Simian Farmer

Midday in the garden of good and ugly

We finished the front garden last week, and now hopefully will never have to weed out there again.  The before picture is just below.  I sort of regret not having taken the shot prior to ANY sort of work being done, but there is a part of me that breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of evidence.  Such an unseemly display of wild and wanton flora ought not to be flaunted.

We rented a roto-tiller to loosen up the top few inches of hard-packed soil so we could dig it up, thereby making room for the layer of limestone to go down.  And hoo, boy!  Did the roots ever not want to come outta there!  I had some fun with my hatchet that day, lemme tell you.

I discovered that it is painstakingly, agonisingly annoying to dig a trench and pour and level sand to ensure the foundation layer of a small retaining wall goes in level.

This here's about half way through the entire process, so it's not so much a 'before' pic as it is a 'during' pic:

(Bigger pic)

We had already ripped out the ugly green, plastic edging that held back the dirt (we shovelled out a LOT), and used a bunch of it to build up the level behind the wall under construction there.  The rest went to our neighbour's front yard, where they conveniently want to put a planter under their front window.  Everybody wins!  Then we ported three truck loads of crushed limestone to shovel onto the driveway and subsequently onto the layers of newspaper and landscaping fabric we laid down.

Then, while Amy was away for her Girls' Weekend just past, I searched about for a little bistro set to spruce up the joint and surprise her when she got home.

*****

The Simian's Official Harry Potter Review

Herewith the concise summary of my past four days of reading.  I'm rather surprised that I finished as quickly as I did, since Amy was away from Friday night through Sunday afternoon.  I was aided and abetted by my habit of staying up too late.

I finished the 600-plus page novel last night very near the stroke of midnight.  Averaging 150 pages a day is something I can't be accused of having done in many years now.

Below the fold is my full and complete review of the novel.  The only one I will make.  I have kept it free of any spoilers if you haven't yet read the book.

**********

Professional conversationalist

Declan almost convinces you that he's really talking to someone.

This was filmed late this afternoon, just before Granny came over to pick Dex up for the evening.  As the boy explains in the video, they're going to go pick up spring rolls (and other stuff) for dinner before going to the zoo (for a concert).

Declan can't tell time yet, but he sure makes it sound like he can.

The damage under his left eye is courtesy of Tav's fingernails.

It's a little long at just over two minutes, and sorry about the bad lighting.

Calamity John

There is an unfortunate stereotype that exists about the incompetence of the working father when he is forced to fend for himself and his offspring while the much more domestically competent mother is away for whatever reason.  He is annoyed by small creatures unable to fend for themselves, and the frustration at his inability to cope with this inconvenience coalesces in his apparent lack of empathy for such wee things.  I assure you I won't live up to that this weekend.

Amy's going away on a Girls' Weekend Friday night to Sylvan Lake, a small resort town two hours south of us, and she won't be back until Sunday.  (I know! you don't normally think "Alberta" and "resort town" in the same sentence, but I assure you it's real.  The sort of place where 80 percent of the residents live within 15 minutes walking distance of the lake, and most of those spend the summer months brandishing rakes and screaming like shrewish fish-wives at the flocks of goddamn tourists that infest the beaches and trample shortcuts across a myriad of manicured lawns.) 

So anyway, my wife's back on Sunday.

Friday

I anticipate Amy will have herself packed and ready to go by about the time I get home from work.  She has to pick up one other gal on the drive out, so she'll want to leave before I have a chance to take my pants off.  (Something I look forward to at the end of each business day, especially in the summer.  So I can put on shorts.)  Then it'll be just me and three other little life forms, each with a limited capacity for reason or a predilection to use the toilet.  (Dex is the most advanced on both counts, but still falls short of my ultimate expectations.)  Some of my methods may involve incoherent rantings and wild arm flailings.  (I'm kidding; see first paragraph.)

Our evening routine mostly involves the boys and me anyway, so it should be little different than most nights, except we won't hear my wife's fingers clattering away on the keyboard as she abandons her family for her Facebook fix.  (Ha!  We love each other dearly, and one of the ways we show this is by incessant teasing.  If that were the sole benchmark, she would love me more.  By a lot.)

After the boys' bedtime: this Simian is going to catch up a little with Harry Potter.  (Is anybody NOT posting about that book these days?)

Saturday

Our neighbour kids are aged nine and seven, so are in daycare during the week days and don't normally pop their faces around our front screen door until at least 15 or 20 minutes after I get home, leaving my wife in relative peace during the day.  However, they operate pretty much under their own auspices on the weekends, so I can probably count on them showing up shortly after breakfast.  They're good kids, and play well with both Declan and Tavish, occupying them a lot of the time so that we responsible adults can get other work done around them with a minimum of supervision.  We've told the older girl that we're training her to be our babysitter in a few years' time.  She's stoked about that.

Work in the backyard sounds good for Saturday.  I need to get the rock ring a little closer to completion.  The one intended to go around the massive twin pines by the garden shed.  The one my brother and I started last summer when we scavenged discarded boulders from around the new housing development where he bought his own abode.  He placed a few of the bigger ones, but the rest are still in a jumble, having sat undisturbed through the winter, overgrown now with tall weeds and coated in an unhealthy patina of apathy.  Given how much time I sit on my ass each day, I have an unusual fondness for hard labour that makes the sweat pour off me.  Man-handling large rocks will accomplish a couple goals.

Plus, Saturday, I need to go get one part of the anniversary present for my wife.  The other part has nothing to do with the first part, but that's my way of saying there are two parts.

Sunday

Pancakes and bacon.  It'll be weird without Amy there, but I think it would be weirder to have a Sunday without pancakes and bacon.  (There have been some, and they feel strange until about noon or so when that feeling passes.)  I get to use the new cookware we just invested in (and believe me it was an investment), so there may be some experimentation with temperatures and timing.  The electric griddle should be great for the bacon though.

I plan to have Granny and Grumpy over for dinner, or earlier in the afternoon for a stroll along the riverside.  Or something.  Maybe we can all go downtown to partake in the gastronomic delights on display at the annual Taste of Edmonton.  Many of the city's restaurants trot out a booth to be staffed by their junior employees, selling only sample portions of a few signature dishes.  There are dozens of these booths set up around a downtown square.  If you buy a whole sheet of meal tickets, with most items costing between two and four tickets, a family of four can circulate, share, and leave stuffed for about 40 bucks.  I always get the green onion cakes, and always slather on too much malt vinegar and hot sauce.  The last couple bites are an exercise in pain tolerance and the tears streaming down my cheeks, at the end, are tears of hard-won victory.

The weekend will be full and the forecast looks like decent weather will play a pleasant accompaniment.  And now that we have our cleaned and scotch-guarded furniture back in the living room (WOW! what a difference!), we no longer have to squat on Declan's Spider-Man sofa or entertain the occasional visitor solely in the kitchen with apologetic glances toward the Living Room Wasteland of Toys.

When Amy gets home Sunday evening, I'll be sure to pawn the kids off on her and go check my own Facebook messages.

Progress

The front garden is done.  Meaning, it is no longer parading about as something that should have been a garden but, in our four years here, never was.  It is now a quaint little bed of limestone, with a cute raised wall below the living room windows, and a tree growing out of the middle.

We were told that laying down landscaping fabric under the rocks wouldn't do the trick for total weed suppression.  They're that tenacious.  Given the crop of weeds that blessed our small patch of earth out our front door every summer, I believe that.  But Amy's mom knows a trick where you lay down newspaper before throwing the rock on top, and it's supposed to work wonderfully.  She has a test area in her own backyard where there's newspaper in one area and fabric in another.  Current status?  Landscaping fabric: weeds, newspapers: no weeds.

We put down newspapers and then rolled the fabric over top.  Take that, bitches!

I should have a couple pictures up soon.  I would have snapped the 'after' shot last night, but it was nearly 10 PM when we finished and, even as far north as we are, the lighting wasn't too good at that time.  Tonight or tomorrow, then.

Amy is leaving for a girls' weekend away from home this Friday.  Just me, the boys, the dog, and freshly shampooed furniture and carpets for two full days.  What could possibly go wrong?

Wordless Wednesday (7)

Clink this link for terrifyingly huge grasshopper of DOOM!

Howzit goin', hot stuff?

July has been scorchingly hot for us this year.  My tan lines can attest, since I've spent a whole bunch of it outside.  As my wife recently mentioned, we're getting big into the home improvements this year.  We hope to have a livable basement before the snow flies, which will stave off the cabin fever a little longer once the January doldrums make their annual migration to our house.

Other than getting somebody else to finish our basement for us, We're giving our front garden a good face-lift.  No longer is it the wasteland of discarded birdseed and the ensuing wild grasses that grow under the feeder, annoyingly lush and more vibrant than the nearby lawn.  We've stripped off the top layer of dirt, nearly finished a low retaining wall by the house, and the garden will be covered in a thick layer of two-inch limestone.  I don't think it's possible to know how much two cubic yards of limestone really is until you've shovelled all 5,200 pounds of it out of the back of your pickup truck onto the driveway.  The bobcat loader at the landscaping place makes it look so easy!

It's been so consistently warm this month that the glass jar of semi-sweet chocolate chips in our cupboard, reserved mostly for my peanut butter toast and Sunday pancakes, has largely fused together.  The jar needs a good shaking before a furtive handful can be secured while one's wife is not looking.  (It's not like she scolds me for eating chocolate chips, it's just more fun to sneak them.)

I came home on Sunday afternoon with a couple of this year's first road hockey injuries.  As a Canadian, I am ashamed to admit that I can hardly skate to save my life, but pickup games of road hockey -- I'm all over those.  One of my group of Superfriends lives near some seldom-used tennis courts, and there is nothing that makes for a better game of road hockey than a nicely enclosed tennis court.  The concrete is good for a few scuffed knees though (bloody injuries are cool!), and I took the hard, orange ball once off the forehead and again off my right bicep.  I flexed manfully when I showed the latter welt to my wife, but her stoic mien proved that she remained unimpressed.  She's a hard nut to crack sometimes, my darling Amy.

One fringe benefit of the hot weather has been some consistent thunder storms.  Almost always in the evenings and into the night, so they haven't interrupted our outdoor activities yet.  Everybody else is mentioning it, so I may as well chime in that I started the new Harry Potter last night 'midst the peals of thunder and flashes of light in the foreboding skies.  An ominous beginning, to be sure.  (Sorry Moksha, I shelved Hyperion for a few days...)

For the rest of the week: more shovelling.

World's gotta see, see all the love, love that's in me

I've shied away from participating in blog memes over the past while.  Not least because two of the words I strive to keep out of most of my posts are 'blog' and 'meme'.  I have never liked either.  Neologisms are one of the driving forces that continue the evolution of the English language, and I love to butcher a hearty bon mot into something mildly amusing yet understandable as much as the next fella.  (Discombobulatorium - noun - a small, hermetically sealed chamber where confusion is pumped into one's psyche.  "Why does Simon seem so stupid today?  It's like somebody put him in a discombobulatorium or something, you know?  Dude!")  But sometimes the ones that bleed into mainstream culture bug me.  Like 'blog' and 'meme'.

Don't even get me started on the gnashing of teeth and gouging of eyes I am reduced to when 'impact' is used as anything but a noun.  The transitive and intransitive verb forms of impact are, technically, correct, but they bug the hell out of me.  Perhaps because I work in an increasingly corporate environment and hear how things "will impact us" on an aggravatingly frequent basis.  The only time it's acceptable in my eyes is when describing a failed proton torpedo attack on the Death Star's small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port: "Negative, negative.  It just impacted on the surface."

But I digress.  This is all to say that this blog post is in response to being tagged for participation in a meme.  (Aargh!)  I hate you a little bit right now, Paul.  I have been asked to write about five or 10 (or whatever) songs that had an impact on my life.  (See!  noun.)  I like the challenge of this because music has rarely played a significant role in my life.  Not one of which I've been terribly conscious, anyway.

Let's jump into the WayBack Machine and see what I can dredge up.

Wordless Wednesday (6)

Scintillate

New take on an old poem that I can't stop reciting to myself.  I wish I had thought of it.

Scintillate, scintillate globule vivivic,
Would I could fathom thy matter specific.
Lustily proud in the ether capacious,
Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.

(If that makes no sense to you, recite Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to yourself and then read it again.)

*****

I am sad to report that the youngest of the Frasers has succumbed to the recent heat wave.  Tavish developed a fever yesterday morning that rose in the evening to a peak of 39.5 degrees C (103 F).  I spent two hours in the waiting room at the local clinic for a two minute consult with the doctor.  Just to allay our fears, really.  Tavish developed a fever when he was two months old that resulted in a febrile seizure.  That's when your baby turns sort of purple and his limbs go rigid.  Scary.  We are understandably cautious.

He's OK though.  Had himself a good puke before bed and a necessary cooling shower with his dad, who managed to catch most of the effluent before it dribbled all over the floor.  His fever broke this morning (I was told on the phone) and he's on his way to his usual vivacious self.

*****

We're having our living room furniture picked up today so it can be steam cleaned.  We've owned it for four years and had it cleaned once after the first year.  With two kids and two dogs having been exposed to it in the past three years, it's developed a sort of waft that makes you cringe every time you sit down.  It's best not to look too closely either.

The Febreze just ain't covering up the aroma like it used to.  Especially in this heat.

We'll get the furniture back in a few days and the same company will steam clean the carpets tomorrow.  In the mean time, we have some throw cushions we can plop around the living room and will probably hose off the plastic patio chairs by the fire pit so we can pretend like we're white trash.  If I can convince my wife to hold my beer in her cleavage I'll let you know.  She totally could!

*****

After struggling, sometimes mightily, for the past eight months or so, I finally finished Moby Dick on the weekend.  Not for lack of interest in the book, certainly, but my drive to carve out time so that I might consume whole chunks of the tome at a single sitting had unwontedly waned.  I blame my inconvenient family.  They're always getting in the way of everything I want to do.  It frustrates me sometimes.

The book, though, was intimidatingly awesome.  It's not really about a whale, you know?  I need to read it again with a pen and notebook at hand so I can transcribe all my favourite parts.  It'll probably take another eight months, but it would be totally worth it.  It's truly a mighty book, as Melville himself states:

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.  No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be have tried it."

Tongue in cheek, the book also made me think to provide this visual synopsis: