Nesting

So they say that pregnant women tend to start doing home improvement projects because of the nesting instinct -- we want to make sure everything is perfect for baby. If you look around my home, you can certainly see that it's true for me. I've finally got the last of the moving boxes out of baby's room, and I put up shelves for her toys and clothes. I've been cruising freecycle and Craig's list to see what I can get out of buying. I got a playpen/bassinet and a stroller that works with a baby carrier/carseat.

I also found somebody giving away a bunch of bricks. So I drove over to Long Beach, filled my trunk with bricks (only carrying two at a time so I wouldn't hurt myself), and brought them home. Peter helped me unload them that night, and the next day I laid them between my sidewalk and my next-door-neighbor's. We had just had dirt there before, with a bunch of old shingles to keep the weeds down. The result isn't perfect -- the sidewalks aren't precisely parallel, and most of the bricks were broken or had mortar stuck to them, so it's pretty uneven. I think it would look a lot better if I bought a bag or two of sand to put underneath to level it out, but in the meantime, it's a lot nicer than what was there. Here are a few pictures. Sorry about the weird angle -- I'm not sure what angle you're supposed to photograph brick at to keep from disorienting your viewers, but this is obviously not it.




I've been having trouble sleeping lately, since I can't get comfortable at night with the baby in the way. I'd wake up feeling more stiff and sore and tired than when I went to sleep the night before. I was doing some walking to loosen everything up during the day, but it really wasn't getting any better. After two days of brickwork though, I found that waking up sore from working hard is a lot nicer than waking up sore from just not sleeping well. It's amazing how doing some really hard work in the dirt gives you more energy.


So then I decided that the best way to keep myself sore and tired out was to tackle the weeds on the side of the house. My mobile home is blessed with excellent dirt, but without constant attention from the homeowner, that just means that I get fantastically healthy weeds (see the picture above -- you can see the shingles holding some of them at bay so we can get through to water the plants that we want to have). Somebody had once dumped gravel over them, but they've grown up through that. I found that if I pull up the weeds (most of them come up pretty easily since they're not rooted in clay), then use a hand trowel to shovel the top couple inches of dirt and gravel into a wire basket I bought for the purpose, I can then sift out the gravel to set aside, replace the dirt, lay down a garbage bag to keep the weeds at bay, then have enough gravel to put a healthy layer or two on top of the plastic. I can't go very fast -- it took me an hour or two to do a 2x3 foot patch today -- but it sure does look a lot better when I'm done! I can also expect it to stay fairly weed free for a year or two, and if I want to put a garden in at some point, I'll just have to pull up the garbage bags full of gravel, and I'll have nice clean dirt to work with.