entering the whirlpool

Apparently the tree removal counts as a house project, for that definition that all house projects take at least twice as long as you expect them to. First we got an e-mail the night before saying that they'd got an emergency job where they needed to use their bucket truck on Friday morning, so they didn't get here until after noon, and then they only got half-way through taking it down before the hydraulics of the lift arm sprang a leak. So they're going to have to come back next week and do the rest of it. I fully expect there to be a thunderstorm so that we have to put it off again.

Most of the out-reaching branches are down, but the really tall ones are still there, and there's all this sun in the back yard. Ugh. Though if I'm not trying to protect the poor tree from having its roots mucked with, I guess I can do an actual rain garden now, which would be nice. And it's actually raining. I guess it's fall or something.

Xposty from dreamwidth.

So, right. The weather has suddenly gotten lovely, the downstairs is still in flux, and my twitter client stopped speaking to twitter. (These are the major contributing factors to my not having posted this earlier.) We've been out for walks two mornings in a row, which was excellent, and the 2/3 done floor continues to look lovely & feel so underfoot.

Monday afternoon, grauwulf came home & pointed out that my carrion flower (which was exiled beyond the porch screen when the flower bud got longer than my hand) was blooming, complete with entourage of flies:



Unfortunately, one of them was sufficiently fooled to lay some eggs, so on tuesday morning we had tiny maggots starving to death. I was not a sufficiently devoted naturalist to bring something out to feed them.

( some other things, with pictures )

Xposty from dreamwidth.

I have inadvertently taught my baby "Zombie Arms." I did not realize that was what I was doing; I just thought it strange that she hadn't figured out she could reach things six inches in front of her face. Five days of coaxing later, I found myself holding a baby making creaky noises and reaching for my nose with both arms outstretched.

It's been an unnecessarily tempestuous week; grauwulf has been putting in new glamorous engineered hardwoods in the living room (you would think that "original hardwood floors" would be a different layer than the sub-floor, but in our case you would be wrong; also you would think that floors refinished for sale five years ago would not be peeling up great swaths of varnish) which involved much moving about of books and furniture and occasional bursts of swearing about cutting the funny corners. (The living room is now done & looks lovely; the dining room is still to do.) Then there were existential and interpersonal work angsts on his part, and two of the three things I actually decided to leave the house to go to got called off at the last minute. The Megatherium had a few days where she refused to eat during the hottest part of the day-- we seem to have sorted that one out, thank goodness, but having a dehydrated infant who's showing all the hunger signs she uses turn away from you and scream when you try to feed her is not an experience I recommend. Oh, and then I had a mysterious few hours of running a fever yesterday afternoon. Still no idea what that was (there weren't any symptoms except the fever-caused ones) and it seems to have gone away, thus far without the baby getting it, so that's good. But odd.

And I'm not sure if it's funny or horrible, but when I hold the baby on my shoulder & sob, she laughs. Presumably because she thinks that's what I'm doing.

Anyway, this week I shall go back to worrying about the wedding we're theoretically going to in Reading this weekend (for those of you not familiar with central PA, yes wedding & Reading rhyme) and the slightly alarming news that several of the enlisted men from the submarine on which my father was engineer are coming to the memorial service in a couple weeks-- two from Florida, and one flying in from Hawaii. Which is a heck of a tribute, but goodness...

Xposty from dreamwidth.