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Hammer Knife Rotor
Feeling overwhelmed by the long grass today, I asked Kawasaki-san if I could use the hammer knife rotor. He gave me and Tod a quick tutorial and off we went. It’s been a dream for two years to try this beast! It is a powerful and complicated machine with a lot of controls. A pull-start…
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Teaching the Birds a Song
This morning I opened the window and heard loud and eager songbirds. A trio of brownish birds held a concert in a tangle of vines and trees. I listened. The cats listened. It was glorious. I tried to capture a video, but the sound quality on my phone doesn’t do it justice. Here it is…
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Feather protocol
It’s very clear to me that I am not a squeamish person. Last night one of the cats brought a bird into the house. It was consumed except for the wings and the feathers, which were spread all along the triangle where floor meets roof next to my desk. It was too much after a…
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Patio touches
I wanted to call these “final touches” but let’s face it, nothing is ever final. But for now, the patio is ready to go. I planted two dozen moss flox (shiba-zakura, an old-fashioned favorite in Japan), plus another 2 dozen assorted low growing herbs and plants like wooly thyme, veronica, and Coriscan mint in the…
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Ending Birthday Week
It’s the cats’ birthdays today. Mine was yesterday. Birthday week is now over. Fritter and Maura were born five years ago. Facebook shared a memory with me today – a 25 second video of Three licking infant Maura clean. Little did she know she’d be doing that thrice more for Futatsuyama, Calico #3 (later Isabella…
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Birthday flowers
A log of what’s blooming today, a love letter to the plants 555, and a birthday gift to myself of walking around outside at dawn with with a cup of coffee and a camera. Before I even leave the house, I see flowers from the windows. The late-blooming camellia in the front garden is going…
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Patio time
Today Monaca Royal Construction Enterprises (MoRCE) and I finished up the hardscaping project. I am very happy with the result. It wasn’t easy. For the patio, we experimented our way across substrates. It was simply dry mortar for a few initial tiles in the southeast corner, but wet mortar is stronger, so we switched. Hand…
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Stone Path
To my surprise and delight, the Monaca crew turned up the day after they brought the stones. Their other project was put on hold and they got started on my hardscaping. I sketched out a concept and we started with a big irregular stone that is already a canvas for little nature mandalas and other…
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Hardscaping begins
I was excited to find the Monaca Doken yumbo parked in our driveway when I came home from lunch today. And a little while after that, my fav guys turned up with a truck full of stone slabs to supplement the ones I already have. They first changed the bucket for jaws, a process that…
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Winter into Spring
Woke up with a bit of a headache and decided to take a walk before yoga. Mother Nature gave me some lovely scenes on a foggy morning. Spring is on its usual rollercoaster of temperatures and precipitation. We’re finally getting rain so the weeds and grasses are waking up from their dormant rosettes. It won’t…
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