Mad cleaning rush, giant mulch pile, minor car accident, etc.
Well, as predicted last week or the week before, the vast majority of the cleaning for my brother’s return happened within the last 24 hours, ie, within the last 48 hours before he gets back tomorrow night.
Spare room: check. Bathrooms: check. Kitchen/dining room: check. Laundry room: check. Living room: meh, good enough.
I also got my office quasi- in order, or at least books were put back on the shelves (new shelves that my father installed that are actually mounted into the wall rather than just laid on supports that hopefully won’t come out of the rails mounted on the walls like the previous shelves) and the growing collections of Barbies and Funko Pops neatly arranged.
Hypothetically speaking, I may be approaching 30 of each.
The one on the right in the pic immediately above is the only new arrival this week. She looks a lot like one of my main characters, Betty, so I think I’ll make her Betty’s daughter… who, in the grand tradition of Betty, also started having kids in her teens and was a grandma by 40… which is to say Betty is a great-grandma in her 50s.
I need to start making episodes of the damn web series so y’all can know what I’m talking about, lol…
I did order another of the Four Frumps previously mentioned, but she won’t arrive til July, I think.
Anyway, I’m not done with pics:
You’ve seen all these dolls before, but there are a couple new Funko Pops in the mix.
Anyway, so the house is in some semblance of order, for the most part.
Whilst cleaning and organizing, I found an old Tommy Lee guitar pick I must have ordered from eBay years ago:
As for last week’s fire, the smell of smoke is finally gone. And I’ve ordered new curtains and sheers for the upstairs hallway. The curtains should be here in a week or so; the sheers are one of those “we’ll let you know when they’re back in stock” things.
But… since it is the Mercury retrograde, of course there was other bullshit this week.
The first I suppose is an error in judgement on my part. I need to mulch my flowerbeds, and I thought it would be more efficient to simply order a crapload at once for delivery to my driveway and then I would spend a day shovelling it into my wheelbarrow and distributing it around the property.
So… off I went to my usual source for mulch and gravel, where I was told the most I could get delivered in one trip with the smaller (ie cheaper) delivery truck was 8 cubic yards.
I had wanted 10, but figured 8 was just fine.
Folks, don’t order 8 cubic yards of anything.
That mulch pile is chest high and takes up as much room as my car. And while I did get some of it shovelled out on the first day or two, it pretty much looks the same as of this writing a week later.
Now, what I did distribute does look nice and seems to be helping with water retention (more so than weed blocking):
But goddamn is shovelling that shit hard work. Later that day, Facebook threw up the following image on my newsfeed:
There was a time when I would have said “oh, how sad that there’s just those tiny little ports for the plants!” but now I’m beginning to understand the wisdom of this sort of thing. No mulch, no weeds, still lots of flowers.
Anyway, after I finish this blog post, I gotta go out and make a dent in the goddamn mulch pile, which can’t be any less than 6 cubic yards, maybe 6.5.
Ugh.
From now on, I’m getting the bagged shit at Home Depot. The cost isn’t that much more, but the bags are manageable and if you’re smart with how you open them, you end up with a spout in the corner through which you can pour the mulch just where you need it, which is vital when you have thickly planted flowerbeds like I do.
Also, this fall I’m buying like 20 4″ pots of the hardy asters that bloom in the fall, because I have one of those in a back flower bed that I planted in the spring or fall of 2019 and it’s now a mass of green 3′ across that will become a mass of purple flowers 3′ across in the fall, and it chokes out all weeds. Just alternate those and Shasta daisies with a few spring bulbs and you have all your bases covered.
Anyway, I might have gotten more shovelling done over the week were it not for the second Mercury retrograde shitshow incident.
So… there’s this astrologer (I know, I know…) that my brother and I both read and lately he’s been kinda eerily accurate for me. In the horoscope for this last week, he threw in a “Drive carefully.” Tuesday I was headed down to Victoria to dump off the Buddha snow globe that torched my curtains last week as well as some other crap I don’t need at Value Village, plus run some other errands.
Mindful of the warning, I was extra paranoid on the Malahat on the way down.
Once the errands were done, I thought I’d head to Island View Beach for an hour of beachcombing for shiny rocks and whatnot. In the process of trying to get there from downtown Victoria I found myself headed south on Blanshard when I wanted to be going north, and as I went to change into the left lane to then turn left and go around the block, I shoulder-checked and thought I was clear and boom, some dude was there and I side-swiped him.
That lane had been clear right before then, so I dunno if he gunned it when the light turned green at the previous intersection or if he made a left onto Blanshard at the end of the green light in the other direction or what, but he was definitely going faster than my lane which had been stopped.
In any case, ICBC of course deemed it 100% my fault, and I now have to get some body work done.
At least no one was hurt.
Guy was kinda an ass, but whatever. I get being pissed off when you get hit, I mean shit like he was whining “what were you thinking at me?” Uh… I was thinking I was clear because I didn’t see you, you twerp. (I didn’t say that last bit, of course.) You wanna yell at me, fine. But Lord, I cannot stand a whiner.
Then he was on his phone and I thought he was calling ICBC’s Dial-a-Claim, which is what you’re supposed to do (and I called them as soon as I got home an hour later), except it became clear that he was actually phoning the police as if they were going to come and investigate. I actually heard him say “well, I want a cop here… no, I’m OK… no, she’s fine… well, I don’t know how this goes, I don’t exactly get into many car accidents… ” I got the impression whoever was on the other end of that 911 call gave him shit for wasting their time.
But I digress…
The weird thing is how there was a chain of screw-ups leading to that crash. First, my usual parkade was screwy, with a bunch of empty spots but every one of them had an awkward angle where I would have had to wedge in between one of the concrete pillars that encroached the front of the space and a car that was parked too close to the line on the other side. So then I headed to my second-choice parkade a few blocks away, which was fine.
Then when I was at my favorite clothing store, the clerk had a bitch of a time getting the electronic tag thing off one of the shirts I bought and she probably took 3 or 4 minutes retrying it on the magnet thingy that deactivates it before she was able to remove it.
Then I debated ordering takeout from Red Robin but decided I wasn’t quite hungry yet so I thought I’d head to the beach first.
Then there was some construction on Douglas and I thought, to Hell with it, I can turn onto Blanshard at the next block instead of going back up to Mackenzie, so I did, but I forgot that next block doesn’t let you turn left onto Blanshard, only right. And that’s when I had the accident… and in retrospect, I could have and should have stayed in the right lane, turned right to go around the block back onto Douglas and then just stayed there an extra block to get over to northbound Blanshard.
So… if I’d gotten parked in my usual parkade, all my errands would have been over a few minutes sooner and I would have missed that hit. Ditto if the plastic tag hadn’t taken so long to come off. Ditto if I’d ordered Red Robin (would have stayed on Douglas and turned on Coverdale). Ditto if I’d gone around the block the other way.
Shit like this makes one wonder about things like predestination vs. free will.
Point is, so then I had some crap to deal with that sidetracked me from chipping away at the giant pile of wood chips that is hogging my driveway.
I think it was Monday night when one of my friends said the last time he did something like order 8 cubic yards of mulch it took him 3 weeks to move it all. At this pace, I’m thinking he might be grossly underestimating how long it will take me, LOL…
Anyway, let’s wrap up with a couple of pics of flowers from the garden, as per usual:
