* I spent almost an hour and a half this morning (instead of finishing my piano practice for the day and watching the re-run of the Twilight's Kingdom episodes, both of which I kind of wanted to do) weeding and ripping junk out in the garden. I'm going to just work an hour a day now until it's done to the point where the yard looks "perfect" and there isn't a scrap of grass in any of the flower beds and every dang seedling of winged elm has been cut out. I need this to be right because if the city decides to come in and deal with it they will just herbicide everything, including the 12 year old rosemary bushes I have.
* My worry is they'll come after me for the leaf pile where I compost leaves next. A fussy person could say it was an eyesore. Or they could say, "But snakes might live in it" (And they do - at least, rough earth snakes, the only snakes I've ever seen in my yard, and I defy anyone to claim a rough earth snake could be dangerous). I don't know. I'm torn between leaving it and letting them send me ANOTHER letter, and I will then say, "I was not told of that problem before, therefore you cannot make me go before the board for it" and just hiring my tree guy again and having him haul off all the additional brush I've cut plus the leaf pile. The bad thing is, I use the humus from the decomposing leaves as a soil amendment, and I also use a corner of that pile as a source of soil invertebrates for a lab I do, and if the pile were gone, getting a good source of soil invertebrates would be much harder. (They tend to congregate where there is labile organic matter, like decomposing leaves).
* I think I need to ask if there's some kind of guidelines about what the city can and cannot complain about in a yard. Surely people are permitted to compost on a limited scale? Surely people are allowed to have things like sunflowers and fennel (both of which I have) that get kind of tall?
* What worries me so much is that this feels like a moving target. Like nothing I do will be good enough or right because they'll find something else wrong with my yard.
* Feh. I hate how something like this takes over my brain and I worry endlessly about it. I had put the alley stuff out of my mind because the guys did such a good job and I thought that was the end of it. I didn't think the city could come after me for my backyard having some winged elm seedlings I hadn't cut out yet or some grass invading the flower beds. I suppose next they'll say "Your garage needs to be painted again." I could make myself broke prettying up the backyard no one ever sees (unless they are walking in the alleyway). This is why I let the brush get high in the alley - I liked the privacy of a backyard no one could see into. Maybe I need to look into getting a paling fence along that back lot line. (I do eventually have plans to get vinyl siding or something put on the garage - it's too much of a pain to have to paint it every few years - but I was saving up my money so I wouldn't have to take out a loan or something to do it.)
* I'm still going to Sherman today. I decided to compromise on the "doing work" stuff: I read in a book on soil inverts for a couple hours last night and I am going to set up my BlackBoard pages this morning.
*I did make myself feel a little better; started my Christmas shopping today. (I was ordering my Christmas cards....Monastery Greetings has a small sale on them this weekend and they had a nice Celtic-themed one that I liked, so I ordered them and then also added a couple small things as gifts for family. Oh, and some tea and whipped honey for myself....)
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