She’s Young and With It

The neighborhood meeting was less annoying the second time around. The developer hired a green art non-profit to develop our community spaces and trail. So the plan now is to get the community garden up and going very soon just to show some progress. I am excited about the potential and anything that brings the community together is a good thing. I think anyway… Plus, they are receptive to the idea of a dog park. Fingers crossed!

Saturday I decided to begin work on a butterfly and hummingbird garden. Of course, I went out and bought the plants before I actually dug the bed. Ahem. Then on Sunday we had massive rains and blustery winds so I could not dig the bed. Now we are into the week and I work and stuff, so when will I dig the bed? That is a very good question.

This is a very trying week as we are trying to teach the dogs (Callie and Sherman anyway) to stay off of the furniture (bed, sofa). That is no easy task when they have had free reign up until this point. There has been very little sleep and occurrences of high crankiness. Wish us luck!

Whoa! My blog does not look good on IE7. That is quite a surprise. I knew it was slightly wonky in Firefox, but that is nothing compared to the wonkiness in IE7. I suppose I should try to fix that soon. Hmmm…

There has not been much of importance going on. We attended a really annoying neighborhood meeting regarding our community spaces. That is a long story and pretty boring if you do not live in the ‘hood. There is another one this weekend and I suppose I should go even if I will be annoyed following the meeting.

What have I been up to? I go outside and look at my plants everyday. I long wistfully for a large budget to totally landscape the yard and to build a patio. Sue (yay, blog!) turned me on to MyFolia. It is kind of like Ravelry, but it is for gardeners. Here’s my page if you join up and want to add me. I had actually been thinking that I wanted to begin a gardening journal to track changes, what works, what does not work, etc. I think MyFolia will serve that purpose and make it a little more fun!

Other than gardening stuff and watching tv, we have been trying to take the dogs on more walks to get them better at walking on a leash and not dragging us down the street. Neko has her issues, but she is so small that she does not cause too much trouble. Callie is getting pretty good about walking with a loose leash. Sherman… well, Sherman can be good when he wants to… but most of the time he yanks me all over the street. Callie and Sherman are signed up for some basic training that begins in about a week. We had to cancel the dog training we scheduled last fall so we are finally registered again. Here’s hoping for a good training experience this time around.

We also decided that Sherman might be more Anatolian Shepherd than Great Pyrenees after meeting a guy at the park who told us his dog was an Anatolian Shepherd mix. That dog was very Sherman-like. Apparently Anatolian Shepherds are very obstinate and well, that is a very good word for describing Sherman.

A last note… Our Basil cat is aging and it makes me very sad. He is still his spry talkative self most of the time, but his Inflammatory Bowel Disease has been acting up. We had to put him on some antibiotics and then some appetite stimulants and now we are monitoring him closely. He seemed to relapse a little this week and I am hoping he does not need antibiotics permanently. Basil turned 14 this month. I guess some signs of age are to be expected but it is still tough. Sometimes I worry that the addition of three dogs in such a short time frame aged him a bit due to added stress.

Clint was offered a job as a designer at a video game company. Hooray! I mean designer as in graphic designer, not a game designer.

We went to Round Top on Saturday. It was fun but tiring. And I got a sunburn. It was a tin and bird sort of day.

Yesterday I aerated most of the front lawn. It took a very long time and I have not even finished composting. I am going to wait a week or so to see if the front yard looks healthier before I set in on aerating and composting the backyard.

Did it take me long enough to come back to SXSW, which occurred about three weeks ago? I am still catching up on everything. Right after SXSW, meaning the day after the last show we attended, we also planted some big 15-gallon Alphonse Karr bamboo plants. We planted four of those suckers and those were some dang big holes to dig. It wiped me out!

The bamboo immediately started growing and dropping leaves for spring so they are not so pretty right now. As soon as they are pretty, I will take a photo. I want more! I have a clumping bamboo obsession.

Oh right, back to SXSW. I will say it with pictures…

As you can see from the photos, my favorite shows were She & Him and Herman Dune. Unfortunately, The Wedding Present sound was poor. Yo La Tengo were good, but too short. J. Mascis was nostalgic by playing Dinosaur Jr. songs until he entered into extreme guitar wankery. Thurston Moore sounded like Sonic Youth!

The Odd: We went to see Karl Blau play and I was not even sure that we saw Karl Blau play. There were no introductions after a frightening female performance art piece and Karl Blau was kind of rapping with a repetitive guitar thing going on. I had to go home and google him to see if we actually saw Karl Blau. He did not sound like the Karl Blau that I have heard singing. It was him though and he looks different in nearly every photo I found of him.

The Fun: We met Janice of copacetic fame! Janice was way nice and way fun. Yay!

The End.