Random Update-y Stuff

Orkin Man has come and gone. We get a 7-10 day follow-up by the guy who usually is “on this route” & then it’s every other month for a year. Told our neighbor. She frowned and said “Oh no! The people in that house [she lives next to us, the people on her other side] have been fighting them since they moved in [about a year and a half ago].” Which is just as the Orkin Man said — usually carpenter ants are a neighborhood problem & there’ll be a primary colony where the queen lives & then they’ll set up multiple secondary colonies as they need more space.

We did lots of yardwork today. The backyard actually looks maintained. It’s been mowed, weed-whacked, weeded… I cut the sage back to a quarter of the size it had grown to — again… and then P attacked the blackberry bushes & oregon grape that had gone completely out of control on the side of our house. And we borrowed above neighbor’s tree trimmer & really took a bunch of stuff out. And we trimmed the pear tree away from the power/phone/cable/etc lines in front of the house, finally. He ended up putting out nine of those paper yardwaste sacks, plus the usual big ol’ yardwaste tote. I cleaned up where the kids have been dumping dirt from the garden too, so it looks really nifty. We were planning on being out there a couple hours this morning & it turned into an all day project. And I didn’t even get the crazy climbing roses in front of the house trimmed back. Next week maybe.

Yesterday M1 was singing to herself, “Yo-deh-lay-hee-hoooo… I want to go to the swi-mming pool…”

Watched Spirited Away last night. Damn, that was some beautiful stuff. We let M1 stay up and watch it too. It took her a little bit to process it, but she ended up really liking it.

We’ve been tentatively thinking of trying to find a house that’s a little more appropriately sized for four people, probably next spring. I know we need to do this because the feeling of always having someone underfoot is only going to get worse as the kids get bigger and need to have their own space… but damn I’m going to miss this little neighborhood. I like the people next door, I like the people across the street, there are kids M1’s age (next door a girl two weeks younger and across the street a girl one year older & they all love playing together), there’s a kid M2’s age (one month older next door). They’re all good people. And then there’s the school a block from here. I love it too — M1 had such a good experience in kindergarten, and this school (and from what I understand, the entire school district) really seems to have its act together. My cousin from the east coast visited a couple weeks ago & was looking at the end of year stuff M1 brought home and was all “This is amazing… and this is a public school?” She was shocked. I loved it.

Tired. Only a half hour until the new Iron Chef America. It sure isn’t the original, but Alton Brown narrates & I think it’s Chef Batalli tonight so there should be some humorous banter anyway. (You might think if I’m tired maybe I would go to bed, since I have no homework. It’s a logical thought, but if I go to bed before about 10, I wake up around midnight & am up for a big chunk of the night then. Annoying).