Happy holidays from 517!

We are still chugging along on the house at 517! The work going on now is more detail and finish work. This holiday break Woody and I are working on getting the home office in shape -- soon there will be a big shared face-to-face desk and more polished-looking bookshelves. Pictures to come soon!

In the meantime, un-redeye-corrected greetings from Maddy and Alice. I would have made them look less possessed but I don't have that kind of Photoshop know how. If I did I would have also made Maddy look slimmer and Alice look more obedient. We didn't do the bells-around-the-neck thing, the groomer did. Woody wanted me to mention that.

Best wishes for a great new year from all at 517!

Bust out with your Clue notebooks

Upon returning home after discovering that someone in Arizona had swiped my debit card number and purchased $3000 worth of furniture at Ikea and $52 worth of food at Jack in the Box (the bigger insult I think. How is it even possible to purchase $52 worth of food at Jack in the Box? Did he purchase Jack's costume as a getaway outfit?), I found this:


No, Alice didn't Houdini Hound it and spirit herself out of her crate. We forgot to put her in there. But boy did she remind us of it when we got home. Not pictured here is our bed. Which she peed all over. Some sleuths out there claim that Madison masterminded this flurry of Kleenex destruction. Perhaps she goaded on the impressionable pit to new heights of tissue paper terrorizing. After all, we know the pup has a propensity for maxipads and premium quality tampons...

So, go ahead, we know the deed happened in the Drawing, er, Living Room. Who was it? Colonel Mustard? The saucy Miss Scarlett? The less saucy but very old Dame Madison? Or the puckish Miss Alice? Please don't leave any of those little metal reproductions of revolvers and lead pipes around. I don't want to find them in Alice's after dinner droppings.

Quivering with excitement for a new school year

It has been a busy summer at 517. I was away for part of May and all of June (with periodic pilgrimages back to SC to visit with Woody and the puppies). Woody was holding everything on the homefront together and completing some impressive improvements to the "grounds" of 517. So when Aug. 18 hit, were we:

1. shocked
2. dismayed
3. quivering with anticipation like the exquisite Mexican jello mold pictured above
4. befuddled as to why our new GPS routed us through Tennessee to get to campus
5. all of the above

If you said "All of the above," you would be covering your arse but you would be right.

So what did we get done this summer? The better question really is what did Woody get done this summer because I mostly sat on my butt in archives. Woody did some impressive stonework in the yard! We now have a flower patch with a fancy rock border:

The pergola on the back porch is covered with jasmine, roses and hanging plants:

Our garden has not been as robust as it was last year. Horned caterpillars and some other guys who pop out their antennae when annoyed (thanks Wanda and David for the tip!) have set about gorging themselves on our tomatoes and parsley. We also have this guy hanging around:

When Woody ripped out the wall around our backdoor he battled with a spider that was Shelobesque in size. The guy in our garden is more like Shelob's flashier cousin. He knows that an accent accessory or two can really lighten up an outfit and be slimming to boot. We're told he's called a Golden Garden Spider. We hoping he dines on caterpillars.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this pole!

Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? Remember David Hasselhoff's rousing performance of his hit single(s) (in Germany)? Remember his super cool light-bulb-covered jacket?

No? Then you'll probably be taking Latin American history with me next semester.

Yes? Then keep reading.

If the Berlin Wall represented all the things that Communist meanies could do (and all the resourcing the Macys could do with the bricks afterwards...anyone get one for Xmas?), then the Tetanus Spear of B'ton represented the last derelict vestige of our home's previous owners. But we did it! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! The Tetanus Spear has fallen!!!!

In an afternoon reminiscent of the Shawshank Redemption, I worked on digging the spear out for roughly 2 hours. It involved: a large shovel, the mattock, a tablespoon (for the detail work), another trip to the hardware store, a smaller new shovel, and rocking the thing back and forth. And yet it stood. It was clear that there was cement footing and/or a root and/or the earth's f'ing core involved with keeping it in the ground. Remember the Tetanus Spear could not be defeated even by Brian's skid steer!

Then Woody had a go at it.

Before:

During:


After: Woody asking the pole "How ya like me NOW?"


Alice resolving her desire to chew everything with her desire to avoid tetanus:

(I cannot get that image to go the right way. Grrr...
You can see the giant HOOK that held this thing in the ground though.)

Alice detects the scent of the first puppies on earth:

Alice is still with us, yes! We found her brother Arlo a good home with our friend Paul and decided to keep Alice in the family. Her and Maddy are getting along well, mostly because Alice is an absentminded eater...and Maddy polishes off the leftovers.

We've decided to fill the gaping maw left by the extraction of the Tetanus Spear with a lovely little fig tree (getting move-in ready here):

Two little visitors to 517

Yesterday I found one of these guys just wandering the neighborhood, not suprisingly he took a liking to me (he might have started to think differently when I bathed him). After some asking around, I found his owners and also discovered he had a very little sister. Both of them were being kept in a dingy shed and separated from their food and water. When asked if I wanted them, I most definitely said yes. How far I have fallen from those days when I said I "hated furry things that pooped" (indeed that was before I met Woody....).

When Woody got home and saw them about all he could say between them licking his face and crawling all over him was "Puppies! Pupppies!!!" Maddy has been a very mature dog about it. Probably because she knows we are going to find these guys good homes . Currently they are reveling in the marvelousness that is beach towels. They have never had something that soft to sleep on. They were sleeping on cold concrete among the garden tools. Sometimes I marvel at people's lack of compassion and responsibility...

Return of Still Life of Disturbing Junk!

With the tree out of the way and the ground ripped up, new disturbing artifacts from previous residents of 517 came to light. Remember what we thought was Ken but turned out to be GI Joe from under the front porch? We found his burlier cousin who went the way of the professional wrestling along with a gigantic plastic firearm in the backyard:

Joe seems to have met his demise in a more peaceful fashion than the B'ton Bomber:

This is the face of a man who went down fighting. Or doing other things we shouldn't mention on a family-friendly blog.

Like that tree from Avatar only smaller, dingier and filled with ants...

Woody and I finally saw Avatar last weekend. How appropriate to see a film entirely about a rotted out tree when we too had one in our backyard. Once again, James Cameron has tapped into the very essence of our being... Thank you, King of the World, for validating us.

We knew the tree outside the back bedroom had problems when Brian chopped off a limb only to be met with a swarm of carpenter ants:


Here's a closer view of the deathly hollows of our tree:


Yeah, not so much with the luminescent blue-skinned people. More with the gaping maw full of carpenter ants.

We had the tree pulled down on the cheap and took out neighbor Steve's fence, our wheelbarrow, Woody's custom made sawhorses and some new landscaping in the process. So much for saving some dough. It sat in our yard for while we worked hard, went to BBQ competitions and sundry dry academic conferences, but we have been whittling away at it for a couple of weekends now. It has been reduced to this:


It turned out that it was not a little rotten, it was a LOT rotten. Like, if the Avatar folks were Smurf-sized they could have seriously lived in there. Comfortably.


We generated a HUGE pile of sticks, which the city thankfully took away. Here is a smaller pile and the giant firewood pile that resulted:


(This is not near our house or anyone else's house, so no worries about termites.)

We are turning the very hollow stump into a planter. We'll probably later sublet it to little Navi if we're hard up for cash.

The muscles from Brussels

It's been a while since we've posted. We've either:

A. Been working hard and too exhausted at night to write
B. Been goofing off and not accomplishing anything

Take your pick.

While we've either been:

A. Been working hard and too exhausted at night to write
B. Been goofing off and not accomplishing anything

Madison has kept up her strict regimen of begging for food, whining to be pet and laying about aimlessly. She managed to shoehorn in some time to pose with a dish fixed for her by her in-house chefs: brussel sprouts with a side of floor dirt.

It kind of looks like a vegetarian version of that scene from Pulp Fiction. Or it's cute. Take your pick.

Now we just need one of those rolling ladders...

Kenneth came by this morning and was miraculously able to move after one of Woody's famous biscuits, sausage gravy, grits and eggs breakfasts. While I rubbed my belly on the couch or waddled around and asked if "anyone needed anything to drink," Woody and Kenneth moved our new bookcases upstairs! Kenneth built us a full set of custom bookcases for Xmas, they are beautiful and make our office look so...scholarly:


Another set (currently living in the man cave area) will go on the wall opposite. These are specially built to accommodate Woody's collection of vinyl (records, not clothing). After some painting, the books go in!

The Life Aquatic at 517

Woody's 75-gallon fish tank has been home to a veritable menagerie of exotic things -- in its first incarnation it held his high school letter jacket (sigh...to be the type of person who enjoys Grease references...if you do, maybe get away from our blog), a moldering fedora and 3 inches (or more) of blown-in insulation, in its second incarnation for our rehearsal dinner it held this:


Yes, those are figures from:

1. Doom
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
3. random reptilia/puppies

A closer look at the sweet symbiotic relationship these guys enjoyed:


Finally, the 75-gallon's gypsy existence has come to a happy end. And all our strapping (and less strapping) friends could not be happier, as she bestowed hernias on anyone foolhardy enough to try to help Woody push/pull/lift/shove her.

A few days ago Woody filled her up with the teeming water of B'ton and got our fish palace started. I tried to persuade him to make it a lobster tank like at the food store but, once again, I was shot down. Instead, we chose the most exotic of sea life...gold fish:

At 13 cents a piece, we bought a Sea Monkey colony's worth:

They seem like happy enough little guys. We've only had one go down the long watery swish into the light.