boxofdelights

So you know how there's always someone on Craigslist who regrets their landscape choices and would like you to come and scoop up the rocks they spread? This weekend there was someone offering hand-size rocks, lots of them, not a mile from my house. So Neal borrowed his friend's pickup and we picked up three loads of rocks and spread them on my new swale. If they're not all gone next weekend we'll go back for more, but this was as much as we could manage in one day.

I am not a morning person. I *can* get up in the morning, but I need advance notice. Email when you're on the way to my house is not advance notice.

Another step towards house fixing: the lab guy took samples from everything to test for asbestos.

He asked what kind of tree the catalpa was. I praised its beauty and its scent in spring, but when he said he was looking for a tree to plant I warned about the enormous seed pods and the fact that, with climate change, well, none of the trees know when to leaf out anymore, but the catalpa's big leaves and weak wood mean that when it gets a load of wet snow in May it's going to lose a lot of branches. Later, when he was telling me which kinds of materials are likely to have asbestos and which are not, he said, "I'm glad to know that you're not one of those science-deniers." Climate change! It's a shibboleth!