the width of the hill about halfway up the side yard. A lot of the neglect goes back longer than our limbo last year. The previous owners bought the place from the original owner, a woman who had lived in the house for almost 90 years. Built when she was a small child, this woman grew up in the house and then stayed on there with her husband. The magnificent yard and plantings are her doing. Decades of planting, pruning, and tending. Those same dopes who plastered the inside of the house with Kountry Kute wallpaper that looked like Laura Ashley vomit, let the outside of the place go to Hell. Fortunately, their 6 years of neglect hadn’t totally undone the previous tender loving care and most things are rescue-able. The evil bushes still have to go though. In a bucolic state of mind, ~LA Today’s Pick: “Octopus’s Garden” by The Beatles
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