being not doing

When I talk with neighbors about our yard, they are uniformly positive about the way it looks. Which I can understand: we eradicated the pokeweed orchard in the back corner; we cut the vines back out of the trees; we’ve pruned deadwood and limbed up the border hollies; and we’ve managed to create relatively weed-free [...]

Freshly installed rain barrel, with rhododendron. I have two overarching goals with regard to our house: (1) to make the entire enterprise of living here more energy efficient and (2) to make the yard and garden more pleasant and usable. Rain barrels address both of these aims to a certain degree, by reducing the amount [...]

The front flower bed, newly planted. The front flower bed, one month later. A month after planting the foundation bed with flowering perennials, we’re seeing all kinds of growth. It doesn’t look like a mature flower garden yet, but it’s showing signs of how it will be when it fills in. When the plants first [...]

Our big accomplishment at the end of May was painting the living room. The living room was the last large room on the list to be painted; we’ve already completed the dining room, family room, and bedroom, as well as two of the three bathrooms. What can I say, after decades of living in whitewashed [...]

Just a month after starting to regularly use the Brita pitcher again, I dropped it and it broke. Which is a shame, because it was over ten years old and they just don’t make them as streamlined or user-friendly anymore. In the course of trying to choose which new pitcher to invest in—larger with unnecessary [...]