Hi, Neighbor. Wait, I can still see you.

Oct 02, 2005 23:50

I grew up in a family of highly-mobile types, small town squatters in other families' unsalable homes: we were Renters ( Read more... )

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Comments 28

steven October 3 2005, 10:42:51 UTC
How gorgeous! You have landscaping that would put Mr. Miyagi to shame!

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Okay, not THAT ashamed. mwittier October 5 2005, 05:50:55 UTC
I am strangely ashamed to admit that I had to Google Mr. Miyagi. I had no idea that that character was a gardener. I thought that he was just a wise, enigmatic kick-y/hit-y guy. (Never saw the movie.)

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mockduck October 3 2005, 11:29:26 UTC
Mmm, green! Tell them all to shut up!

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*my interpretation, but likely not theirs. mwittier October 5 2005, 05:54:08 UTC
Mostly I just act like I can't hear them. I squint appealingly, and cock my head charmingly*. I think they think I'm loopy. I know they think I'm loopy.

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brianrdu October 3 2005, 13:22:50 UTC
Everything is so incredibly verdant there. Do you know how depressing it is here this year? It's been an absolutely rotten gardening year. We are in a drought. Tomorrow the water restrictions start, not that I've been watering much anyway. I miss the rain.

I really like your allee. F the neighbors and the small talk, I say. I need to make inroads in screening mine out as well.

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mwittier October 5 2005, 06:03:02 UTC
It was an unusually wet summer here. Stuff just got crazy green in the last month, which is nice, only with unusually wet comes unusually humid. Which isn't nice. Tonight there are flood warnings locally; my house is high up on a hill though, so I'm lucky.

Last year was strangely dry, and my water bill was accordingly painful. Now that stuff is pretty well established though, it's largely drought-proof. I picked pretty low-maintenance plants and trees.

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Oh! tinaguppie October 3 2005, 13:41:05 UTC
Your property is breathtaking. I took a landscape architecture class last year and the instructor taught us that planting a wall of trees and other green stuff was a perfectly acceptable option for blocking out the view of the neighbor's rabid sheltie/cobbled together tool shed/screaming urchins.

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Re: Oh! mwittier October 5 2005, 06:10:59 UTC
Thank you. It's really very happy-making for me, both working on it and sitting quietly surrounded by green. It's really pretty in the snow, too, and the birds love it. My mom, who is an avid gardener, comes over and helps a lot on weekends. We have nice quiet afternoons without talking; just digging and moving stuff around, dead-heading.

Hopefully this Spring I'll be able to afford a fence, and then I can really relax. The copper theft kind of freaked me a bit, and the yard is now so tangly/wooded, that it's pretty easy to hide back there, especially at night. I'd like to be able to sit in back at night safely, with a glass of wine, without having to worry about creepy people in the alley. And I have a lot of sculpture I can't put out until I get a fence.

When I first moved here, I used to joke that I would like to sell my back yard, because it was too big, and a pain to mow. Good thing there are zoning laws, huh?

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Re: Oh! tinaguppie October 5 2005, 15:21:34 UTC
I totally recommend a big ol' privacy fence. We got estimates from different companies for ours & ended up hiring a small deck & fence company to install it. They were much cheaper than the bigger companies and worked efficiently to get the thing installed in less than a week.

What is up with the cemented area in the back of your yard? Are you going to have it torn out?

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Re: Oh! mwittier October 7 2005, 04:15:02 UTC
I just read your entry tonight; I just finished hauling in monster hanging ferns and two amazingly heavy potted bamboo plants, because it's going to freeze here tonight, too. I should have harvested the basil, but I got lazy (and cold.)

Anyhow, I am getting fence estimates this week, and so far, they're all coming in at about seven thousand dollars. Which might as well be seven million dollars. I have a good friend who I could hire to build my fence for me, and I know he'd do an excellent job, and I'd rather give him a wad of cash than some anonymous fence company, but I swore off hiring friends when I was an art director. I don't think I want a fence that badly.

The cement in the back near the alley was installed by the goon that previously owned the house. He'd planned on putting a detached garage back there (which stumps me, because there's a perfectly nice attached garage, but what do I know about cars and garages) but he never got around to doing anything but having concrete poured ( ... )

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urbaneninja October 3 2005, 16:07:14 UTC
awesome. i especially love the hall of willows.

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mwittier October 5 2005, 06:13:25 UTC
Thanks. There are huge rabbits that practically live down that grassy path, eating clover all summer. Even the neighborhood alleycats are afraid of them. Luckily, they ignore me.

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