Tales from Easement Acres
To further beautify the house, we got some expensive edging. I’m kind of ashamed to say how much the edging costed, so I won’t.
But we needed something, and as was evidenced by the fact that I pulled ancient plastic edging out to install the new–cheap plastic edging is ineffective (and ugly).
So after much digging, behold!
Fancy-ass edging. That is all (I mean, I’d talk about it more, but it’s edging. And I’m not paid by the word here).
–Simon
Last summer, we constructed a strawberry garden out of old wooden boxes. It worked, but it was quaint, and Liz wanted a real strawberry garden. And I like strawberries and gardens, and I was itching to finally use that saw that’s been sitting in a box in my garage since we bought the house, so this seemed like as good a reason as any.
So after procuring some 2x8s and a work table from Lowe’s, I had a perfectly respectable setup, ready to butcher some lumber:
My blood coursed with suburban manliness (and histamine–Spring allergies that did not appreciate the sawdust)! I really only needed to cut a single board in half, but it was the manliest single cut I could make!
The majority of the work was far less creative and primarily involved grunt labor: digging trenches and hammering stakes. But I had no intention of installing a garden that would shift and become unsightly, so all boards were carefully leveled and secured with corrosion-resistant deck screws:
Okay, it just looks like a box (because it is), but soon it’ll be growing delicious fruit and look way cooler.
–Simon
Dogs pee in the house. It’s an inevitability, despite their willingness to please their human masters. Bladders are small, and days are long. Ergo, dogs pee in the house.
A myriad of devices exist which attempt to deal with this problem. And indeed, the pee can be extracted, but residual proteins remain. And these proteins stink! So, a myriad of products exist which attempt to neutralize them. And…none of them work.
So I was left with a choice: kill the dog and burn the carpet, or live with the smell. Neither seemed ideal. But then I remembered the final invoice I received from our last apartment. In it, a specific deduction was itemized from our deposit: an ozone treatment for the dog smell. Faye had a tendency to pee in the second bedroom.
At the time, I considered this bizarre procedure to be limited to a specialized commercial application, and therefore necessitating expensive equipment. But they say smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory, and when walking down the hallway one day, the stench wafted into my nose and my hippocampus short-circuited.
A quick search through Amazon revealed many affordable products. So, as I normally do, I made a selection based on recommendations and ordered the Enerzen ozone generator.
Excitedly, I unboxed it as soon as it arrived. I concluded that the best place to test it would be the bathroom, since if anything went wrong, the room already had ventilation. I set it for a modest 20 minutes, plugged it in, then immediately ran away as its insides glowed purple. An overreaction, perhaps. But I’ve seen enough post-apocalyptic movies to not be disconcerted at the color (even if it’s oxidation, not radiation).
I returned an hour later, figuring it had been enough time to dissipate. I figured wrong. In fact, it was 2 days before the ozone smell was finally gone. But, the bathroom no longer held that mild mildewy essence.
Unfortunately for Liz, it triggered memories of her numerous hospital visits and she became nauseous. Turns out that they use these to sterilize surgery rooms.
But despite that, it was a preferable alternative to dog pee. I started treating the carpet, cleverly devising a method to trap the ozone under a storage bin so as to avoid flooding the house in painful free radicals:
But as it turns out, an ozone generator can’t keep generating ozone with oxygen (ah hindsight). So the viable output of this method was insufficient to deodorize anything. So now, I’m running it for short bursts in problem areas, which is difficult because I can’t evacuate the house, and too much will kill the houseplants.
So it remains to be seen if this tool is effective, since I have yet to run a proper test. Hopefully the multitude of supporting anecdotes out there will foreshadow my own success. And if not, I can always kill the dog and burn the carpet.
–Simon
I’m failing on today’s post, but I’m damn tired. And Sea of Thieves just came out, so I’m expending my energies elsewhere.
–Simon
Trees don’t appear to appreciate the shock of transplanting. That makes sense of course, but I’d still think they would enjoy getting out of that stifling pot and into unrestricted soil. The pear tree reacted that way, but not the others.
I forget which tree Liz planted out front our first year here, but it most assuredly died, and became the most expensive piece of firewood in history. So we put in a crabapple next–my preference–in the same spot, as a replacement. In fact, the pear tree was meant to be a crabapple, but the pallets of trees at Lowe’s weren’t clearly marked and we bought the wrong one. But it’s happy, so it can stay.
The few leaves on the crabapple kind of withered and fell off, with the remainder being munched on by the Japanese beetles. I thought this tree a goner too, but turns out it had just underwent an extended period of hibernation.
I thought I’d walk the perimeter and check things out one evening, and sure enough, everything we had planted previously was beginning to bloom, even that pointless ash tree in the back that the dog has uprooted.
Now that everything’s been acclimated, it looks like it’ll be a greener year.
–Simon