Termites Suck, er chew...

So last week sometime I discovered our shed is getting eaten from the ground up by termites. (That certainly explains why it seems to be sinking.) That find led me to wander about the yard to see what else might be getting eaten. They've munched half the bottom row of the pond timbers. The actual garden beds seem to be fine, but they do all have pretty bad wood rot. (Which happens when you build out of cheap pine rather then rot resistant wood.) I have one raised bed to replace completely and others to phase out. The deep one near the house is getting demolished to keep any termites from getting ideas. The shorter ones near the house I'm not sure what I'm doing with yet. Since I now have to rip up and move or replace most of the beds in the yard my eye turned toward reorganizing. The current design was caused by fencing the yard in sections rather then connecting it all together.

My new plan:

This is only a plan of the currently fenced garden area I have to work with. A large chunk of the yard off to the right and above this plot is devoted to the dogs with very little except wood chips. Some of this depends on whether we can get the huge trees thinned that now shadow the yard. My mother is on a local food kick right now and devoting more space to food and getting some light into the garden can let us actually grow some stuff I might eat too. I really want to do more grapes (our reliance vine gave us grapes this year, which were okay, but I really want green table grapes) and cantaloupe melons. Mom really likes tomatoes, lettuce and watermelons. Right now we can sort of grow lettuce, green beans, peas and a few other veggies, but not well. We had two years of great tomatoes a few years back when the trees have been limbed up. I'm hoping at minimum to have them trimmed, the one closest the house seems to be dying however and may be completely removed.

Obviously the above plan would be more useful to other people if they had the current layout. I'm actually quite embarrassed by what it looks like now, so just believe me that it would be a better use of the space I have. I have tall plants growing south of short plants, lots of stuff is sort of on top of other stuff, and I let the weeds take over in a few sections.

Ranty

So is there some reason stores think customers want to be individually greeted and asked if they need help at every turn. Are there really people who want that? I had the misfortune of going to a big box home improvement store today. I used to like shopping there. If you needed help you could find it, but you didn't feel stalked. I feel stalked now. I was asked no less than 7 times if I needed help finding anything. Did I look lost? By the seventh person I was getting a bit tired of saying no thank you. To make it worse they were having some kind of training event so management types were prowling and shouting out to every customer if they wanted help. No I don't. I want to browse, find my polystyrene, get some liquid nails and go home to build my weird reptile cage tree. I'm not stealing anything, so leave me alone. Maybe I should get a t-shirt made or something. "It's called browsing." perhaps? Maybe just "Go Away!" would be clearer. I blame the new G.U.E.S.T. approach to sales. It's a little creepy. Link to PDF explanation. I personally have never relied on a salesperson to tell me what to buy. It's their job to SELL things. I don't care if they're bubbly and confident, their goal is to separate me from my money. Thank you but no I don't have any interest in their recommendations and can do my own research.

Daily Photo - Cleaning and De-cluttering

Since I very well may be moving to Minot around July I'm clearing out stuff I don't need, want, or ever use. (I also keep looking up tiny houses online.) I shredded a couple pounds of bank statements, credit card bills, phone bills and gas or electric bills today. The shredding was in addition to the other 10 lbs I just recycled. I have apparently been saving all my returned checks from when I first opened a checking account and all the statements from my bank before it was bought out which was a good number of years ago. I had payment coupons to a school loan that was refinanced and was no longer with that company (and I saw I was saving 60 bucks a month with that refinance.) I also really didn't need the photocopied readings from my art history class in college. When am I ever going to need any of those things? All they were doing was taking up space. I have over 250 science fiction or fantasy books I need to get gone ( I still have 350 or so I actually want.) They're all books I either read once and didn't really like, or the beginning of a series I found went south or even freaking brand new but I've owned them for going on 5 years and never had interest in opening them. If no one on craigslist bites I'm going to donate them to the Dedham library, which is apparently having a book sale in a few weeks and needs more books. They might even pick them up with the number I have. I'm also getting rather annoyed at how nothing holds it's value and even less increases with age anymore. Just about everything I own is mass produced junk. It is no longer just cars that halve in value as soon as it's bought... I have tons of stuff with next to zero resale value but I'm likely not going to be able to take it with me and I want to limit the stuff I leave behind. Right now I'm working on getting rid of the stuff that is just taking up space. That said anyone want some Jurassic Park Trading Cards? I have 3 complete sets and I am trying very hard to not do the math on how much it cost to make those sets that have a resale value of $5 in mint condition.

I Got Downsized Today

There may or may not be more about this later. I'm going to spend a week obsessively cleaning, doing my taxes and all those other things that have been adding up, then decide what I'm going to do. At least I'm going to have lots of free time for a little while.

Daily Photo - More Dog Walking

This was today's haul from about 2.5 miles of my walk. I skipped the Town Center but noticed more trash there now that I'm looking for it. Number 1 item is a bud light can, flattened or still whole. There were even 2 liter bottles. I took all the cans I could see flat or otherwise though I didn't cross the street for any of them. So this is just one side of the street. I didn't pick up anything but cans and the occasional complete bottle. I left a number of perfect plastic bottles that had water or something else in them. There are also still huge numbers of cigarette packs and such. Maybe next time. Boomer put up with it okay. He's not a fan of plastic bags at all, so didn't like heeling to avoid people with the bag over his head. I'm sure plenty of people though I was nuts, but I just couldn't stand the trash anymore.

Walking the Dog...

I've been working myself up to 3 miles a day walking. My goal is higher but I'm working on this for my trip to Utah. I want to be able to hike for good chunks of time before I need to rest. So far I'm using the time to work on Boomer's leash walking manners. I might have a dog yet I can walk down the street without having them try to jump any dog they pass to play with them... I have come up with a lot of complaints about my walking location. I live in a nice town, low crime rate and such anyway. Due to a bunch of people voting for it (not me, I view it as a ridiculous waste of money) the town redid the Town Center during the last few years. Pretty trash cans are on every corner, brick is now in the sidewalks that kind of thing. The Town Center does look nice provided you aren't planning on driving through it. Less than a block in either direction though and I'm finding the trash excessive. Too many Bud Light cans and water bottles along the sides of the road. Now I'll admit some of this could be getting blown out of recycling bins on trash day (only way to explain clean large juice bottles really) but it's freaking everywhere. Every time I walk I spot at least one new beer can and water bottle. And what is with throwing cds from cars. Was the music really that bad??? I walk a fairly heavily trafficked commuter route, so I expect at least a little of this is from drivers. Do people think this stuff biodegrades or something??? Once Boomer gets a little more reliable about wanting to foray into the street I'm going to bring a bag with me and at least pick up the flat cans and water bottles, because it's driving me absolutely nuts. And the freaking dog waste. If something comes out of your dog what makes you think someone else wants to clean it off their yard everyday??? Do I like picking up after my dogs? Nope, I find it fairly unpleasant, however I know someone else would find it more unpleasant to try to clean it off their shoes on the way to work. I seem to spend a lot of my walk time staring at the ground. I've been rather unimpressed with some of the drivers too. I make an effort to cross at crosswalks with walk signals. On smaller roads that don't have that I use the basic crosswalks that you see on just about every road. If there isn't a crosswalk I wait, and jog across the street during a clearing. I don't expect drivers to stop for me if I'm not in a crosswalk. However if I am in a crosswalk, by STATE LAW I have the right of way. Yesterday I was crossing a smallish street and had a car come within two feet of hitting me because he wanted to get into the 'shortcut' side street. When I started to cross it was clear. Mr red car had been sitting in traffic farther down the street but had decided to pull into the oncoming traffic lane, zoom up and try to turn left before any cars could hit him. He couldn't wait for the three cars in front of him to pull up enough for him to just turn. There was also a car pulling out of the street, which he almost hit as well. Mr red car zoomed up and was mighty annoyed I was in front of his car and that he had to wait. I've had other cars zoom past behind me by the same 2 foot margin. I know it's horrible that I keep blocking traffic for those precious 5 seconds it takes me to cross half a street. Why is everybody so impatient. The world will not spin off its axis if you don't get to work at the time you were supposed to. It's called planning ahead. Rather than leaving with just enough time, give yourself an extra 5 minutes and you won't be late again. And please try to remember that all those other people are in the same boat as you, trying to get somewhere, though hopefully at least a few of them are on time, so are less impatient. Maybe I should just change my route. And sorry it went kind or ranty...

Disposable Electronics

I killed my cell phone. It has been in not so nice shape since last July when the anchor screw in the back disappeared and dropping that metal clamp on it a few months ago just made it worse. I finally dropped it and appear to have severed its ability to communicate with its top half meaning the buttons light up but it appears to do nothing to the screen. But I can still turn it on and off, so possibly just the display portion of the connection is dead. It brings to mind my annoyance with he disposable electronics industry. My phone was originally my sister's but it "broke" on her and she had to upgrade. It sat around for a while until I finally got a cell phone. It has worked reliably well since then even with being in a condition of maybe 1 out of 10 cosmetically. All of the rubber bumpers have worn off and the screen has imprints of all the buttons. The metallic finish on the battery is almost all worn off, and most of the side buttons only work when they want to. yet it still worked fine for texting and phone calls. I rather like the build quality. It was new in 2004. All my relatives have gone though phones, like having them for two years is impossible, they just keep breaking. As it is now undeniably dead I'm going to need to get a new one. I've been thinking of just buying another one of my current phone on eBay and irritating the Verizon people who will activate it. All the new free phones I've seen are tiny pieces of junk. My mothers new phone, only a few weeks old drops calls all the time due to an idiotic placement of the antenna exactly where anyone using it will have to put fingers. My painfully old phone didn't do that. It also put up with a lot of punishment. I'll be seeing if anything can be retrieved from my phone, but I'm not holding out much hope. edit: The phone is dead, guess I have to ask people to call or text me when I get the next one so I have all their numbers again.