lindapendant

It all started with a new fence. That inspired me to transform the backyard and give it some love for a change. It has been a neglected mess for years on end and I haven't cared. Every day for the past week and a half minus the weekends, I got out there at about 6:30 am and did stuff and things for six to eight hours without a break which caused me to collapse onto the couch with four Tylenol with codeine and a screaming back.



I put in brick trim around this garden, dug out the tired soil and added fresh black earth mixed with peat moss and then I trimmed the periwinkle with scissors stem by stem and planted portulaca.



I ripped apart the circular rock garden from the front yard, hauled a metric shit ton of rocks to the back yard, reassembled the garden, filled it with fresh earth and planted a bleeding heart, flocks and some stuff I don't know the name of which is a perennial.



I'll be repainting the deck and I replaced some of these mother fucking heavy flagstones on the walkway which had started to crumble.



I edged this garden with brick and hauled a butt load of rocks to cover the ground under the cedar to the right of the shed which I trimmed and tied up because the winter had flattened it. I planted a bunch of pots with lobelia, begonia, marigold and some basil in the larger pot. I planted nasturtium in the window box.



I edged this garden with brick, threw down fresh black soil and sowed wild flower seed, trimmed back the lilac a lot, and planted more nasturtium in the cement urn thingum. I got down on my hands and knees and dug out a shit load of weeds on the lawn. Shit. Load. Then I reseeded the lawn.

Not shown is an area where the hose is wound up and I put down and leveled some flagstones that had to have weighed thirty pounds each at the very least. Mud be gone under that damn hose, praise the Lord.



I planted cherry tomatoes in the pot behind the rock garden and scrubbed the bird bath and transplanted a hosta beside it.

On Friday I went to my ex's house and dug a new garden and transplanted Justin's raspberry bushes and confiscated an antique phone for payment.

Stay tuned for riveting information on my transformation of the front yard.

Yesterday I left the house (incredible, right?) to run errands and at Canadian Tire (who by the way has signs up indicating the department names that are written in three foot tall letters in French but can't find it in their heart to write the English translation in a six point font - fuck you guys! Key word: Canadian Tire. But come to think of it, maybe it's illegal here to post English shit in public, who the hell knows anymore?) and there was a flyer on the door with a photo of a lost dog, and the only information given other than a phone number, was the dog's name.

Now, I mean - really? Really? That's all you got? I'm thinking about how if I see a Maltese whatzit running loose, the first thing I'm going to do is ask, 'Hey, is your name Bambi, and did you run the hell away from your peoples?', because I'm totally down with helping this dog find her home, but perhaps ACTUAL USEFUL INFORMATION WOULD HELP ME HERE.

Maybe you could tell me what area of the city she was last seen fucking off. Maybe you can tell me if there's anything specific about her which will help me identify her. Maybe she's missing an ear, or she limps, or she's got a pink spot on her otherwise black nose.

People are just plain stupid.

Anyway.

I made a wreath.

Justin won a scholarship to study Mandarin in Taiwan for a year, all expenses paid. All of them.

He gets to live there for another year and not spend a dime, and I can't even express how damn happy I am for this kid of mine.

I'm positively drunk with joy.

I've been working on this for a few days and finished it up this morning.





I think it's fair to say I've found a new obsession.

I'm a sucker for advertising tins. You put a mediocre product in an attractive tin and chances are I will buy it.

But when I see attractive vintage advertising tins with a few scratches and a bit of rust and a dent or two on them I'm pretty sure my heart rate accelerates, and then I covet them.

Awake at 3:00 am with nothing to do, I'm looking at my pretties on Etsy and some 'crafter' with a pair of tin snips is selling 'bookmarks' out of 'old reclaimed tins', and they're old tins all right - worth a whole lot more money when they haven't been cut into bookmarks. I could just about cry.

This reminds me of people who bring an old chair to Antiques Roadshow and are told it's worth a hundred dollars, but would have been valued at one hundred thousand if they hadn't stripped it and sanded it down.

Ugh!

LJ just decided my mood was 'thoughtful' and added it automatically. What's up with that? If LJ is able to mind probe me, it should have chosen 'irked'.

I made this simple wreath today for my bedroom door. I am crazy about wreaths and I'm pretty sure I have too many.

I like doing things cheaply, so to make this one, I took apart a coat hanger, shaped it into a circle and then wrapped it in taupe fabric and held the end down with hot glue. As you may notice, I can't do much without a cat helping.



From time to time when I am at a dollar store, I check the greenery and buy a cluster so that when it comes time to craft, I have several kinds on hand to make things interesting. This wreath has six different types in it.

How strange is it when you realize you've lost some techno you paid over $100 for and your stomach drops and you get really pissed at yourself for being careless and then you come to find that the very same techno is being dumped for $25 now that there are newer, better, shinier versions, so then you don't feel bad anymore? You're sort of all 'Oh well. I had them for at least two years. Whatever.'

At the same time, when you paid $100 for this techno, you went around saying 'Holy God these headphones kick solid ass, and now that you know they're going for $25 you think, 'They couldn't have been very good at all. Now that I think of it - they actually sucked ass, they didn't kick it at all!

So now I feel as though I've got to shell out $100 to get decent headphones that kick solid ass, but then in two years they'll be worth $25 so they've actually got to suck, right?

First world problems, I know.

Also, I shouldn't have to tolerate ants in the house when it's supposed to be spring but it snowed on Friday.

I nearly tossed this bedside table out.



It was gathering dust and waiting for a garage sale.

Oh my God have you ever?



I sewed up this ridiculous fish with zipped lips because I saw one and had to have my very own for no apparent reason. I had found one of these guys around the internets and filed it away in my to do drawer and then promptly forgot about it.

Then yesterday, some fabric arrived from Taiwan and one piece in particular screamed FISH SCALES in my face and that made me remember my fish dream.



I have made a tutorial for you zippered fish pouch lovers here because as far as I know, there isn't a pattern or tutorial for these guys, or at least I couldn't find one.



I realize that I don't have much to say anymore and this journal has mostly turned into a place where I just dump my junk, but whatever. LJ feels like a ghost town and I miss the people who used to update on a regular basis but I stick with it because some of you *are* still sharing your shit and I like keeping tabs on y'all.

Maybe one day I will have stuff to say outside of my own head and I will bore you to tears and make you wish I would stick to dumping my junk even though that crap bores you to tears too.

In other news.

Mad Men! Any day now!

Is anyone else hoping Don cheats on Megan this season? Raise your Hamm!

Yesterday, I tried to access www.antrhopologie.com and www.urbanoutfitters.com, and access was denied to me in accordance with the Quebec French Language Charter of Fucking Bullshit. Quebecors aren't allowed to access retail or service websites that do business in Quebec if their sites aren't available in French.

I pitched a damn fit when this happened and since I was in a Skype chat with Justin at the time, I asked him if he could access the sites from mildly oppressed Taiwan. He could. Of course he could.

I used a proxy server and went through the back door, but that's beside the point.

I know I need to stop writing about how pissed off I am about living under a Nazi dictatorship, but I just can't swallow this bitter pill without vomiting out some venom.