Hello Again

Oh hi, it’s me. Hope. You might remember me from such blog entries as “a post about my house” and “another post about my house.”

Life has been pretty hectic around here, what with the whole buying a house thing and all. We’ve been working like busy little beavers to get the place all respectable like. You see, it just so happens that I, in my infinite wisdom and foreward thinking, invited a bunch of people over for a BBQ on Sunday.

What, you think that it’s a bad thing to have a whole bunch of people over a week after moving in? When the majority of your stuff is in boxes? And you’re fairly neurotic about cleaning for company? You don’t say. I thought that it was an excellent idea. What better way to force yourself to make things look presentable?

Of course, even I can admit that it was really NOT SMART of me to start building raised beds in our garden this week. It would have been much more practical to spend my time doing things like, oh I don’t know, unpacking some damn dishes. We’ve been eating off of paper plates and using plastic utensils, but we’re going to have our own fresh vegetables by the end of the summer, dagnabbit.

I would say that the raised bed project is about halfway done. Kristian and I purchased all of the materials after a trip to Ikea last Tuesday (I spent probably a week’s pay on that little jaunt. I weep for my wallet). And then, on Wednesday, my buddy Dan came over and we put together one of the boxes using these instructions here. We had to stop at one, because apparently darkness and powertools don’t mix together very well. Who knew? Also it was getting late, we were hungry and the smell of the bbq that Kristian had thrown together was making me drool. I don’t hammer very well when I’m drooling.

So now, I get to do the fun part of the whole raised bed thing and that’s to dig out two feet of soil and then fill the whole thing up with known good soil that we will (hopefully) be purchasing this afternoon. Yes, that’s right, you heard me folks. We’re going to be buying dirt. Oh, the joys of not knowing what your soil quality is. We plan on getting it tested at some point and, if it turns out that our soil is just fine and dandy and suitable for our future offspring to snack on (because we all know how much kids love eating dirt), I will probably tear some of my hair out in little clumps. Because buying dirt is not exactly high on my shopping list.

It’s still a better prospect than growing plants and then discovering that your soil is so full of lead, you could probably make bullets out of it. Which is what happened to us last summer. It was so sad, watching those little bean plants grow and knowing that I could never eat them. If it turns out that our soil is fine, that just means that we’ll be able to grow more stuff next summer and not have to worry about building structures and buying dirt. Because, seriously, these raised beds are probably going to cost more than the bed that we, you know, sleep in.

In other news, we almost had the pool ready to go and then Kristian discovered that he can’t get the pump to turn on. This either means that we need a new pump (expensive) or we have some sort of electrical problem (even more expensive!). At this rate, we should probably have the damn thing swimmable by October or so. I’m sitting on our deck looking at it right now and the water looks clear and refreshing… but I’m told that it’s so full of chemicals that it would probably kill me if I jumped in. It’s still tempting, though!

Ah, the joys of home ownership.