Dirt

Today was a gorgeous day.  When looking up that is.  The sky was bluer than blue, the birds sang, crows were loudly busy, and hawks wheeled spectacularly overhead.

Looking down however, was all about dirt.  It rained most of yesterday and all the night before.  Our yard is a few inches of dirt sitting on clay.  Wet clay.  Red clay.  Brown clay.  Slimy clay.  (Heh.  Dr. Seuss I am not.)  Tempting-to-dogs clay.  Dig-down-a-little-and-you've-created-a-stagnant-pond clay.   I-see-years-of-dirt-improvement-ahead-of-us clay.

Be that as it may, it was too nice to not work outdoors.  The project of the day was finishing the composter bins.  We moved it into position and finished stapling on the chicken wire.  I even got to put stuff in it.  Woot!

It's waaaay over there across the slime dirt.  I'm fine with the location, I just know myself though.  I won't bother to take the kitchen compost out there if I have to dig out the gumboots every time!  (We won't even think about the long mosquito season.)

So to help solve that issue we built a "path."  Not even, not pretty, but it will get the job done for now.

We put down the round stones for walking on and shifted some of the crazy paving stones to at least cover up some of the mud.

We had to pry up stone from wherever in the yard we could find it!

The pathway is still a few feet short but I'm going to live with it as it was too exhausting by this hour to even think about going around the corner to buy a few more and haul them home.

I may have to fix the wobbliest blocks so I don't break an ankle but we didn't want to put too much effort in something that's supposed to be temporary.

We've been feeding the barrel composter for a year and it was too heavy for me to turn it anymore.  So that "compost" is now the base material in the new composter and we need to find a better place to put it than against the fence there.  It took some time to figure out what to put in it besides kitchen scraps to actually create compost rather than slime.  Nasty, nasty, nasty!  And I won't fill it up too full again either!  Behind the fence you can see green tarps covering the rear neighbor's very neat but massive wood pile.  He has spent most of the past two months out there with chainsaw and log splitter and must be hugely pleased to have the job done.   I'm pleased the bright blue tarps have been replaced by dark green ones.  Of course everything will be springing green again soon and we have hopes for some plantings along the fence on our side.   Our mud pit can't be very scenic from their side either!

The dogs, thank goodness, mostly lounged on the deck out of the mud.  They do like to dig in the dirt/clay and make small ponds.  I guess it isn't so much fun when their people are around watching.  :-)

Even so, the feet are always dirty.  And this is after the wipe-down with a "dog" towel.  My vacuum cleaners (six!) are very precious to me.  Sigh.

The Tramp has taken his achy body to bed early.  I got some more done on the bag.  A bit of glue, some flowers and a few crystals.  I'd change some things if I could but this is a use-what's-available project.

While the glue was drying I pulled out my little houses.  I haven't touched them for so long!  I cut some more house pieces and watched a weird movie while ripping out foundation papers.  Now there are new grandchildren and the others are growing so fast I need to print out more photos for the little windows.  Now if I could just get my children to send me photos directly rather than my having to mine for them on Facebook.  Sheesh!

Tomorrow I've got two t-shirt quilts to finish and two churn dash memory quilts to start.  I think I've got some major cleaning up to do in the morning before I can start!  Just another form of "dirt."  (to say nothing of the usual vacuuming!)  :-)