I had intended to reseed the labyrinth today with a mix of winter rye and shade, and to plant the daffodils I dug up last spring when I planted the ferns, but plans change. The area where I’m putting the daffodils (the “dance floor patio” on the upper level) was very wet; tomorrow will be dryer. The bulbs seem to have survived for the most part, and some are beginning to put out leaves.

The reseeding I have no excuse for, except I began to think it might be better to wait till the end of the month. I first seeded it on February 1 last year, so I can wait until then this year as well.

I did get some busy work done, getting all the votives prepped, i.e., cleaned and restocked with fresh candles, and getting the Christmas greenery chopped up and stowed away. The air is redolent with fir behind me. We need to have many fires to get all this stuff burned by the end of February. Last year branches lay around until they turned black, and the ground beneath them. I don’t want to let that happen again.

And finally, I decided that since the weather was so beautiful and warmish, I would go ahead and get the bamboo fencing finalized around the men’s loo.

This is the area we’re talking about:

On the right is the area where the tree fell last October, and it’s even more bare now without the overgrown undergrowth behind it. The men’s loo area on the left is even more bereft and open.

So I got to work and in less than three hours I had this part of the yard all fixed up:

I think it’s going to be very nice. At the very least, it provides a modicum of privacy, and I think by the end of the summer it will probably be covered with ivy and/or honeysuckle, which will provide even more privacy. Then when the ferns recover in the spring, they’ll really look good against the backdrop.

It was not difficult getting the fence up. The back fence should be pretty easy. The rest of the fire area fence, not so easy, because of all the bamboo and having to move the firewood, and I discovered while on the other side of the fence in the Ellis’s back yard that the pecan tree directly behind the fire area is almost totally rotten. So I think I’ll probably wait until that’s down before installing that section of the fencing.

That was enough for the day, I thought, so I’m just sitting out here blogging and listening to the usual iTunes labyrinth playlist and having a drink in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the fact that our country has more often than not decided to do the right thing.

I do have some thinking to do about the eastpoint of the labyrinth. The element connected to the east is Air, and I’ve been collecting items that I think might be an appropriate installation for the east:

Left to right, we have a windchime, a twirly sun thing, and a solar-powered mirror ball. The windchimes are not the ones I want, they’re just a conceptual placeholder. The ones I would like to install are lower in tone, the “tenor” range. I also have a handblown glass star with a gold center that will go into the final mix. Another option might be prayer flags.

Leaving aside what an idiotic idea a solar-powered mirror ball is, think about it, help me think this out. Here’s the eastpoint we’re talking about:

It’s the entrance to the labyrinth. I would like to do something like take one or two of the big pieces of rebar that I have left and create an arch or something over the entrance from which the Air items could be suspended. I don’t want it to be cluttered, like some daft old hippie’s front porch, but simple and understated like the other points of the compass are.

Any suggestions?

I was in a pissy mood this afternoon, and have been for several days. I was thinking about blogging and analyzing all that, or at least posting on Facebook MOV I.1 and see if anyone picked up on it, but then I got home.

All this made me happy. There’s the manila package from Summer, who returned a Neo-Futurist book. The little box is a piece of fence equipment that I couldn’t get from Home Depot or Lowe’s, so now I can reattach a pole across the top of the fence at the woodpile.

And the big bundles are my bamboo reed fencing.

Here are they unwrapped. Each 25′ length is bundled in a handy carrying case, stitched closed.

When unwrapped, we get this:

And here’s a closeup of the texture:

There’s actually quite a bit of space between the reeds.

It was too cold to do any real work, of course, plus I have to go pick up some wire with which to attach the fencing to the chain link, but I couldn’t resist standing it up over in the men’s loo to see how it might look.

Quite nice. We now have to consider whether to stain it, and how.

As soon as the weather starts to warm up, I can start installing it for sure. Huzzah for yard work! I’m ready to be outside again.

The view from my labyrinth, sometime after midnight on the first night of the year:

It was beautiful.

I went out to prep the labyrinth yesterday afternoon for an evening with Craig, lighting all the candles as dusk approached so that I wouldn’t have to do it later.

I got to the men’s loo, and suddenly realized…

…there was no privacy. My neighbors had had all the shrubbery/underbrush cut down on their side of the fence. I don’t think it’s the Ellis’s exactly, they are not at home. I think it’s my other backyard neighbor, because all the growth on his side of the back fence is gone too. I think probably he did the Ellis side of the yard as a favor to them. (The dog pen in the area right there also appears to have been pulled out. I’d really like to buy that small piece of property. I’d really like to buy the shed as well, maybe have a studio or something in there.)

Here’s a view of the firepit area.

Well. One feels naked. As it were.

So now I’m in the market for artistic/nice ways to obscure the view here. More bamboo, clearly, although that won’t work along the western/back fence. Climbing vines of some kind, perhaps.

The floor is open for discussion.