We worked in the yard yesterday. Neither of us wanted to--I loathe working in the yard--but we wanted to go out there before it got too warm (it was already too warm, in the low 60s) and stop trouble before it started. This meant trimming the privet bush (which has turned into a privet tree) so it didn't touch the roof and James getting up on the ladder and cleaning out the gutters. (We have a gutter guard on the highest gutter, the one that's about 20 [30?—I'm terrible at estimating distances] feet up on the eave of the upper story, but we couldn't afford the others. We're thinking of getting those screens you can buy at Lowe's/Home Depot and put on yourself.) He also used the extensible pole we bought and scraped the dead leaves off the roof with the small rakehead; we were both happy to discover the ants had not formed a nest in it yet. I raked the leaves back from the back door and sprayed it and spread ant granules on the ground for a couple of feet and also sprayed the other doorframes and the kitchen window, and then towed innumerable privet and other tree branches out to the curb to be collected.

(My mom once asked me irritatedly "Why did you buy a house if you didn't want to do yard work?" Well, because we were tired of the roaches that poured into our kitchen from the next door neighbor who refused to let the exterminator in his apartment, and tired of listeing to his stereo through the wall and have the floor and the walls vibrate every time our downstairs neighbor got drunk and turned his stereo up to max volume, and tired of the kids in the complex throwing rocks on the roof, and tired of our parking area that flooded every time it rained, and tired of the rats around the dumpster... It was cheaper to buy a house than to rent an apartment in a nice-enough complex where we might not have had those problems. Besides, our yard was flat, small, and had no trees on it; aside from cutting and trimming the lawn weekly and clipping the azaleas a couple of times in the summer, therre was nothing else to do!)

We were knackered by the time we finished and cleaned up, so treated ourselves to ice cream at Bruster's. We brought Willow with us and to our utter surprise she turned her nose up at the "doggie sundae" (child's scoop of vanilla ice cream in a bowl with a dog biscuit in it) she has always loved. She scarfed down leftover rice at home afterward, so it wasn't that she was sick. How odd!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:52:00 AM

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