New Fauna

Not much work has been done in the past month but I've found I'm still able to enjoy the garden, despite my busy-ness, sickness, and plain bone idleness. Now that Spring has gotten started, I've gotten into the habit of having a walk through the yard every night and on the weekend... trying to put in a couple hours of weeding.

At the top of the garden, ever since Abel and his people emptied the contents of the old garage, there have been two cabinets sitting in the very middle behind the lemon tree, back to back. While it gave me a relatively snail and slug free platform for a couple of neglected pots of seedlings, they never made me very happy so we finally finally moved them two weekends ago.


With the cabinets gone, I finally weeded the oxalis and onions that had been coming up between the doors and cabinet frames and all around them. In the process, I discovered a slender salamander. So interesting to find a new creature in your garden, especially when it's a beneficial one and not an evil looking bug... It's hard to see in my picture, but he's running away from me right in the middle of the frame, on his tiny little legs.


He clearly was enjoying the moist ground under the oxalis and gorging on the hundreds of slugs I had been finding all through my weeding. But he apparently wasn't the only one. Minutes later, I found an arboreal salamander too! You can just barely see the tiny yellow spots on his sides.


I'd read about them on another blog and knew not to pick this guy up in my hands because of his sharp sharp teeth. Reading about him before, I never thought I'd find one in my yard, either of these salamanders. They sound like creatures that couldn't survive the long dry summers away from creeks and rivers but that must not be true. I grew up in Contra Costa County and apparently they live there too, though probably not in any of my backyards which were mostly packed clay and grass.

The last in my new animal discoveries, I was not so happy to discover; not that this creature was deserving of my disgust.



Sadly, I found this Jerusalem Cricket and another one minutes later before I tried to find out what they were and I sent them to cricket heaven. I found them when I started to attack the dirt pile near the house, about a foot high and there, like the cabinets, ever since Abel's men took out our patio. I was trying to break it up and spread it out evenly on the ground when I broke into these guys' homes. Jerusalem Crickets are apparently everywhere in the west and far down past Mexico, though this is the first I've ever seen one, probably because they are nocturnal and prefer to stay underground. This one is trying to scramble out of a 3-inch pot so it's a good inch long. They look disgustingly evil but are apparently a good creature all around: They aerate the soil, eat dead animal matter and provide a good food source for many larger animals. I found this page about them quite interesting.

Nearly two months ago (only two posts ago, sorry), I wrote that I had bought a bird feeder and hung it on my magnolia tree. It's been so interesting watching the little birdies ever since flying to and from it, fluffing their wings and hopping around. I've never properly watched birds before and I'm not yet interested in doing so much farther than my own backyard but I've been searching around the internet to identify each and every bird I've seen so far. There aren't any rare birds yet, but I'll admit that I didn't even know half of the names of these birds. And here they are:

(Not my pictures, but I fully intend to capture my own birdie pictures once I have enough money to justify buying a new camera lens)

Male Anna's Hummingbird


Female Anna's Hummingbird
One female dive-bombed the Salvia next to my brick step. I was standing there, about to go back inside and I hear a loud crescendoing buzz and boom, it was there three feet from me. Goes from my Salvia to the Nemesia and the lavender before zooming off again.


The next three are my most common offenders, often jumping about and twittering in groups of 5 to 10.
Golden Crowned Sparrow


White Crowned Sparrow


House Finch


Mourning Dove - There's a pair that always come to the yard together and peck at the seeds spilled by the smaller birds and those mischievous little squirrels.


Scrub Jay
I've seen these before, even as a child and they don't come any more often since I put up my bird feeder. Interesting thing, these are actually a type of crow (which explains the loud screech it makes) and they sometimes eat the eggs of others birds and even small hatchlings. Still, they are beautiful.


Crow
I've only seen one land in my yard once, about two weeks ago, but who hasn't seen them everywhere else.

Painting and Weeding

Forced to stop due to the rain, this seems as good a time as any to give an update. Last weekend was busy with Patrick pushing me much harder than I prefer to work. But as long as he's working, I feel bad to relax. Right now it's a bit different though, while he finishes the final touches in the closet, I'm resting my back. I guess I pushed myself too hard and have had a horrible back ache since Wednesday.

So yes, we're finishing the closet now because last weekend we got a bit distracted and painted the kitchen.


Now we finally have a finished room. We even put up our first picture frames. The light yellow makes the room feel so wonderfully warm and cheerful. Patrick has had breakfast in there a few times now, despite the wobbly table and ugly cabinets. Now it's about the nicest looking room we have. We also spent a large chunk of our time, most of Sunday, creating a frame on the wall above the washer and dryer so that we could put up shelves. We attached the frame to three vertical studs and then were able to attach the shelves nicely in the middle of the nook. I helped draw up the design and find the correct dimensions for everything, but mostly this project was Patrick's. He's clearly very proud of the job he did.



Those three pictures took all our time last weekend and shockingly, even though we were so close to finishing the closet we didn't work on it at all. We just can't focus. The closet is finished now though. We sanded down the new plaster and painted yesterday and Patrick has been in the bedroom most of the afternoon assembling the closet organizer.


The rest of this weekend, I got out into the garden and finally put in some good time pulling up Oxalis.


Actually, this one isn't a before picture, these pretty flowers are still taunting me in the corner but here is the nice stretch of ground that I worked on.


I cleared out everything around a bunch of irises that we apparently mowed over last year, not being able to see them under all the weeds. They're badly in need of dividing which I'm sure I'll get to eventually...

But the irises that I divided last fall and moved to the back of the garden look wonderful and now that the lavender next to them is in bloom, I really love the contrast.



Everything is finally starting to come up, even the bulbs that I planted far too late in the season. And I can't really be bothered to think of transitional phrases etc. so here you are.


Our Dark Star Ceanthonus, still only partially blooming.



Grape Hyacinth growing around some of my roman chamomile. The chamomile helped while I was picking out the tiny clovers in and around the grape hyacinths, the smell was absolutely wonderful. I'll be putting many more of them around the garden.


The daffodils in this group will be opening any day. Two have already opened in a slightly more sunny spot.


There are two left over tulips in front of the group. Then, the same tulips, just plain red ones, in the front have opened on each side of the front stairs.


Not quite up yet but looking promising are the Hostas I had in pots last year.


Other things coming up aren't so welcome. I have slightly fewer onions spread throughout the yard than Oxalis and their pretty white flowers are starting to emerge.



I quite like the flowers but the leaves are pretty ugly, besides the fact that these are weedy. The blackberries are also coming back.


And I guess that's about all.

Paint and Plaster

During the past three months or so, we've worked on and off, little by little, on the front room walls. The front room more than any other had very bad paint, not color, although I can't stand any of the colors the house came with, but the paint was dimpled and cracked on all the walls. It wasn't peeling or falling off but it wasn't good. I decided that I'd scrape the paint off the walls, around the cracks, at least, but found that all the imperfections we were seeing in the paint were not coming from the plaster. The plaster is wonderfully flat and strong away from the cracks that actually were telegraphing through. So I decided to scrape all of the front room. Took forever and was quite dusty, but it's done now.


We've repaired all the cracks on this side of the room and skim coated the wall on the right of the picture and one more across the way. We won't remove the paint above because when we first started to scrape in that area we found that there isn't any finished plaster up there. There used to be a border all the way around the room and above it there was just the rough scratch coat and it's really hard to peel the paint from that. So we'll just plaster over it all around and put up a new border. You can also see to the right a paint sample! I want one more, slightly lighter but this front room will be green.

We went a little paint sample crazy last weekend. The front room has been our focus for months now but actually the kitchen and bathroom have been ready for paint for a while. The bathroom will probably be bluish but I'm not happy with the samples I put up. The kitchen , though, will be yellow (with white cabinets and wood countertops) like the picture below.


I'll pick up another yellow sample slightly darker to see if it works better but this might be the right one. I also put up a very light purple before but it doesn't work, the room will need a warm color with all the white, stainless and fluorescent white lights.

This last weekend, we also finished replacing the missing shelves in our kitchen built-in. Inexplicably, when we bought the house, there were these wire shelves resting on the remnants of the solid shelves that were cut out of the built-in (and not cut well either).


But now we have pretty primed pine shelves. Still need to paint them with glossy white but we also need to use the shelves.


Then there is the big job we took on this last weekend, the first Patrick and I have done together for a while. When we first bought the house, the closet in the back room which is now our bedroom, was big (about 7x2) but it had a regular 30 inch door. So you could step into the closet, turn and walk three feet more into the closet. Very strange and not very useful so we had our contractor make the opening wider.


They widened it quickly enough but they didn't finish the framing and drywalling until last month... not really excusable in my mind. But it's done now.


You can see the purple paint sample that I bought to try in the kitchen in the middle. I like it in the bedroom but it's a bit too light. Anyway, super eager now that the closet was finished, we bought this simple closet organizer.


The pink wall looked like it was in good enough condition. The back baseboard was rotten on one side so we would replace it but after that just a bit a plaster repair in that area, paint and install. Finally an easy job.

...But when we stepped into the closet to check out the baseboard, I noticed a very straight line down the middle of the back wall. I pick at it a little with my finger and some fell off. Damn. That pink is paint on top of green paint on top of 80 year old wallpaper.


So a bit annoyed, we went off to Home Depot again and got a wallpaper scorer and a spray to dissolve the glue, then scraped late into the night determined to install the organizer tomorrow. Most of Sunday, I plastered over the wallpaper we couldn't scrape off and the holes from the plaster that was pulled away with the wallpaper until it got to whitish yellow state above. Sunday, we also wrenched off the baseboard and about 5 pieces of lathe that were also rotten in the area and maybe half a square foot of plaster. Before screwing in the new baseboard, we sprayed in a can and a half of spray foam to stop the strong draft that had been freezing me since the moment I knelt down to do the plastering. Seems to be working. After spreading on a second layer of plaster Monday night, the bottom corner looked like this.


With the third coat at the bottom yesterday, the area is almost flat. This weekend I'll sand down the plaster repair and the top of the baseboard which has gotten its own accidental coat of plaster, then we'll paint and Patrick will be able to finally install the closet organizer.

Eight months without a working closet has certainly been long enough, I'll definitely be posting a finished picture after this weekend.