It’s been raining on and off in Arizona for a week now. I sure hope that’s not why I’ve got this vicious cold. Ugh. These last two Saturdays SwimKids USA’s parking lot has been flooded. I bet some kids are really confused and think they moved lessons outside. It is the desert after all. Claire rocked her lesson today, and I really wish someone had been evaluating her since it was a private lesson in a mostly empty pool. Afterward Amanda said she’d forgotten we wanted out kid evaluated. Oh well. Next week. Seriously though. If she can do it, then she should be able to do it with loud kids all around.

Got a quote on the fence stucco & house painting this morning. We really liked the guy and found the quote reasonable. We mentioned we had to wait until we tore down the porch roof, and he asked if wanted that built into the quote! Yeah! This is what we want. A company who’ll do it all for us. I even told him that.

Ok off to do the Christmas cards I am two weeks late doing!

We planned to hit this whole house improvement over fall break, and I bet you could go back and read some of the things we did get done, but some of the major things we want to do outside include stuccoing the ugly prison-like block fence we currently have, paint the house, and buy a new porch roof. The roof is a must have since the current one could fall down anytime. The other two projects have been hard to figure out because we can’t pick colors we can agree on! We’ve thought of browns, tans, greens, oranges, etc… Finally this morning Donna said "why don’t we just with mustard as one of the colors?" The cartoon Eureka light bulb went off above my head. Of course! Yes, that would work I thought. Yes, I do think it will. I like that idea, but now we need to pick a color to match. So I’d say we’re half way there!

This morning Donna and I poured our coffees and opened the back door. Last night Donna had swept the back porch and sat out our new (used) garage sale seats, and this morning we all put on our shoes to go sit outside. Even though the porch roof is following down over our heads, the dog likes to poop wherever and whenever h wants in the back yard, we enjoyed sitting out there in the cool fall air with the wind chimes blowing gently. Claire ran around with the dog playing ball, and after a while I grabbed her sidewalk chalk and walked toward the block fence around our yard. It was such a nice time, even if we have only dirt and nothing else much back there.

We enjoy our neighborhood and last year decided to invest some money into our house and stay awhile. The people are nice. We have the quiet, single guy who never leaves his house, the talkative neighborhood gossip who was here since the first house was built, the odd neighbor whose kids smoke pot in her yard, and we have the girl whose mother had bars put on her window so the boys wouldn’t climb in late at night. Now this girl was quite odd for a few years and we’re really only see her late at night sitting on random boys’ cars out front of her house smoking and drinking who-knows-what. Anyway, in the last few months she’s gotten friendlier and always says hello to us. She dropped out of high school and doesn’t go to college, and she has the sweetest mother.

Last week I discovered this girl in a neighbor’s yard pulling weeds. Where we live everyone has desert front yards and in the spring there are a ton of weeds. A landscaper said he’d pull them all and clean it up for over $100. So I saw this girl’s mother and she said the girl had been bored and had been pulling weeds. The nosy neighbor said the girl is bipolar and is on new happy pills. So I came home last week at about 10pm and she was out pulling weeds in the dark. I went over and told her to do my whole yard and we’d pay her well. I think she agreed to it. I wasn’t too sure. Most of the conversations I’ve had with her have been like discussing painting with Dali.

Friday night on the way out for the evening, there was this girl. Pulling weeds in little black hotpants and a skimpy tank top. I thanked her for pulling weeds. When the babysitter showed up, the only thing she asked was "Who’s the naked girl in your yard?"

When I was growing up we lived on a four lane highway and I was always bugged that I couldn’t have a garage sale. I always seemed to have junk I didn’t want, but I could never try to sell it. So one thing I loved about getting my own house was having garage sales! Garage sales are a really big deal in the Valley, and we hit several a week. We go all out with the signs, making sure everything is clean and ready to go and everything is organized. Our last garage sale was with Laura and Emma in October. It’s now February. We have a ton of stuff that didn’t sell. Donna wanted to keep it all and give it to a woman’s shelter nearby.

We eventually gave up on that idea because her shelter didn’t take donations after work hours, which is when we’d need to drive there with all of our stuff. We found another shelter recently who would take everything and even the desk. They even told us they’d pick it all up! I felt like hell was freezing over tonight as we packed it all up. Donna’s moving all the boxes to the driveway before 8am tomorrow, and perhaps, soon, we can pull the Chevy back into the garage!

Our backyard is relatively empty. When we bought our house, we liked it because of the yard (in part), but then the guy who sold it let everything die. It didn’t help too much, and we tried to fix up the yard and grow more grass, but that didn’t work. Now the entire yard is dirt and we were recommended to kill all of our Oleander, since it is poisonous to Claire & Dante. Also, one of our palm trees died, which sucks. So we were out there all day working on the yard again. We’d like to put in a dog run and shed soon, and then fix up more of the yard.

We saw some artificial soft rubberized turf in Pittsburgh, and we’d like to put that in instead of grass. I use to think I wanted a huge yard, but now I really don’t want to deal with it. I’d just like to be able to hang out outside with friends while Claire plays. If we do a dog run, maybe we can also replace the sliding doors with French doors. That would look nice. Who knows.

Last week I started writing our Christmas cards because it always takes me a long time to finish.  In contrast, Devon usually can finish his in two hours.  To prepare, I looked for Christmas labels, found the Christmas cards, picked a nice pen, setup a little writing area near my indented couch cushion, retrieved my address book and got a roll of stamps.  Throughout the week, I wrote nice little messages in many of the cards, systematically going through the alphabetized list in my address book.  On Saturday, after setting up the Christmas tree, putting other decorations around the house, hanging the stockings and stapling lights to our house, Devon and I sat down together to work on the Christmas cards.  I started a related – not to be mentioned at this time – project; Devon wrote cards according to a convenient computer spreadsheet I found listing the people we sent cards to last year.  About three hours later, we finally finished.  Well, not quite, since we ran out of cards.  But we finished for the day.

On Monday, I showed up at work with cards in hand, expecting to find a card and pack of peanut brittle on my chair.  That might sound funny to you, but this is an expecting tradition that my co-worker began years ago.  She has always been the first to distribute Christmas cards.  I looked around other people’s desk, then contacted her assistant.  My co-worker was not coming to work Monday. I win!  Not that I was competing, but she had always been first and I expected this as fact.  It was a nice feeling of pride to accomplish the goal in a timely manner.

Last night, while Devon was in Scottsdale, Claire and I decided to carve our pumpkin.  I covered the coffee table with newspaper; gathered all the carving tools, a spoon, a bowl & napkins; then grabbed the pumpkin, Claire, and a camera – critical pieces of the puzzle.  When I started to cut the top off, Claire insisted on "helping" – her hands HAD to touch the knife as I moved it around the pumpkin.  To reach the pumpkin, Claire was precariously perched on my knees.  Since she is about three feet tall now, that meant that her head was in front of mine – I couldn’t see what I was doing!

After the top was removed, it seemed more feasible to move Claire to the table as we pulled out the pumpkin guts.  This actually worked out well, except when Claire’s spoon would get stuck in the small opening.  She readily plunged her little hands into the gooey, slimy, seedy, smelly center and removed as much as she could.  I was so pleased that she was interested.  Near the end of our adventure, she actually spent about four minutes examining the strands of pumpkin innards on her hands, and I sat there, marveling at the gears in her little head as they were spinning around.

Claire and I drew the face on the pumpkin mostly together; I, of course, had to take a leadership role or jack would have been decapitated or neutered or otherwise disfigured.  After that, we started carving…  Claire took an interest in the pokey tool and I moved her back to the table and allowed her to "design" the backside of the jack-o-lantern.  She really enjoyed the empowerment and was entertained long enough for me to finish most of the facial features.  Claire helped to clean up the space and even found some seeds on the ground to throw into the trash can.  She is indeed a great helper.

Later that night, Devon and I roasted the pumpkin seeds and sampled a few as Heroes was on.  Claire went to sleep late again and I’m hoping that she doesn’t pass out while trick-or-treating tonight.  She took her Giraffe costume to school today and is already making out with the loot.  Too bad for her that Devon and I have already planned to eat it all!

This past week Donna and I were notified that our house was picked for the Landscape Design class at the local community college. The way it works is that the students come out and generate biddable designs for our front and back yard. So Thursday we sat for an hour interview with the class, and I thought it was funny since one of the former deans is in the class, so he’s going to be trudging around our backyard next week.

Today Donna and I went out back to the yard that Dante has owned for the last 6 or more months. There was poop everywhere, mixed with leaves, rocks, weeds, etc… For three hours we raked the entire yard and bagged the rubbage. All the while Claire hobbled around the mid-October afternoon and played in the yard. She got a new pair of Osh Kosh corduroy overalls and was so cute walking around in those with her Chuck Taylor’s that Auntie M got her for Christmas last year.

By the end of the afternoon, Claire had learned the word "ROCK" because she kept carrying them around, playing with them, and stuffing them in garbage bags. Only occasionally her "rocks" really turned out to be dried dog poop. Needless to say, a family shower was in order afterward.

The yard is now cleaned and ready for the class, and just watching Claire run around out back all afternoon showed us how important it is to get the yard redone so we can enjoy it with her.

Over the past month or so we’ve been preparing for new garage cabinets. We cleaned out the garage and stacked box upon box on our living room floor, up against walls, where Claire cannot pull them down on top of herself, or where she cannot crawl up them like the monkey she’s become. And after a few phone calls haggling back and forth, this morning the cabinet man came. He said it’d be a few hours and we’d have our cabinets up and ready to fill. That was at 8:30AM. Donna brought lunch home at 11:30 and he was still pounding away, stabbing nails into boards, and dripping in sweat. By 3:30 he finished, and I could honestly say it sure will help! It wasn’t perfect, because the original guy wasn’t wonderful, but it’ll work.

Now we need to get the shelves filled and junk sold. We’ve decided to invite our friends to bring their garage sale stuff over to our house to sell in a few weeks. We have a canopy we’ll erect and set everything out.

We hate those garage sales where there’s nothing to buy. You drive slowly by, see the old clothes hanging precariously from hangers, with arm pit stains and cat hair, and wonder why anyone would even try to make a buck off them. Then you hit the gas and speed off down the road.

This won’t be that.