Isle Collins, in the strait of Murray No-Hill

While I'm just itching to start the kitchen renovation by knocking out a false wall in the kitchen, I've promised myself not to do it until I have enough money to fix whatever I discover behind it. So that will wait indefinitely while our new (to us) appliances hang in my mom's laundry room. Then I'll build a couple of new cabinets, and am ordering all the doors from Rockler because I don't want to make them.

In the meantime, we got some rain this week. Maybe this is why our house is higher than the ones around us. Everyone else still had some yard left. The water was within a foot of the joists in the crawlspace. When the water got pretty high that night, some people in a dinghy hit the chimney wall on their way to the cars stranded in the picture below.


The microwave circuit breaker kept flipping that night. Reviewing my electric notes today, I saw the cable to that outlet runs under the house instead of through the attic like the rest of the runs. Everything else is fine, though my car has been wedged in a mud rut since Tuesday, as nothing is really dry yet. Most of the yard mulch is still hanging around, too. Mostly, this has taught me that when we build the shed, it needs to be at least 1' off the ground.

Kinda Like Twin Peaks? The ugly details

Our neighbor across the street was found dead on his front porch this morning. Weird stuff has been happening there for several weeks. J called the non-emergency # at 5 AM last week on a very large white woman pacing the street in front of the neighbor's house and yelling, "Black Willy! Black Willy!" Eventually, a man whom we guess she was referring to emerged from the house. I don't think either of them lived there but we had seen her peeling out of the driveway several times in the neighbor's truck. I thought he was her dad.

We have met all the neighbors, wacky or not, renters and owners, and this guy seemed subdued and nice, and walked his cute little black dog 5-6 times a day in the park. He was a skinny man in his 50s and we think he was dealing or doing, or at least had a medical reason to be growing. Foil has covered one of their windows since we moved in, and we don't live in a region where heat loss is a problem.

Another house for sale? That would make it all 6 houses surrounding us. Maybe someone will buy all of them up and offer us a pile of money too, so they can build a mega-mansion or an apartment complex. It really is amazing.

Paint-your-own Pottery

For birthdays we like to try new things, and I'd never painted my own set of dishes (outside of the fourth grade). I didn't manage to get a whole set of dishes done, but did make a plate, of the house, and some of its cats. I wanted to write something creative on the back but we ran out of time so now I have a record of the gas price on my birthday.

My sister made a box with a penguin handle and Jason painted a bowl for ice cream, which I'm sure will be used. The house looks about as lopsided as it actually is, so that is a win for my artistic skillz.

Landscaping help

We went to a kind-of local nursery (across the river and south, Jacksonville proper is 2hrs in diameter) looking for zucchini and tomatoes, since it's time for our second planting season. I asked the man at the counter how much they charged for lanscape design. He said Mr. Trad draws them for free, you just have to buy all your plants there, and can use their installation service or do it myself over time. We are meeting at the end of the month. I figure it will be cheaper to have a plan than to plant things willy-nilly, right, Jason? I know I like formal plantings, but I think the house likes cottagey-plants. The lot is 50 x 100 with an incomplete city sidewalk, narrow original driveway and 4 fully grown fat trees threatening to eat power lines/fall on neighbor during hurricane Shoot Me Now. Our main needs include:

A barrier bed to keep adult walkers on the sidewalk and kids running to the park from cutting across our front walkway (if you're within spitting distance of my couch you are too close!)
A hedge to block out the neighbor's motion sensor driveway light
Plants which won't mind being flooded twice a year or only five hours of sunlight a day
Suggestions for pavement/shed placement (Me=clueless!)

Meanwhile, in the backyard, our spreading butternut squash vine has killed lots of grass but is popping them out like a bunny, and there are 15 broccoli babies from last year's seeds.