No longer an embarrassment to the neighborhood

Our lawnmower has been broken for 5 weeks now.  We're lucky that it hasn't rained much in those five weeks, so the lawn isn't as long as we might have expected.  Still, I come home from grocery shopping to find business cards on the door from people offering to mow it for us.  Apparently our failure to maintain a proper suburban lawn has been noticed.

Our mower is a very used commercial mower.  Replacement parts for a 20 year-old mower an not easy to find, and they're surprisingly expensive.  I'll spare you the blow by blow view, but to summarize, P has been diligently trying to locate the part we need, so far to no avail.  The search is also getting increasingly expensive, as we end up paying substantial, nonrefundable shipping fees on parts that turn out to be close but not quite right, and then restocking fees when we have to send them back.

Finally we stepped back and realized that, for less money than we were going to spend on the replacement part, we could just get a new push mower.  P had been window-shopping online, and was thrilled to learn that the mower he was drooling over turned out to also be a model that Consumer Reports recommended.

Our new Husqvarna 6120 arrived yesterday.  P was really excited to have his new toy, and immediately set it up and started mowing--despite the fact that it was a scorching hot day, and the forecasts said today would be much cooler. 

This is one of the many reasons why P is in charge of mowing the lawn, and I am not.  If it were up to me, the lawn would probably go unmowed June-August, and not because the mower was broken.  Hey, we'd be providing native meadowland habitat, right?

Anyway, P was so delighted with his new mower, that he skipped dinner to mow the entire lawn.  (He had originally planned to do just the small portion in front.)  So far, we have nothing but good things to say about the mower.  There was virtually no assembly required, and it even came with its own bottle of motor oil--so the true mower enthusiast can get straight out to the lawn without having to run by the store first.  Starts right up when you pull the cord.  And my favorite part is that the mulching feature works really well.  We thought we'd have to rake the grass clippings this time, since we'd let it get so long.  But the mower properly pulverized them, and no work for us!  (Plus it makes the lawn virtually self-fertilizing.)

P hasn't entirely given up on getting the big mower fixed.  With it, he can mow the lawn in less than a third of the time it takes him with this little guy.  The push mower is cheaper than a gym membership, and a good way for him to work off the stresses of the day, but sometimes it's nice to just get the lawn done fast.  So we'll see how things develop on that front....

With a little help from our friends (part III)

A final update on what we accomplished with my parents' help in May.  It's a long time coming, but at least you get really good "after" pics.

If you don't already think that we're abusing our guests, you will after hearing this next one.

It wasn't enough for my parents to completely transform two rooms with paint in the two and a half days they were here.  I decided we also needed to do a complete makeover of the exterior, as well.

I don't have any good "before" pictures here, since I was busy trying to disguise the sad state of our landscaping.  Our house has the standard long, narrow foundation beds extending along the entire front of the house.  The weeds there were getting out of control--one particularly notable one was taller than me!  The previous owners had planted azaleas in these beds.  For some reason, most of the azaleas in the west bed were doing well, but the ones in the east bed were on their last legs.

You can get a hint of what we were dealing with in the background of this cute picture of my nephew.  He's enjoying that moving day means furniture is on the lawn--who needs playground equipment when you have bookcases!  But back to what we were supposed to be focusing on: the azaleas have more dead sticks than leaves, and the weeds are taking over.

While my mother and I painted, my father went out and dug up the dead and dying azaleas (and the massive weeds, while he was at it).  Then Mom and I came in, and planted some herbs she'd been kind enough to pick up for me, plus some other herbs and cosmos I had started from seed.  And three pepper plants for good measure.  I'm totally a function over form person, plus I think a pepper plant, with nice ripening fruit, looks lovely in its own right.

Here's the bed about a week after planting:

And here it is today:

Our landscaping is a little lopsided right now--to the east of the front door, there are all these nice small annuals and herbs, and to the west, a few monstrous azaleas.  I'm okay with that for this summer.  I think I'll wait until fall to even it out, when the weather is better for both gardeners and for young plants.  Maybe remove a few shrubs from the west, and add a few to the east.  Or maybe just get rid of the azaleas altogether.

We also have a long, narrow bed bordering our driveway (no before pics here).  The last 10' or so of the bed was completely full of weeds--no plants at all.  It also gets as much sun as anywhere else in the yard, so I decided this was the perfect place for our tomatoes and the rest of our pepper plants.  Again, Dad pulled all the weeds and tilled the impenetrable soil, and then Mom and I swooped in and took all the glory by planting the plants.

Here they are a week after installation:

And again today:

Between the poor soil and the mushroom compost we mulched with (and the great prep work Dad did), I hardly have to do any weeding back here.  Except where the weeds trail through the fence from the neighbor's yard.  My father removed some old, crumbling pieces of plastic border fencing from the property line--I'm thinking I might need to put something like that back in.

I'm not quite sure why the pepper plants are so short.  I think it's some combination of: 1. late planting and too long spent in cells may have stunted their growth, 2. the soil is not very good, and 3. our neighborhood deer came by a few weeks back, and had to taste each plant to realize he didn't like them, and clipped off all the leaders.  Perhaps this pruning explains why they're so full!  They're starting to bloom now (the plants in the front have peppers that are coming along nicely), and our summers are nice and long here, so they should have plenty of time to recover and have nice full yields.

Back in action (sort of)

To make a long story short, Lenovo decided that since they weren't sure when they were going to be able to repair my laptop, they'd just send me a new one.  While the process has been pretty frustrating, I'm definitely happy with the outcome--I get to replace my increasingly buggy 3.25 year old laptop with a brand new one at no cost to me.  It will have several upgrades I'm excited about, including Windows 7, which P uses at work and says is a vast improvement on Vista.

So I'm eagerly awaiting the laptop's arrival--but first the factory has to make it.  In the meantime, Lenovo sent my old unit back to me so I could transfer the files off of it.  I was a little shocked to open the box and discover why they thought it was necessary to replace the LCD screen:

Seems the screen was broken in transit.  Luckily, we have an extra monitor, so I'm able to use that for now.  (Sorry I tried to convince you to get rid of this when we moved, P.)

Anyway, there's much interesting stuff to fill you in on.  Just to give you a taste: we have finished work on two rooms, and actually moved some furniture into them and unpacked some boxes!  Pictures to come...

Sorry about the silence

Sorry about the blog silence.  My computer has been off with Lenovo for the past month, waiting for a part to come in so warranty repairs can be completed.  I'm getting pretty frustrated with the situation.

Lots has been going on around here, both in our lives and with the house.  But what's a story without a picture?  And I can't upload pictures from my camera to the blog until the computer comes back.  So bear with me a little longer, and hopefully there will be more to see here soon.

One year ago today