Wow, it’s been a week.

When I started this, I didn’t plan on making entries every day, but once a week is way too long.

The TV poltergeist struck again twice.  The TV in African Tulip lost reception.  Global Satellite came by Tuesday and started poking around at it.  For those of you that know African Tulip, the TV is in this huge eight foot high by eight foot long armoire.  The armoire was in it’s exact location when I bought the property.  The wall behind it was the old maid’s closet that we gutted to add the African Tulip bathroom.  Since there is very few “hollow” walls in the building (the entire property is brick construction, even the interior walls), we ran a ton of electrical, plumbing and air conditioning through the open space and then closed everything up.  Denny couldn’t get a signal at the jack attached to the back of the armoire.   We  moved the armoire and still no signal coming out of the wall.  Denny went down to the DirecTV junction box downstairs and checked all the connections again and found the problem.  The next the signal died in Lady Palm.  They came out and promptly fixed that.  As of this writing, all the TV’s are working fine.  Lets hope they stay that way.

I stopped by Dragun Supply and ordered my yearly mulch supply.  Since I’ll be spreading the mulch this weekend, I decided to spread the compost I’ve been working on since last summer.  This is my first venture with composting.  I know air and moisture are very important for things for rot, so I put a layer of sticks on the bottom of my composter before starting to drop my kitchen scraps and leaves so it wouldn’t get too compact and air could circulate.  Mistake.  The vegetable matter rotted and the sticks were still there on the bottom as sticks.  I had to dig the sticks out by hand (through all that mush) so I could remove the compost.  A big mess.  And with this being my first time harvesting my compost, I don’t know what to expect.  There are lots of worms and other critters working their magic in there.  The compost on the bottom was pretty much indistinguishable from what it originally was, except  for the egg shells.  I guess maybe I won’t try composting egg shells.  I’m not too worried about the shells not being totally composted since I’ll be spreading the mulch over the compost.

It’s so exciting to see the tulips, daffodils and hyacinths growing and flowering.  The purple plum tree’s buds are swelling, the white lilac tree has small leaves all over it.  There’s all kinds of nubs of growth coming up in my gardens. The days are significantly longer, finally.  I think the thing I like least about winter is the short dark days.  I definitely don’t like the cold, but the short dark days are the worst.

Da Boiz and I went out to Betty’s yesterday.  As I’ve been working my way down into the woods, the destruction for the snow storms is even worse than I initially thought.  There’s three trees down, not one.  And there’s a lot of branches that should actually be considered trees they are so large.  I broke my chain saw out there last week, so I just went out there and used the lopers to trim all the small branches off the big stuff.  Next week, I’ll be able to quickly zip through all the branches and trees and cut them into manageable sized logs I can move.  But I still have another full day’s work pruning down one more area of downed trees and branches before I’ll be able to cut those up.

Good night,

ed