Permit the Frog: Return of the hammer

By now, the only people reading this are probably our own future selves, indulging in nostalgia. Hello, future selves! And anyone else who happens to be hanging around.

Though we have not posted in a dog's age, we have been working steadily. Mostly on the garden. Currently it is rocking the free world with very beautiful lettuce, cabbage and our first-ever successful broccoli crop (yeah!), as well as promising pepper, tomato and bean patches. The peas, marigolds, squashes and radishes are a little more marginal as yet, but most still have the potential for greatness. We've expanded the areas we grow in, and without much digging at all. Now we can see that the entire backyard will somebody be producing food, and this vision makes us very happy. Next up: fruit trees!

House-wise, there has been a snail's pace attack on the remaining trim painting, which involves large ladders and the need for dry weather. Ladders suck and it's been rainy all May, hence the creeping progress. It will be done soon, though. We have our eye on some front porch work, but we have to wait until the four baby Eastern Phoebes fledge before we go out there with paint scrapers and belt sanders and circular saw. They are currently occupying a very crowded nest on the top of a porch column. You'll recall that we replaced that column, but we left the top plate and the nest in hopes they'd return. And they have! The parents are always around, hunting for insects and looking watchful.

Which brings me to the shed. It's been a bit of an eyesore since we moved it--propped up on concrete blocks and twisted askew from its taxing journey up the hill. Last week we suddenly got the notion to start making it a usable building once again. And so we are. Basically, it needs to have the bottoms of its walls shored up, the foundation rebuilt, and a floor frame and floor put in. Nothing to it.

We've done the first of those four things and started on the second. Shoring up the walls meant adding various bands, planks, diagonals, nailers and plates to the softly rotted wall studs. We're using whatever lumber we have around, making our miter cuts on the back porch, and taking our time. We've both hit our own hands with the hammer. Construction takes some re-getting used to. Also, there is a nest of bees or wasps living inside on the ceiling, so we sometimes have to wait for them to calm down before proceeding.

But the shed is looking much sturdier, and we've straightened out many of its funkier aspects. The days I spent watching my dad jack this thing up must have sunk in, because we've been able to jack it and nail stuff to it without any big hassles.

Yesterday we finished step one and moved on to step two: the two posts that will support the shed's front corners. We decided to use black locust posts for this, setting them in concrete. We already had one in our wood pile, and the other came from the back of our property, chain-sawed by John out of a downed locust tree. Carried that monster back to the yard on our shoulders. And ended up sawing our post out of it with a handsaw when the chainsaw blade proved too dull. This is living!