Brick Pathway: Completed

Photos from last summer, and from yesterday. I first started laying out bricks for a pathway from front yard to side in August, 2007; wrote about the project in September, and again a couple of days later.

Sometime in October, I gave up for the winter, and left the bricks laid out on top of the grass, hoping perhaps that nature would work her wonders, kill off the greenery for me, rot the roots to make them softer to dig up, or possibly even sink the bricks down into the earth to save us the trouble.

No such luck. In fact, the grass grew thick and wild over the bricks, leading HomoDomi to twist his ankle in the thicket a few weeks ago (because of the bricks above the level of the rest of the lawn, we couldn't mow the area, either). The dense too-long grass and piled bricks have been a real eyesore, and this pathway a task guiltily avoided all spring.

Well, the Texan took it upon herself to cut the space out for the path last week. I sand-filled and bricked in about half of the resultant ditch, and then she finished it off when I was out of town last weekend. It is lovely, smooth (ish) and best of all, finished. You can wheel the garbage can from the back all the way to the front yard now, something we couldn't do before.

More work is required, half of which is "gardening" (getting blooming plants in the stretch of dirt on the right of the photo -- dahlias, iris and gladiolas have been planted, but the bulbs/tubers were all nearly rotten, so I doubt if any will pop up -- we're too late for blooming this year anyway). The other half may wait for next summer, after other projects have been finished: We will be pulling forward the fence to meet the front of the house, from where it currently is halfway back. More about that when it's done.

The Sand between the Bricks

Went out in the cool morning to put in a dutiful hour on the front yard, and worked for five hours instead. I'm still not finished with the brick pathway, but I am further (about half way). Andrew took this photo, a different vantage point from other photos I've posted.

I am using sand from the neighbor's back yard to fill between (and under) the bricks. Miss Jane, next door, has just had her above-ground pool removed. This is big. This is the pool where Molly and Will learned to swim; the pool Miss Jane and Miss Ellen used to swim in daily. John (Jane's son) remembers the pool being installed when he was still a kid, in 1958. The pool-remover-contractor said he had never seen a pool like it, in 20 years of pool work.

The pool has had problems the last couple of years, including leaks requiring more than the usual maintenance to fix. She's been heating it using solar panels above her garage, but with her arthritis, she needs the water to be at 80° or more, and the water rarely was warm enough for her to swim, even in the long sunny Portland summers. They reckon that she'll be saving enough money in power bills (even with the solar panels) to pay for membership in a health club with a specially heated pool, with a little left over.

It's going to be a big job to clean up the yard, which now can take the trophy for Trailer-Trash Yard of the Block (except it's hidden behind the house, unlike our mess). There's six inches of sand over the whole base of where the pool stood, so it's great for both households that we're needing a bunch of sand next door. They get full sun in the summer, so there will be room for a vegetable garden, if John is up for tending it.

Until then, the cats are doing their part to fertilize the ground, studding the giant box with neatly piled mounds of sand, surrounded by spiraling swoops of claw-marks like a Zen garden, decorated with a single paw print.

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.