June 1, 2003

• Yesterday, I organized the back patio. This is a task that has intimidated and overwhelmed me since I moved in.
  
  C. (my landlord) left a couple dozen empty plant containers on the patio. The black kind that come with the plants when you buy them at the nursery. Some are huge, and some are merely medium sized, but few of them had been stacked.
  
  The patio is directly under the most active branches of the cedar tree, so it drops its needles right exactly there, and over the time that no one was living here, they filled up the plant pots.
  
  This, combined with the unending winter rain, meant that I had a couple dozen tiny compost heaps in my back yard.
  
  It also meant that there was about an inch of topsoil on the patio, composted from other needles that had missed the pots. I had another garden’s-worth of ground cover growing on my patio.
  
  So each of those pots got emptied into a bona-fide compost heap, and the soil was shoveled onto the heap and the remainder washed away.
  
  Which isn’t a very interesting story, except that I did it all barefoot, and I stepped on a rose stem clipping which didn’t cause enough pain to draw attention to it, but did enough damage to let in the compost. So the ball of my foot is a little swollen. Nothing serious, just one of those things.
  
  It’s still not an interesting story, but if they have to amputate, at least it’ll be worth it to crutch myself out to the neat and tidy patio, eh?

  • 4:20 pm
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