A Vision and its Outcome

HomoDomi has these visions of the way things could be -- for instance, he thought he could imagine a day when the back garden was not edged by the neighbors' decrepit ugly green garage on one side, and, behind a chain link fence, a compost heap, which stinks in high summer. (Composting is a great ideal, but for small lots in urban areas, the realities can be unpleasant.) So he built a pergola, of sorts (strictly speaking, a pergola would have a "roof", too) -- fencing for vines to grow up over and mask the ugly walls put up by our neighbors.

I cannot find any photos of the truly Before, when the whole northeast corner of the yard was literally a heap of yard waste on bare weed-strewn dirt, half hidden behind a huge old rhododendron. We cleared out the yard waste, and I pruned the rhodie into a more tree-like form, in 2006. In May 2007, HomoDomi installed a brick patio and the twining fence.

Here is the corner as it looked about a month later, with a new brick patio and planted with jasmine, honeysuckle, clematis, mandavilla and passion flower, two plants at the base of each column. We wanted evergreen vines, with all scented flowers, which would bloom at different times of the summer, to mask the compost smell. It turns out only the clematis is truly evergreen, and the passion flower has no scent.

Here is the corner as it looks this morning (above and below, yesterday afternoon). We moved the rhododendron to the front of the house in July (exactly the wrong time of year to transplant a rhodie, I was told later by someone at the nursery, but it's doing fine), and carefully added rich soil and grass to the resultant hole and the dead patch around it. Now we have a large stretch of luxuriant lawn, where not long ago it was broken up by bushes (we moved a rhubarb, too). The globes are solar-lights, which glow nicely for a few hours after sunset, and we have a firepit, which is perfect for making s'mores on a cool night.


Next summer we are going to extend the fence another 10-12 feet, obscuring the neighbor's driveway in addition to the garage. But for now, the original vision has led to a comfortable improvement.

The Wonderful High-Pressure Water Spray-gun

One of the list items under Finish the Porch, is Stain the Ugly Concrete Stairs. They are a dirty gray-brown. Andrew thought the church had put a quick slip of cement over them just before selling the house, and has intended to get rid of the steps or at least improve them since they moved in.

Today we bought special cement stain, and borrowed a high-pressure water spray-gun from a friend. This puts out water at a rate about half of the professional spray-guns (which you can rent from Home Depot), but the friend said it was perfectly adequate for cleaning moss and dirt off steps before staining them.



It works like a charm -- pull the trigger, point and spray. And the dirt disappears as if you were spray-painting Clean all over it.

We are left now with a clean step and front walk. And the discovery that it wasn't a cement slip, after all, but paint that the church slapped on before selling the house. So we aren't sure the stain is going to work -- but it is not returnable, so we'll try it before anything else. One option is to rent a professional spray-gun and shoot the paint off -- even the spray-gun we have, given time to work its magic, will push off the paint. Whatever we do, we have to do it soon -- the walk and steps look horrible -- pallid gray with patches where the paint has pulled off. The dirty steps were at least a rather warm and homogeneous brown.

Another use for the spray-gun is the pathway bricks. It turns out that the sprayer melts the mortar off the bricks like butter. So I spent a very fun hour this afternoon shooting off mortar, cleaning 80% of the bricks in the time it would have taken me to scrape 5% of them (and more thoroughly than by hand).

Digging down

The intensity of the interview yesterday has led to a day of pungent self-doubt. I swing from moments of acute nostalgia for the loss of the sparkly, creative woman I remember being at Infocom, to finding myself unable to love the memory of that same self-absorbed and cock-sure girl. What banalities about the others and mortifications about myself have I now preserved in digital video? How could I have forgotten my place so much as to think, for a few hours, that I was as relevant as Steve Meretzky, or Brian Moriarty, or Dave Lebling, or Stu Galley? And how did my neck get so goose-skinned, like those too-thin older movie stars?

I did work on the pathway, for a little while. The ground under the sod is dense clay tangled with the warp and weft of decades of unaerated grass roots. Two days ago, I set the sprinkler on until the area was a grassy marsh, but the water appears to have slid off ineffectively rather than sinking in and softening the dirt. I did uncover a little "cliff" between the hard clay and a small patch where we dug up concrete months ago, where the ground is wonderfully light and aerated. Using that as a starting point, I was able to carve progressive inch-wide shovelfuls off the cliff, plowing up the packed earth for several feet.

But shoveling, or cutting the ground with a shovel, gets old fast. So I turned to removing the mortar from the bricks, which you do by scraping bricks against each other, mortared side to mortared side. The clumpy gray mortar crumbles off fairly easily, leaving smooth red brick underneath. Then you turn both bricks to a different mortared side and scour them together, repeatedly, over all six faces of the brick. It doesn't show in the photo -- the nearest line of bricks are cleaned and smooth, and will look red after a good rainstorm; by comparison, the ones behind are still gray and lumpy. But all that bending and balancing and rubbing bricks together is really hard on one's back.

A rational person would expect, as I adopted the stances associated with poor Chinese farm workers, spine aching and hamstrings taut enough to pop, that I would gain a little perspective. I'm building a brick walkway around the spacious house in which I live. I'm working on it a couple of hours every day. I'm not starving, standing half-naked in a rice pond for months on end.

But a rational person would be wrong -- perspective remains beyond my grasp. Hard labor and physical pain, however, do push to the back of one's mind the immediacy of self-pity, so in the end the same goal was reached -- I stopped dwelling.

So, after gouging out some dirt, and scouring off a few bricks, I shoved a hypothetical ramrod up my spine, and Andrew and I went to Ikea (for the third time in a week) and then to Home Depot, and then out for gelato and coffee. Sometimes you just have to enjoy where you are, and vigilantly not-think about where you were, or where you woulda-, shoulda-, could have been, had things been different.

Brick Pathway

I told myself that I could not work on the kitchen plans until I have distributed my IRA money out of a low-interest earning money market and into a safe but higher earning mutual fund. I started researching mutual funds in March (when I read Mutual Funds for Dummies cover to cover), but my money continues to sit where it was to begin with. I find the whole subject painfully tedious and painfully ... painful. The only other time I researched and settled upon a long term savings plan was November 2000, just before the bottom dropped out on the market. I lost 60% of my retirement savings (from Infocom days) in three weeks.

I am not the only one with such a story, and frankly there wasn't that much to lose. The whole let-people-manage-their-own-retirement-funds concept was invented by idiots and scoundrels who stand to gain a lot of money off fools like myself who think something called a "security" should be secure.

Anyway, faced with the prospect of staring at mutual fund prospectuses yet again, I started work on the brick pathway. Let me do something with my hands!

The photo shows how wretched the north side yard looks right now. The broad dirt area is where the old concrete sidewalk was. We never used it -- it ran too close to the house and was too narrow. In July when Andrew and the teenagers were carting muck from under the porch, I crowbarred all the concrete up, broke it into portable sized pieces, and carried it all down to the container they were filling with dirt. (Those photos are on a defunct disk, alas!)

The plan is to pull the fence up to the edge of the house (you can't really see that corner in this photo); have a nice brick walkway leading around the house to the back; and all the space between the path and the house will be filled with shrubs and flowers. Early fall is an excellent time to plant in Portland, because there are plant sales and still two months before the weather gets ugly. So we want to get this ready for planting pretty soon.

I laid out the bricks for the new pathway in early August, using the remaining bricks from the chimney. This is the second design -- the first one was too curvy. I had hoped the bricks would kill the grass underneath, but the grass has just grown through the cracks.

Today I staked out the lines and removed the bricks (photo tomorrow). Tonight I will soak the bricks and the ground thoroughly with a sprinkler. The soaking will make the sod easier to cut, and the mortar easier to rub off.

The cat, by the way, is Natasha, who keeps me company whenever I work with string.