Rae’s Alley

Today is the absolute perfect day to have a deck.

There are twenty gazillion things I should be doing right now, ranging from scrubbing six weeks of life off the interior of the house to mowing the weeds. What I really want is to have some kind of cushy recliner set out on my non-existent deck and enjoy the cool breezes as I doze in the sun. It’s been that kind of week.

Our show opened on Thursday, which was quite excellent. I felt loved and admired as one of the actresses proceeded to say how fantastic I was. I made bonus points with her daughter as well by recommending that she check out the Maine State sumer theater camp. Just the fact that I knew about such a thing apparently was awesome. And, for the first time ever, the Bald One was in attendance. That made my night.

This show’s tech wasn’t a particularly hard one, but the week before of running and notes and discussion every night and will we/won’t we get the set elements in time was a little taxing. Add to that opening on the first of a month when bills are due and being in that odd limbo at work of being on the cusp of being busy but not being busy yet and you have one whacked out little Rae.

The yippy-skippy news is our federal “economic stimulous” package arrived. I should throw it at a bill and make it go away, but at current, I have a plan where we actually are managing to pay things down in a reasonable fashion. Combine that with the couple that gets us to go downtown and have a beer with them so often moving out to the boonies and we have an instant extra money supply. So the majority of the funding went into a savings account.

The not so yippy-skippy news is that the Bald One’s employer officially filed Chapter 11 yesterday. Blaming the sagging home market and the lack of retail confidence and you’ve got a failing home-goods store. Oddly, they’re not closing any stores in this area - despite our bets that one of them really should be. The Bald One does have his resume all shined up and has already applied for another position with a prescription home delivery company. Normal hours and theoretically better pay? If he’s happy, I’m all for it.

But now, I’ve delayed long enough. The house isn’t getting cleaner with me playing online. The bills are paid though, the one odd charge is gone and the breakfast has long been finished. Time to get cracking on life.

Even though the breeze is blowing and the birds are singing. Damn reality.

After it warming up to the upper 70’s and low 80’s for a week followed by a cold snap that brought all our plants indoors, we’ve started to warm up again. Just in time for my show to open and me to have time on the weekends to think about making it pretty. The Bald One has put in many hours while I’ve been at the theater or at my day job and all but one island in the front has been weeded and mulched. Since we were starting from a complete lack of mulch and a mess, this is an amazing feat.

The fact that our front has gotten this far has made me realize that we need a lot more work to make the front yard match the rest of the neighborhood. We don’t live in a showstopping community. It’s more of a tired, real community that your see inmore established areas. The picture perfect houses scare me. But even with a quieter set of standards, we still look too new, too disorganized.

Part of the solution will likely be adding more color. We’re slowly getting there as the roses take more presence in the yard and the burning bush is loving taking center stage against the blue-grey house. Our winter honeysuckle has established and is climbing insanely on a different side. To contrast, the jessamine has overgrown the trellis on the side of the house. It just takes time and I’m impatient.

the other thing our yard desperately needs is grass. Currently we have a mix of three different types of weeds along with bermudagrass and some kind of fescue. Pestering some of my coworkers, I discovered that the best bet for the moment is to keep the lawn and weeds closely trimmed and spray a broad-range herbicide to kill what survives trimming. This should keep things down until fall when we can re-seed. At that point we should be able to keep things at bay and crowded out by the grass root structure. Hopefully.

Really, I don’t give the Bald One enough credit. A majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting things done around the house - inside and out - is done by him. I guess it makes us even - I’ll get the bills paid and do some of the artsy point of view nonsense, and he gets to buy power tools. As I type this, supposedly I am getting wall mounted shelves put up in the office which will give us more book stashing space and a place to display his action figures.

I have a good one.