Tag: Yard Work

Pick Up the Dumpster, Please

We rented a dumpster for the weekend. I had a ton of crap in the yard that needed to be dumped, and a ton of crap in the cellar that also needed to be dumped. Renting a small dumpster is what we do when we find ourselves in a situation like this.

They delivered it on Friday. I worked off and on filling it up on Friday through Sunday. They are supposed to pick it up today. The window they gave us is 9:00am to 5:00pm. That window is going to close in less than an hour (the clock says it’s 4:13 right now).

What the heck are they waiting for? Come and get the damn dumpster. I want to put our cars back into the driveway. They’ve been parked on the street since Friday morning. I know it’s been raining heavily all day, but should that stop the pickup? I wouldn’t think so. Let’s get this done, shall we?

Subject change

It’s been almost a week since I did a couch to 5k run. I am not sure when I am going to get back to it. I will get back to it, that’s a promise, I just don’t know when. I also think I am going to redo the entire last week. Instead of picking up where I left off, week three, workout two, I am going to start at week two, workout one. I feel like I need to do some rebuilding. I still want to finish this process. I just don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to get there. We’ll see.

Subject change

I just want to go out and take pictures of stuff. Film, digital, whatever. I want to do it first thing in the morning when the sun is out. For almost the entire month of June and so far in July there have been few if any mornings with sunshine. It’s infuriating and utterly depressing. Why? I can’t remember the last sunny weekend morning. The forecast for this coming weekend is already saying cloudy and rainy. It’s hard to do this shit on a weekday, but even those are always cloudy and rainy. This Spring was the Spring of suck, and the Summer is becoming the Summer of suck. I just want to scream.

At least I can fill the creative void with some music. I just don’t want to. I want to split the difference. Music and photos together, not one or the other. Blah!

Friday

I so need a vacation. Not even a vacation, really, just a break. Just a little downtime. It’s not happening this weekend. Tomorrow I have an MRI, a ton of house and yard work to do, a birthday get together for my father, and possibly a house painter/vinyl siding consult? A lot of the house and yard work will spill over to Sunday, though I checked the weather yesterday and it’s supposed to rain. At least that’s what it said yesterday, I don’t know what it’s going to say tomorrow.

I asked Jen if we could do something next weekend to decompress. I don’t care what. A day trip somewhere? Maybe? Just tell everyone we’re going away and then lock ourselves in the house and hide from the real world for a couple of days while watching bad TV? That would work. Literally anything, just so long as there are no deadlines or responsibilities or headaches or health issues. Just give us a break for a couple of days.

Next week at work is going to be super busy and probably pretty difficult. I’m looking forward to putting it in the rear view mirror, if you know what I mean.

I’m feeling okay today health wise. So far so good. My stomach was off all day yesterday. Today is much better. I even had a real breakfast today. Here’s hoping that my stomach stays on that course.

I want to take the camera (cameras) out somewhere one of these days. It’s still pretty cold in the mornings and that’s turning me off. Also, it’s always cloudy and rainy because it’s Spring in New England. Uh… just a couple of days of downtime… that’s all I ask for. Pretty please, universe… give me a break.

Today is Insane

I’m stressing out, bro.

There are so many people here. A three man electrician team, our regular contractor, his drywall subcontractor, and a landscaper team with at least four people. Talk about a perfect storm. We knew the electricians and our regular contractor would be here. Everyone else is a surprise.

The old cellar lights with the big fluorescent tubes are gone. The last of the drop ceiling framing is gone, the last of the un-insulated cellar walls have been insulated. The front and back yards have been cleaned, including the litter that the wind and the squirrels put into the edge of the woods. Most of it at least. They didn’t do the best job there, but they did a good job everywhere else.

As we speak, the new cellar lighting is being installed and wired up, and the wall board that is going to be installed starting tomorrow is being loaded into the cellar.

From a Covid safety standpoint, everyone is masked and everyone is entering the house through the cellar bulkhead. The cellar is a big open space so everyone can stay as distanced as they need, and no one has to walk through the main floor to get in and out.

Still… It’s stressful. It’s also loud. Lots of banging and hammering and crashing and cacophony and super loud leaf blowers and all of that stuff. It’s making it difficult to work.

Oh yeah, speaking of work. Insert frustrated screaming here. Nothing too terrible, but lots and lots of little things that are piling up and making me want to hide my head under the covers.

So yeah… stressful as hell kinda Tuesday. I’m ready for bed.

Another Reason to Hate Autumn

It’s Autumn. Fall. I really don’t like Fall. I kinda hate it. Here’s one reason.

We caved in and had a landscaping team clean up our yard today. The main reason they were here was to fix and clean the rain gutters on our roof, but they also cleared the yard. Awesome.

Less than an hour after they left I looked out the window and it was literally raining leaves. It was the front of the house. We don’t have any trees in the front of the house. Two doors down from us they have a huge oak tree. The leaves were falling off that tree and the wind was blowing them all the way to our yard. At this rate, within a day or two you won’t be able to tell that our lawn was clear today.

Fall sucks.

One slightly related note. In our back yard the leaves fall off the trees in the woods and the wind blows them all right against the house. The yard itself is usually not too bad, but the base of the house is a leafy mountain. There are some windows along the foundation of the house but only one of them can actually be seen from the living space in the cellar, the rest are in the storage areas. After the landscape folks left, and at the start of my lunch break, I went down stairs to put some laundry on. I couldn’t believe how much light there was down there. Turns out that one window was free of leaves for the first time in a year and you could actually see through it. It was kinda cool. Of course, by the end of the week the window will be blocked again. Yippee.

Thinking About Tomorrow

I have not played the guitar in a while now. It’s the weekend so you’d think I would be in the clear, but there’s a lot of stuff to do.

The grass in front of the house is getting long. The grass in the back and on the side have yet to be mowed at all this year. I’m super tall, six and a half feet tall or so, and I am literally scared to go into the back yard because the grass is so tall I am afraid I’ll get lost*. Seriously. That’s how badly it needs to be mowed. The weather looks clear, though slightly on the scorching hot, inferno, hell fire side of the temperature gauge.

More important, in the afternoon we have a high school band concert. The final high school band concert. I didn’t think we were going to get one, thanks covid, but we are. It’s going to be outside in the parking lot and my step son is playing with every single ensemble. Piano in some parts, and percussion in others. He’s awesome, the concert is going to be awesome, it is also going to be held in the parking lot because of covid in the scorching inferno hell fire temps, but it’s all kinds of awesome.

If I can sneak some guitar time in, I will. I’m not holding my breath though.

On an unrelated note, I got a notification on my laptop to reboot for a Mac OS update. I cancelled the notification because it was in the way of a window I was trying to use, but once I was done I rebooted my computer. When the computer came back up I was prompted to take a Mac OS update. What is this, Windows?

*When I said I was literally afraid to go into the back yard because I would get lost in the tall grass, I was not being literally. Allow me to stand here and watch your brain explode. Boom, babie.

Another unrelated note, I think the V key on my ancient apple keyboard is dying. Uh oh.

Glorious!

Oh praise be to whatever gods control Spring yard work, our lawn mower started and ran without issue! (well… it took a while to get rolling, but once it did, aces!)

Our streak of Springtimes with dead lawnmowers may have ended at two! So far at least. I only did 2/3 of the front yard and there is still oodles of time left for this bad ass mother fucker to die, but so far so good!

Oh yeah, also MY BACK HURTS SO MUCH!

The Time Has Come

The time has officially come. The grass needs to be mowed.

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I had to literally dig the lawn mower out of the garage. All of the supplies for the bathroom remodeling job are in the garage now. We had planned to have it finished by the New Year. Whoops. That means all of the Spring time stuff is buried.

I was able to dig a path and get the mower out onto the drive way. Win . Then it started on the third pull. Win #2. Then I started mowing. 52 minutes later (approximately) the whole front and back yards were done. The whole thing. In less than an hour. I haven’t achieved a feat like that since I was a teenager. Where the hell did that come from?

Now my beloved wife and I are sitting in the living room. Every window and door on the first floor is currently open and the gorgeous spring breeze is blowing through the whole house. It’s perfect. I’m actually thinking of taking my guitar outside and working on some new song ideas. After the winter we just went though I want to spend as much time outside as I can!