garden | Kimberussell.com

Currently, rainy edition

Jun 10 2018

Listening to the continuing rain. It started Saturday afternoon, but I did manage to get some time in at my personal “swim club.”

Life before the rain started yesterday at 4pm.

The handiwork at the top right is WM’s effort to keep Murphy and Jack (the boxer living on the other side of that fence) from meeting. None of the fences that surround our yard are our own, but we do what we can to reinforce them. 🙂

Murphy is on the mend. WM’s been up with him every night for the last 3 nights, making sure he gets let out when he has to go. He’s (Murphy, not WM) still poopy but with much less frequency and increasing solidity. We are supplementing his regular food with canned food for digestive issues from the vet. He’s back to normal energy levels, which I incomprehensibly missed. I miss my bird feeder, though.

Ollie is 3/4 of the way to being on new dog food. I’m hoping that’s the key to getting him past the ear infection hump. It worked before.

Weeding the front garden. I put some perennial flowering plants in there, and now I’m waiting for them to take root.

Watching Westworld again. I caught up on the first year with this three minute animated video and I think I’m good to go. The show is so hopeless, though. There is no way the hosts can get a happy ending.

Reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. All of the reviews say it’s uplifting but I’m finding it very awkward and sad to get through. I’ll keep pushing. The monthly Show us Your Books post comes Tuesday!

Laughing at this tweet…

ARE YOU CANADIAN pic.twitter.com/bd1dYNPWNf

— Anne T. Donahue (@annetdonahue) June 10, 2018

But hey, only 877 days until the 2020 election and then we’ll actually play nice with our allies again instead of sucking up to North Korea.

Hoping that the mechanic’s bill isn’t too large tomorrow. Did you think I was talking about Molly, since I mentioned her locked lift gate on Friday? NOPE. This is our red Jeep, which started smelling like burning plastic ON THE WAY HOME from passing her inspection on Friday.

Working from home tomorrow.

Succulent birdbath garden

May 21 2018

Back in April as I was chasing Murphy around the yard I tripped over something that turned out to be a birdbath buried underneath the ivy that covers the back third of our backyard.

After some Pinterest researching, here’s what we did.

The succulents are from Home Depot. The viney things are Creeping Jennys and one of them died shortly after planting. The other four looked sickly, but finally took root. That white coral-looking rock is actually a piece of concrete also retrieved from the ivy.

See, whenever the previous owners wanted to get rid of things, they just chucked them into the ivy. Concrete rocks, rusted garden tools, full sized birdbaths.

ANYWAY… the Jizo statue is from WM’s collection and the little path is just gravel.

Since it rained so much last week, I’m worried the succulents might rot. The birdbath is cracked and drains well, so fingers crossed our little garden makes it.

Around the House

Sep 19 2017

This summer all of the HGTV we’ve been watching finally began to stick, because we did quite a lot of work around the house.

WM built a work bench for the garage. It’s spiffy.

Next he built some above-window shelves for our stupid and fast-growing collection of Funko POPs. (I love our collection, yet am mortified I keep buying them. This isn’t even all of them.)

And then I built my first woodworking project since 7th grade – a little shelf for the oversink kitchen cabinet. I USED POWER TOOLS!

It keeps all of this crap from falling on my head everytime I open it, and it smells good too.

We stained and hung a wooden ornament we got from some Groupon-ish deal last year.

Outside, WM planted some juniper bushes along the sides of the yard.

We both ripped out all of the irises from the front yard. It was a tough decision, because they were one of the few plants that actually thrived, but they only bloomed for 2 weeks a year, and the rest of the time they crowded out the other plants. We bade them au revoir and the front immediately looks much better without them. I don’t have a picture because it’s just a patch of dirt.

The only fails this summer were garden-related. We still can’t seem to grow grass and will give it one more go this fall. And the rabbits destroyed any and all attempts at growing flowers. My mums have been eaten down to the stalks, and the container gardens I planted were an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’ll try the garden again next year, with the knowledge that I’ll have to probably build up some raised beds with fencing. Until then, I’ll resignedly leave this into the bare soil….

I've been blogging for over 15 years and I'm apparently one of the few over-40 female bloggers who haven't sold out to THE MAN yet; hence this blog remains quirky, homespun and unprofitable. No big.

~~Wife. Dog lover. Slob.~~ I live in Southern New Jersey with my husband WM, and our dogs Ollie and Murphy. I work a fun (really!) office job in Philadelphia. So if you're looking for a childless, slightly round, marginally boring GenX woman's blog to follow, you've come to the right place!

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Kimberly's bookshelf: read

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin

Welp, that ended abruptly. The version I have includes additional short stories, which I thought were part of the book, so when this story ended, I thought the second half of the book would be the others' responses to ... the events that...

tagged: fiction, women, and own-ebook

We Should All Be Feminists

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

So very good. Beautifully written, and really hits home. It was refreshing to read about feminism in a viewpoint other than that of my white, middle-aged, ladyfriends. :) Every middleschooler should be issued a copy of it. It was supe...

tagged: nonfiction, borrowed-from-library, and women

Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

tagged: nonfiction, history, and women

Tag - garden