Susan’s been pretty good about it, but I haven’t done much in terms of reportage or documentage since the pre-renovation demolition commenced last week — in part because I was somewhat deflated when the house’s equivalent of the famed Al Capone’s vault (ours being a crawlspace section of the bedroom that’s been walled off and …
There’s an article in the California section of today’s L.A. Times that covers the pinch gardeners are feeling during these tough economic times. True, true… services like that are among the first to get cut when money belts get tightened. Susan and I canceled the twice-a-month visits from our gardening crew a few months ago, …
Early on in the planning stages of the upstairs renovation, Susan left a folder on my desk containing documents related to the house that I leafed through again this morning — this time a bit more studiously. Some deal with the foundation work she had done when she bought the house in 1999, and others …
Holiday shopping for my sweetie is mostly a hit/miss scenario. While I can be pretty specific and disproportionately demonstrative in what I want to unwrap on the big day, answers from her to “whatcha want for Christmas?” can range from sheepishly “I dunno…” to adorably petulant “Iwantthehouserenovationdone!” Mostly, it’s the former. And that leaves me …
The front steps of our house are a pit of darkness. I swear, any ambient street light gets sucked into the risers like a black hole. This is something Susan’s wanted to address permanently for a while, and something we band-aid each Halloween and Christmas season when we install temporary lighting to temporarily provide some …
Let me start off by saying that it’s still a shame our tenant Joe died this past April. But it’s also a bit of a toss-up in that while Joe might still be alive had he sought out an assisted-living situation, he also might have hated such an environment, and so in a way his …
Back in February I called bullshit on a neighbor, who for whatever reason rather than during a day during the workweek, purposefully schedules his gardening crew to come do their yardwork on Saturday mornings and on that particular one they spent a combined bunch of hours with an illegal gas-powered leafblower going full blast and …