Today I’ve GOT to stuff the numbers into Quickbooks. That, as part of a day of general housecleaning. But really…I don’t want to know how desperate the dollar situation is.
$450 for the tree extermination and cleanup.
$150+ (when all is said and done, probably more like $225) for plants and gear to barricade the excavating puppy from digging up the proposed new shade screen
$158 for the water bill, the cost of refilling the pool whose water chemistry was again put out of whack by the devil-pod tree
$35 for a bag of dog food, moi having run out of patience with begging my son to keep me supplied with dog food for Charley
Ugh. During the winter, when utility bills are low, I can usually go about $300 over budget without breaking the bank. But this is ridiculous. Clearly, I’ll have to drain short-term emergency savings to cover half or more of those costs. What a bummer.
Oh well. At least I have some emergency savings. So can’t complain too much.
Ah, lovely. I’ve lost another earring. Ugh and ugh.
Returned the trellises I’d planned to use to block the view into the backyard while the vitex and hopseed bushes grow, retrieving about $50.
On reflection, I realized it would be a lot less hassle and expense simply to wear clothes while swimming next summer than to cobble together a jury-rigged privacy screen. Costco is selling light T-shirts in the underwear department. They’re apparently intended as underwear, but they come in bright colors—from a distance they’ll look like clothes. Two pairs of my jeans are fraying around the cuffs, so I can convert those into cut-offs.
Truly, I loathe squishing my body into a Spandex girdle so I can take a five-minute dip in my own backyard pool. At least with cut-offs and a cheap T-shirt, I won’t have to break my fingernails, cut off my respiration, and resort to cussing just to go swimming.
Charley is excited about the excavation possibilities in the area where I’ve dug up the soil—had not only to dig holes for four new plants but to dig trenches and run new irrigation line, and while I was at it, trench and irrigate around the existing vitex, which I hope will flourish in the absence of the devil-pod tree. This required me to wet down the entire area, since the dirt here in Arizona has the consistency of cured concrete.
So now Charley not only has a nice patch of sticky mud in which to frolic, much of that mud is nicely tilled and ripe for some serious digging. For the nonce it’s barricaded off with old, decrepit trellises, yard furniture, and a big trash can laid on edge. That’s a mess, and so this afternoon while I’m out to meet the client, I’ll need to stop by a Home Depot and pick up some more wire fencing. The stuff works nicely to deflect the dog, but two more lengths of it will cost almost as much as the returned trellises.
By the end of the summer, the hopseed bushes should be high enough to top the wall, and with any luck at all, the vitex will have filled out enough that by the summer of 2013 the combined jungle should restore my solitude. Except for the swarms of helicopters, of course…but as for those guys, they shouldn’t be peering into my yard, the SOBs, so if their eyes are put out when they see a hideous old lady paddling around, they deserve what they get.
While digging up the ground, I discovered why the vitex has been struggling. To soften the dirt, I ran the sprinkler on the area around the tree for about a half-hour. Let the water soak in…and discovered that only about two inches of soil was dampened. The ground all around the vitex is so dry the water just ran off. It hasn’t gotten city water in years. The little tree must have been getting by on rain, at least until this year, when we’ve had hardly any rain at all.
So I fed it, installed a couple of sprinkler heads near it and also on the feeble cat’s-claw vine whose failure to thrive I’d blamed on the devil-pod tree—like the vitex, it, too, was getting virtually no water. Reminded myself that I’ll need to drag the hose over there about once a month in winter and once a week in summer.
Must prepare an estimate for the client, clean up this pigpen, fix the pool chemistry, clean the pump pot, schlep Harvey to the repair shop, and go buy enough gas to make it out to the Scottsdale meeting with said client.
And so, to work.
Images:
Vitex: Ripped off from PlantAnswers.com
Hopseed: Ripped off from Arizona Living Landscape and Design
I’ve never had a dog that did a lot of digging. Or much of a yard for him to dig in, for that matter. But I’ve read suggestions to give a dog a designated area for digging. Dunno if that would work for you and Charley or not.
Instead of swimming in a T and cutoffs, why not swim in your undies, hang them to dry and put clean ones on. Get some in turquoise or red or pink, even black, and it would look like a bathing suit from a distance.
@ Still Hangin’ In: That would work, too. It’s not so easy for me to find underwear that fits these days… 😉