I made a deal with myself that I would try to spend about an hour or so a day, every day, writing – not necessarily here, but writing something, so that I can continue to develop facility with words and maybe even produce something interesting and good. Alas, I haven’t been writing much, though life here has been proceeding apace.
We have coyotes, we have deer. To a lifelong city dweller like me, these are fairly exotic creatures, though I do remember seeing a coyote trotting along the lakefront bike path in Chicago some years ago, and I have seen deer on visits to Starved Rock. Even so, I’m still enamored.
We have not yet seen a return of even a single raccoon, which saddens me. I know they’re pests, and I know they can wreak havoc, but they’re cute as hell, dammit, and I like watching them.
We no longer have many wasps nor bees. It turns out the bees were carpenter bees, and they were breeding rapidly, unchecked by their wasp foes. Yeah, we had the burrows they had made into our decking sprayed and powdered and filled, and so far, the results seem sount.
We have had rain, lots and lots of rain, to the point where neighbors have not been able to plant their crops yet. It’s also prevented us from putting up our mailbox, but hopefully any time now…
We are finally going to catch up on landscaping. We have a guy coming out this weekend to give us an estimate. We figure that paying someone to do this stuff for the first year or so will be much less expensive than buying a tractor capable of handling our property before we know what the hell it is we want and need from a tractor. Patience will help us avoid, we hope, a number of costly mistakes.
We have had an epiphany about the stuff the former owners of the home have left behind – no one is gonna buy this shit, so we’re just giving it all away, to friends and acquaintances who want some of it, and to charities so that at least someone is getting something good out of it. So far we’ve given away maybe – if we’re lucky – about 10% by volume.
We have also been steadily making progress getting the house organized. We’re still not anywhere near where we want to be with that, but at least we can now go about our lives in relative comfort and not constantly trip over boxes and stuff. My main concern is that we will coast for a bit until it becomes very hard to overcome that inertia.