D.O.P.-T. (Wednesday)

I finally repotted the spider plant whose ancient hanging basket had disintegrated into little chunks of plastic. It had only needed doing for half a dozen years ... it's now in one of the grey pots I scavenged from the kerb a few years ago, while the other has the volunteer tomato plant I found growing in front of the compost bin. That one is also starting to disintegrate in the sun, but for now the spider plant has a home where its roots are in the dark. And a bit of new soil around the sides.

D.O.P.-T. (yesterday)

A foggy morning, everything dank when I got home, and after I went ahead and watered the grass and porch plants, hours later it still looked as if it had rained. The sun did eventually break through.

D.O.P.-T.

The termites being now presumably dead, and the rotten bits of woodwork having been replaced with new, the next step is to repaint the house, but the existing paint job was flaking in places, so a lady came by with some large test tubes and the samples she took were verified to contain lead. So a team wearing hazmat suits have to remove it before it can be repainted (probably the exact same self-effacing color as before, don't get your hopes up for lime green with fluorescent purple trim). We have a back porch room with a lean-to type of roof consisting of translucent corrugated plastic; this can't take any weight, so this morning a crew of burly guys in alarm orange T-shirts turned up in a huge flatbed truck to put on a show for the neighborhood erecting scaffolding so the paint removers can get at the gable end above said porch roof. The housemate managed to shower and dress while they bustled around outside, and was drinking coffee when I poked my head out the back door to gawk and noticed a jagged hole right above the light fixture. They dropped a pole joint through the roof. So now we have to have them revisit tomorrow morning to fix it. I have had the housemate warn them that I will be running the sprinkler in the backyard tomorrow, which I would normally have done today, and they will just have to lump it. The garden badly needs rain, but so far there's no sign of it, which is good for getting the house prepped and painted ...