I know I said I was going to blog more often. Well, you know, the road to hell…

What a crazy night! We hardly slept last night. The winds picked up at about 11 and didn’t stop howling until about 4 am. Poor Rosie was terrified. It sounded like a freight train. I thought we were going to end up in Kansas. Winds were clocked up to 75 mph/120 kph.

Oh yeah, last minute addition: we watched one of the worst movies EVER! Taking Woodstock. Avoid at all costs. We finally saw Black Swan. I thought it was okay. Some of the special effects were great and I thought the acting was good, but still… B-

Anyway, we have been busy getting settled in. We’re still unpacking and getting the basement arranged. When we get tired of doing that (which seems to be often) we go and do something else.

Like Friday. We went to buy a hose and ended up buying three hoses, plus a soaker hose, an unassembled wheelbarrow and bags of soil. The soil is for the brick planter by the front door. Our intent is to plant nothing but native plants in the yard. In Colorado, that means there’s not much to choose from. So, I’m going to put some geraniums in the front planter just to add a splash of color in our otherwise brown landscape. The hoses are each 100 feet long. We have a big yard. Even though we’re going to let the yard be as natural as possible, the trees that were planted are not native, other than the pines. So, we have an apple tree, lilacs, some spruces, a couple of Siberian elms and a silver maple tree that someone tried to cut down – it sprouted again and has become a silver maple bush. Except for the pines, they will all require a little water to help them survive our drought-like conditions. I’m enjoying the magpie traffic as they build a nest in the spruce I can see form my office window.

We tried to assemble the wheelbarrow yesterday. It just didn’t work. Rather than allowing it to become the reason for our divorce, we are taking it back to Costco. We will buy an assembled one for about twice the price as the unassembleable one. It’s cheaper than a divorce.

The tree people are supposed to show up today (maybe) to grind out the juniper stumps. We have eleven of them. That’s not counting the two junpiers the previous owner didn’t cut down. We will. The elms have diseases. So does the apple tree. Severe pruning is needed. We’re working on filling the money pit. So far, no end in sight.

We took some time off from house stuff to take Rosie for a hike up Blodgett trail. It’s a nice two mile hike along a forest service road. It’s uphill most of the way, so coming back down is a breeze. You get some great views looking east over the city out toward the plains. It’s so quiet that all you can hear is the birds and the occasional plane jetting somewhere eight miles above us.

The Beetle battery died. Luckily, the car weighs nothing and we were able to push start it. I don’t know why, but old Volkswagens all had lousy electrical systems. So, I have to remember to take it for a little drive every day to keep the battery charged. I’m taking it in Tuesday to have the seatbelts installed. And while it’s in there, maybe they can figure out why one headlight doesn’t work, the horn won’t beep, the interior lights don’t turn off and on when you open/close the doors, why the brake pedal sits a couple of inches forward of where it should, the wiper sprayer doesn’t work and why the battery loses power so quickly. Other than that, it’s perfect!

Okay, enough blabbing. Here’s a video I found that made me a little homesick for New York.