The Unfinished Projects of Spring

It is Autumn. Where did the Summer go? I took a long walk around the house and I noticed all the unfinished projects planned last spring. I am not frustrated; I am more amazed that the time escaped us.

The tree that fell last winter - still there. Like I expected to get up and leave (leaf?) or something. We had discussed getting a lumber company or logger to come out, thin out some of the overgrowth and pay us for the lumber. But the economy beat us up on that - if people are not buying houses, or fixing things up, they do not buy lumber and so the loggers do not look for the little purchases and clean-ups - they need to make money on the stuff people are buying. We could pay to clean it up, but that is an expense we cannot handle in the priority of things.

It is what we call a 'yay/boo.' Yay, that huge tree is not hurting anything, really. Boo, when it toppled, it must have disturbed the water table, so the pond is no longer there in our woods. Yay, we had less mosquitoes and we did not have to treat the pond for standing water. Boo, we did not see the ducks or hear the frogs as they enjoyed the pond.

Hedges grow extremely well in the wet summer we had, so we never got them trimmed as much as we would have liked. We did get a garden planted, late, but we are still picking squash and we put in a second planting of lettuce to hopefully get picked before a heavy frost. The corn gifted us with maybe 8 ears before it got sick and died. Nice corn stalks, however.

I have to believe that it will all be accomplished eventually. As my husband always says to me, "You are the only one bothered by it!"

When we start a new project, like the garage project, sometimes normal maintenance can suffer. We had a chilly day this week and when we took our warm jackets out of the closet, one of them had mildew on it. One of those rainy days caused water to seep in under the door of the closet, causing a moisture build up and attacked my husband's canvas cowboy coat. (I think it is a costume type thing - the South Philly boy in a cowboy coat and Stetson - oh, yeah, cowboy boots too. Go figure!) So washing and spraying with Lysol was the chore for that day. The excitement goes on...