America, you are A Idiot.
This is all I am going to say about it: you elected George W. Bush because he was a manly chest-thumping cretin, and it got you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a budget surplus turned into a record deficit, ruinous tax cuts, and the Great Recession.
Now you’ve done worse.
Back at work on the Great Labyrinth Reclamation Project, this time on the southwest corner.
You may recall that the new fence, in cutting a straight line from one corner to the other, cut off some of my “landscaping” at the far end of the labyrinth, and so I am having to revamp that corner. It’s always been problematic in that the bricks that I used to create a border were continually being covered over by soil washing down the little slope there.
So my plan is to build a small wall and fill that in with dirt.
Here’s the bottom layer of wall:
And more:
I didn’t buy quite enough blocks, so back to Home Depot today. I will also buy the fill dirt to put in there and then seed it.
Meanwhile that back corner will become a nook of some kind:
I already had two large pieces of fieldstone, so I went ahead and put them down. I’ll get to this area later this week.
Onward!
I bought a timer for the sprinkler last week—none of the timers I had bought previously worked, of course—and so the labyrinth was watered while I was on Lichtenbergian Retreat last weekend. When I got home on Sunday, I went to check on things and was astonished to find:
The grass seed has already sprouted!
Now to keep it alive for another four weeks…
1:32 p.m.:
I’ve been working all morning, just futzing around with some sounds for the opening of SUN TRUE FIRE. Think the opening to Das Rheingold, or to Kevin Puts’ Symphony No. 2. Slow, low strings, building to some kind of crescendo…
I want to structure the entire work around the idea of a ritual: INVOCATION/CALL — AGONS (QUESTIONS, ENCOUNTERS, PROPHECIES) — REVELATION — RESOLUTION. The opening needs to introduce us to the mystical landscape we’re about to enter, and then we will have some great pillars of sound, with a solo tenor calling us: “drunk among them, lead the way a clear voice way…”
Of what I’ve written today, here’s what’s worth sharing: STF opening abortive attempt
(I think it’s nice, and I think it would come after a longer buildup before this point. It may go different paths than what I’ve indicated here.)
9:30 a.m.
I’ve rewritten the Chorale from the Christmas Carol “Christmas Present Street Scene.” Its weirdo chromaticism wasn’t ever really a problem, but the ending was always dicey since the sopranos had to sing high and divisi.
This rewrite had to begin with the same melodic phrase, which reappears before “Hey, boy, what day is today?” in the Finale and which was not problematic anyway. In general, I’ve kept the first parts of the two verses the same, just monkeying with the endings so that they don’t climb too high for inexperienced singers.
So the Abortive Attempt is done. I’ll set it aside and let it annoy me again later.
Oh, you’d like to hear it? Here.
11:36 a.m.
SUN TRUE FIRE. hoo boy.
Lots of scribbled notes—on paper even! Just chords, bass lines, interesting combinations. Nothing serious yet. No real text set, although I think I’m zeroing in on verse IX. Big Case as my first target.
However, here’s a lovely little bit, almost an Easier Piece in its simplicity. It may end up in XI. The Azure Stone (Resolution). Listen.
1:33 p.m.:
Here’s a cute little two-part waltz. I truly am just plopping out random notes without worrying about whether they’re ever going to wind up being usable in SUN TRUE FIRE.
3:05 p.m.:
Lots of little bits, nothing more to share.
It’s time to hit the hot tub for a bit.
Years and years and years ago, before there was a labyrinth, before there was anything in the back yard but weeds, I created a walkway. It has remained a constant no matter what else has happened in the area.
After we put in the patio two years ago, I re-landscaped it with mulch and all that jazz, but that has never been quite satisfactory. The mulch drifts, and it looks messy. So now I’m taking steps to contain the mulch:
The majority of the work was creating a trench for the dwarf mondo grass. The ground is so dry and hard that I used a trencher to cut through the soil, then again to create a parallel cut. I watered it to soften it, waited, then went back over it with two different shovels, watering and scraping the whole time. It was tedious.
I also wondered at the ethics of a construction grading firm who—twenty years previously—blithely bulldozed all the construction detritus into what was surely going to be a landscaped back yard.1
I also also wonder at The Home Depot, where I bought out their entire stock of dwarf mondo grass (six flats), and the nice lady watering the plants asked if I would be needing more. I cheerfully replied, “Maybe, but you certainly will.”
Getting the mondo into the ground was easy: plop the plant into the trench, cover.
“People” will tell you that mondo grass is easy, that you plant some and it will “spread” and “fill in.” These “people” are lying. It never does. There was a small patch near the downspout by the patio for twenty years, and it never grew nor spread. Never.
So if I want to further fill in the path with mondo, I will have to buy it and plant it. That should keep me busy until my mid-70s at least.
In other news, you may have seen the video on the FaceTubes about the cool little metal triangle that all manly men should have to cut lumber and/or pipe. It slices, it dices, it’s better than a Veg-O-Matic. I bought one last month and yesterday I got to use it for the first time.
One of the great pleasures of being alive is when something like this is everything that is claimed for it.2 Where was this device during all those years of set building at the theatre??
I used it to cut a board to insert into the fence along the patio, because of course the lighting fixture we’ve been holding for a couple of years, waiting on a new fence, is too big to fit between the rails but too small to attach to the rails.
One more thing: a huge task on my GLRP checklist was to dig up the underground speakers and figure out why they had stopped working. I figured I would at least have to buy new speakers; I hoped I wouldn’t have to dig up the cables as well.
I plugged in my little marine amp (not all-weather, just weather “resistant”) and plugged in the iPad and the speakers, just to be ready to test. Lo! the far speaker, down where until last week there were ferns (::sigh::) began playing.
Great, I thought, only one speaker to dig up. I began to pull up the bricks that I had laid around the speaker to slow down the ivy. As soon as I touched the second brick—THE SECOND BRICK, KENNETH—the speaker came on. This is after months of not producing sound of any kind.
I chalked it up to living a virtuous life and replaced the brick.
…to be continued…
—————
1 I don’t have to wonder at all. I remember the day: I had arrived home from school to find the bulldozer guy grading the entire back yard into a slope down to the retaining wall despite the contract to create two levels. I stopped him, told him he was doing it wrong, he said he knew nothing about it and started back up. I stopped him again and told him rather acerbically that either he could call his boss and find out the specifics, or he could finish the job and then I would call his boss and he would have to re-do the entire yard. He rather sensibly chose the former.
2 Another thing that performs equally well is the Sonos sound system. It’s awesome when you can have every speaker in the house playing a different station and can control all of them from your phone or iPad or computer. But I digress.
Yesterday I began reconstructing the southwest corner.
The problem is that the new fence was designed to cut straight from one neighbor’s fence on the right to the other neighbor’s shed on the left—and the original chain link fence hugged the retaining wall before jogging over to the shed. Hence, I lost two–three feet of landscaping, as seen here:
There is actually one of my ferns on the other side of the fence now (which, it just dawned on me, I can go dig up and move…) I’m also missing several cherry laurel saplings which framed the westpoint bowl rather nicely. Oh well.
The area’s been problematic anyway: the slope of the ground there means that the bricks are always being covered with dirt washing down the hill. It’s impossible to grow grass there, and the battle with the ivy and the thorns is never-ending. So revamping it is a net plus, actually.
First, take up all the bricks:
Here’s what I’m thinking: define an extension of the mostly level labyrinth area, build a mini-retaining wall, fill in the space with dirt, re-establish the brick edging.
Install some stone steps leading down to that back corner and resurface it with paving stones, perhaps as a little sitting nook?
I’ll let this sit for a couple of days to see how it grows on me.
The Great Labyrinth Reclamation Project [GLRP hereinafter] has begun.
Given that it’s been too hot to do any outdoor maintenance, and given that we’ve had no rain, it should come as no surprise that the labyrinth is a minor disaster: the grass is dead, while the ivy/bamboo/privet/wisteria have run riot.
Normally, that would not entail a lot of worry. Just get out there and kind of work it out as one moseys through life, ne-ç’est pas? However, in a moment of weakness earlier this year I agreed to allow the labyrinth to be a part of the Presbyterian Preschool Tour of Homes on December 3. So now I am under a deadline, which at least will get the job done.
Here we have a happy labyrinth owner installing a new bamboo fence over the original chain link fence six years ago. This was for privacy, of course, and it was quite lovely, although as you can see it did not completely block anyone from seeing into the yard. I was not worried, since I knew the ivy would grow up over the bamboo and provide cover.
Which it did, and that worked—until the bamboo began to rot and break down.
Here we see, if through a lovely sprinkler earlier this year, the wild and woolly state of the fence. (That lush green grass died almost immediately.) It was really ratty looking, and that included some rats who would trot about on top of the chain link.
And so I’ve been looking for someone to replace the chain link with a real fence. I tried dealing with a builder recommended by a neighbor, but that person led me on (since April!) and I finally turned to Angie’s List, where I found First Fence of Georgia. I highly recommend them, although parts of this process may give you pause about hiring them. Ignore the roadbumps: this is a good company.
I really wanted an 8-foot fence, given the proximity of my neighbors, but city ordinances only allow 6-foot fences. I could have applied for a variance, but by the time I hired First Fence it was too late. So I asked First Fence to install a 6-foot fence with 8-foot posts; I could, if I wished, install art stretched between them, art that might even look like curtains. Or summat.
The crew arrived at 8:00 a.m. and got straight to work. Every now and then I’d wander out and smile brightly at them. Chain link—gone. Ivy—ripped out. Post holes—dug. Posts—installed, two feet deep in concrete. Cross pieces—nailed in.
And so it was that shortly after lunch I went to the back yard to marvel at their progress and found—to my horror—that they had installed 6-foot posts.
I suppose I could have been a raging asshole and demanded that they tear everything down and start over, but a) that’s not who I want to be; and b) the expense, while probably bearable by First Fence, might have fallen on the two young Hispanic men who had made the error. Let’s face it, unless someone had specifically told them, “Remember this dude wants 8-foot posts, so that’s different than what you do every other day of the year,” it was easy to miss the one reference (in 6-point type) to the posts being 2′ taller than the fence.
On the other hand, I had asked for—and was paying for—8-foot posts. So I stopped the work and told them about the problem.
The lead worker was calm, but crushed. He double-checked the blueprint and there it was in plain 6-point sight. I told him I wasn’t mad, exactly, but I was upset. I’d call the office to see what they recommended.
By the time I had spoken to the office (and been told the person to whom I needed to talk would have to call me back), the lead worker had a solution: what if we ran 2x4s up either side of the posts? I liked it, specifying that they use cedar instead of pine just for extra safeguard against warping. And so we did.
Quite frankly, even though it means that I will have to create the art, i.e., EXTRA WORK, KENNETH, I think it’s actually more attractive. I think First Fence should offer it as a design, and I think they ought to pay the young man who thought of it royalties.
More to come. Way more to come.
