BOYS. WHO NEEDS EM.

What a difference two days make.

Well. 2 days, 10 hours and 15 heavy duty contractor bags later, this is where we're at.  I spent the bulk of Saturday raking and bagging the INSANE amount of toxic, rotting leaves back there. Turns out, last week's visual was rather deceiving.  It took 5 hours just to get the bag 'n tag done, and another hour just to heft them out to the curb.  I probably should have waited until the leaves had dried out beforehand but I honestly couldn't stand it anymore.  Once the leafing was done, I took a pair of garden clippers to the masses of snaking vines creeping and crawling all over the place.  There's still quite a tangle out back behind the gaping crevace but I haven't decided if I want to tackle that next or keep it they way it is -- I kinda like the melancholy tableau it makes against the back wall, with that swathe of hanging ivy and the weather-beaten laundry ladder -- that mysterious wooden door! Its all very wild and melodramatic and part of me wants to keep it that way.  Maybe pick up an arbor at the Home Depot and get some morning glories and climbing roses going.  This place needs more thorns!

To break up the tedium of scooping handfuls of leaf and cat refuse, I also took out half my supply of snap-together IKEA decking and made a little fire pit deck over the dirt area in front of the shed. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for some stools washed up along the urban tide*, or maybe I can ask a friend to cut up some logs for sitting on. I also took it upon myself to take an inventory of the shed - my predecessor, good old Alan Masters, left me a wealth of garden supplies: planters, terracotta pots, plant stands, fertilizer, seeds, gardening tools, hoses...the list goes on and on. I tossed some of the creepier items like the rusted cat carrier and corroded biscuit tins but, on the whole, I have a good little garden center going on in there. It may smell ever-so-slightly of cat piss and mildew but, hey man, it's functional.

Near the end of the day, I decided it was high time I tackled the mysterious pit in the center of the yard.  There is something both repellent and alluring about that thing.  I probably should have ignored it and moved on with my life, but I can never seem to leave well enough alone. After pulling up a few armfuls of leaves and bricks and broken planters, I discovered this was no ordinary hole. The first thing I noticed was the remnants of a folded camping chair...no, TWO folding camping chairs...and once I'd pulled those out of the dirt, I realized that was only the tip of the iceberg. Truthfully, there were many moments when an internal voice urged me to stop -- part of me was mentally preparing to dig up a body or uncover some ancient portal to another dimension or something.  I wanted to stop!  But I couldn't. I was caught in this kind of trance, pulling out item after item, muttering "What the ****, what the ****" over and over with each new and horrific discovery, not wanting to know what I would find next, but still needing to know all at the same time.    

Cricket Jean knew better than to standby during this whole thing. She'd crept back into the kitchen to hide, which seems to be her natural response to just about anything.  I kept calling back to her "Cricket! You are NOT going to believe this!" , "Cricket! You have seriously have NO IDEA!" but she stayed put, cowering in a corner somewhere until, finally, I ran into the house wild-eyed and covered in filth. Snatching her squirming little body in my grimy hands, I held her aloft over the abyss like a demented, squealing lioncub.  "DONT YOU SEE WHAT I FOUND, CRICKET.  DONT YOU SEE WHAT WE HAVE?!"  In the end, I pulled out the following out of this makeshift landfill:

- two folding camping chairs

- one chaise lounge

- assorted broken pots and planters 

- two garden hoses 

- one weed wacker

- one metal umbrella pole (not a gas main!)

- one metal hammock frame

- one rotted bathrobe in buffalo plaid 

- two Heineken beer bottles still intact

This came out of the earth.

It was quite impressive, actually. I couldn't decide if my dear predecessor grew fed up with his gardening ways and threw the sum of his efforts into the pit to burn, or if it was the tenant before him and Alan merely pretended it wasn't there.  Once I'd bagged it all up and dragged it to the curb with the leaves, I was left with this:

My lovely koi pond!

Which I think we can all agree is a koi pond.  Or was a koi pond at one time.  I've thought about filling it with dirt and I've thought about building a deck on top of it, but in the end, probably the most cost-effective thing to do is just repair the existing pond.  For a hundred bucks, you can buy a kit that includes the liner, a pump, an underwater light and even a pair of silk waterlilies. Throw in a couple goldfish and BAM. Fancytimes are here to stay.

You would think that's where this weekend story ends, but I somehow still felt the need to get rid of all the rusted, nasty yard furniture Alan bequeathed to me when he skipped town for Texas.  Which seemed easy enough until I got stuck in the hallway with a glass table that was an inch too wide to fit through the doorway, and was wedged there cross-legged until 11:30pm unscrewing rusted bolts with a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench I found in the closet behind me.  I guess the moral of this story is, while, in theory, you should probably have a dude handy to take care of this kind of stuff, in the end, you really can do anything yourself.  

Today's new TO-DO LIST following this weekend's epic productivity is below:

1.  GET RID OF CATS...BETTER

2.  FIX GIANT HOLE. BUY SUPPLIES FOR KOI POND!

3.  MAKE DECISION ABOUT CRAWLING VINES

4.  GROW A LAWN!

5.  DONT FORGET THE STRAWBALES ARE COMING NEXT WEEKEND