The garage

Haven't posted much about the garage lately; you might even think it's been done for a long time now. It isn't. The outside is pretty much completely finished, and it looks very nice. For the last month or two Jeff has been working on wiring up the inside (you've never seen so many electrical outlets), and this weekend he started digging a trench diagonally through the back yard to bury the electrical cable from the house to the garage. After the electrical is in, he can finish drywalling the interior and we can plant some shrubs and flowers around the outside. I think we should have a garage-warming party... maybe in conjunction with Melina's third (!) birthday in April.

Garden notes

So the raised bed is in, filled with nice black dirt, and waiting to be planted. The neighbors down the street are also putting a garden in their planting strip, so I'm in good company. Yesterday I planted a few cloves of garlic (with Melina's help) and cut the support posts at the corners to a manageable size. Tomorrow I will make another trip to Home Depot for wooden caps for the support posts, and to Parr Lumber for one last board. Then I can plant! I will post a photo soon. I think it's looking pretty nice.

A new garden

This past week I managed to build a nice raised bed in the front planting strip. It's 20 inches high, 12 feet long, and 4 feet wide, with a one-foot wide flower bed on the sidewalk side. I stained it with some eco-friendly stain and filled it halfway up with fill from Jeff's garage project (topsoil and compost to come later). It kind of looks like a sore thumb at the moment, but only one neighbor has expressed skepticism about it (the one who also expressed skepticism about the chickens); everyone else has been curious and encouraging. I did spend one partially sleepless night worrying that I had gotten in over my head by putting such a huge and prominent raised bed in the front yard, where everyone can see it, judge it, steal from it, let their dogs pee on it, and judge my gardening abilities. I think the public exposure will encourage me to be a better gardener - even going so far as to water it regularly and do successive plantings of lettuce. Usually, I plant everything in one burst of early spring enthusiasm, water it occasionally, and then forget about it. This year I even plan to test the soil and use some of the compost I've been saving up. I'll post pictures soon.

Potty training

I've had a couple of requests about potty training progress. Basically, we're working on it, and once we get a few healthy days at home in a row, I think it will go pretty fast. The skills are there; the will fluctuates. But with the strategic use of stickers and Curious George underwear, I think we will have it figured out within the next month or two.

A sick bambina

Poor little M. is sick, which means that I am at home alternating between holding the puke bowl and running around doing odd jobs while she sleeps. It's another case of the strange, on-again-off-again stomach flu that she got last time. She was sick for half a day last Friday, low in energy on Saturday, and seemingly fine on Sunday and Monday; and this morning she is sick again. Apparently this is not abnormal, but it makes it hard to know when you can finally relax. She's such a poor, pathetic, grumpy little thing - on Saturday all she wanted to do was lay outside in the sun with Olallie, who, by the way, is also sick (though you wouldn't know it by looking at him). Right now she is laying on the basement floor (at her insistence), having finally grown tired of the 128th viewing of "Chicken Run."

Olallie has "sterile cystitis," which means that the pH in his bladder is very high, creating sharp little crystals that cut him and make him bleed. It has something to do with stress (probably from being forcibly relocated to my parents' house for a few months, to ease Jeff's allergies) and possibly something to do with eating too many carbs. I will have to feed him some special food for a while and hope that it goes away. If it doesn't, he'll have to go on the Atkins diet, which would probably be good for him anyway. Also, he has some sort of herpes virus in his eye (very common with cats) that makes his eyes tear up, and I have to put ointment in his eyes three times a day for five days. So I guess I might as well just give up on working this week to stay home and be a nurse. If the chickens or Jeff wanted to get sick, this would be a good time.