See that viney stuff? That's the bad news.
We got lucky. As Mel had supposed and I had hoped, it wasn’t dug in yet at all. It had sprouted enthusiastically, but wasn’t really rooted. We dug out that spot and took a little extra in all directions – including down. We dumped it all into a tarp and wrapped it up and left it in the sun to bake. I can figure out what to do with it in my own time now.
I’m also going to watch the pile carefully to see if I got it all. I think/hope that I did. It took about an hour, all told, because we weren’t moving very quickly.
The stuff down by the street is continuing to ail – most of the leaves have died, and I can actually see my hostas again. I figure I’m going to go down and cut off the dead/dying foliage, and wait to see if it re-sprouts. We’ll see what happens. It’s interesting – now that I know what I’m looking for, I see this stuff growing *everywhere* along the roads in huge stands. Now I need to figure out a new method of disposing of stuff that I dig out: once burned, twice shy. But hell – if I can’t put dug weeds on the compost pile, what the heck do I do with them?
After we were done, since I was already liberally coated in bug spray, I decided to finally climb through the trees to the top of the ridge behind our property. Let’s just say that the slope is much steeper than it looks from the bottom. I’m also stronger than I was before we started doing all the heavy outdoor work this spring, but I’m still *grossly* out of shape – I was truly winded at the top of the hill. Maybe that’s what I ought to do – climb that hill every day until I can do it without losing my breath. The amount of bug spray required makes that unattractive, though. We discovered two things up there. The first one is that our neighbors on that side are *really* close. Horizontally, at least. The other is that we were looking down on our chimney. That’s a little weird. If there were fewer trees in the way we could have done a roof inspection with a pair of binoculars. That's my house waaay down there through the trees.
The rest of the day was spent alternating between napping and the seven loads of laundry that I had allowed to accumulate. Oops.
Sunday was another mostly nondescript day. We headed out to run a couple of very mundane errands in West Hartford – new bathroom rugs, and side rails for the twin bed in
That was a mistake.
I had forgotten that Her Majesty Nishka, elder cat and queen of all she surveys, has adopted that ottoman as her favorite napping spot, it being soft and low to the ground. She walked over, looked at the spot where it had been, gave Bob a look that conveyed how very, very disappointed she was with the management, and then gave us the full guilt trip of “I’ll just have to sleep over here. On the FLOOR. Never mind that I’m old and arthritic.” I went and fetched the ottoman back from