yep, not ded yet

[jennlk]

I was weeding by the pond yesterday, and was getting 'yelled' at by a frog. DB's first thought was "a device is alarming", but he soon realised that it was too organic a sound to be a device, and was not a bird or chipmunk. I haven't seen the frog, but we've heard him a lot -- he's been quite noisy. There are at least two different frogs out there, so this is good. I still have to rebuild the rill so that we can turn the pump on. Maybe tomorrow.

Theoretically, it's supposed to warm up enough today that I can go do more weeding, but it's still too chilly for my still-slightly-annoyed back. There is still lots of weeding to do. I only got about halfway around the pond yesterday (I filled the bucket and disturbed an ant nest, so it was a good time to stop).

J is putting a whole-house fan in upstairs. The passive vent system we put in last year when we replaced the roof just doesn't move enough air to keep the temperatures reasonable. It was 74F in the living room and 82F in the upstairs hall, despite ceiling and tower fans running in both rooms and the hall. It will probably be better once we actually turn the AC on, but it's not hot enough for that yet.

Comments

[tanac]

We spent about 6 person-hours in the past three days de-thicketing the area of the woods that technically belongs to the neighbor, but that is causing our yard to flood because they're not keeping it up. Removed an entire dead tree (!), innumerable saplings/lower branches, poison-ivy vines (and poison oak saplings), and I whacked the heck out of the holly bush that had decided to grow *in* the stream (or the bank eroded enough that it is now in the stream, hard to tell). Bathing in tecnu seems to have helped me avoid any breakouts (Jeff's not allergic to it so he does the heavy-duty pull down vines the size of baseball bats part), but I do have some good scratches (did I mention one of the vines is a stupid pricker vine that has really high tensile strength (so can only be cut with tools) and bruises. Including above my eyebrow, I don't even remember getting that one really.

(I also cut the green wire that runs across the stream about 2 inches from the bottom and catches all kinds of debris, we reported it ages ago and they've never done anything so I snapped and cut it, don't tell anyone. So far everything seems to still work (power, internet, etc.).)

Fingers crossed that the next big rain will actually run through the nice big culvert (4') without backing up our entire yard, would be nice if it would take some of the leaves with it even.

Have a giant pile of brush we're probably going to pay someone to deal with, technically it should be the neighbor's job but we have folks coming to do the leaves next weekend anyways.