Life goes on
The world may be going to hell but I just had my favorite vegan breakfast at the Pork Store and now I'm having tea at Coffee to the People, so life is good for the moment.
Leaving home this morning I ran into the owner of the lower level unit, she was overseeing the dance of vehicles in our alley as four or five cars and trucks pulled out into the street so that the van with her new carpet could get back to our building. For some reason, the people doing construction next door work even longer hours on Saturday than on weekdays. Sometimes, and this was true yesterday as well, the alley is blocked even after the normal quitting time of 4pm. My latest plan for "landscaping" our back yard is to put down tarps and observe how they drain until the construction is complete next door, or until I have a much better idea when we can schedule a delivery of 60 bags of gravel and not run into an alley parking jam.
Speaking of construction, yesterday I walked past a guy finishing some newly replaced cement on a Grant street sidewalk. The rest of the sidewalk there has an unusual pattern and he was doing a skillful job of matching it. The reason I noticed him was that he had brought his dog to the work site. The dog was lying comfortably on a blanket the guy had laid out on the sidewalk adjacent to where he was working. Nice gig for everyone concerned.
Not again!
As if things weren't bad enough this week. Walking past Union Square on my way to breakfast this morning I was shocked to see the big Christmas tree is already up and decorated. I'm interested to see if we will get our subway construction zone streets back for the shopping season -- as we always have in the past. Now that they are working on the station, I don't think they can just cover everything up with fake grass for a few weeks. Hope I'm wrong.
History!
I just ran into something amazing on Medium. This relates both to the Holocaust and to the subject of the Faustian/Mephistophelian character of the Jewish bourgeoisie. I'm amazed I've never heard about this. HERE's the link. Only think what Goethe could have done with this story. Or Dostoevsky.
Henry Ryecroft
Actual rain is falling from the sky. This is our first proper storm since, I think, early April. I remember that rain because I was working outside all day the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Now it's the weekend following Fleet Week and the City is finally getting a good washing.
The past week I've been thinking again about Henry Ryecroft, and this change in the weather brings him to mind again. The change of seasons. From now on we will be descending into winter. My greening work is done for the year. Despite a perverse urge to rev up my workouts, to get back to where I was on a couple exercises I've backed off of because of wrist problems last year at this time, I'm trying to ease off the exercise just a bit. To lay fallow, as it were, and give my body time to recover. (Though while this sounds sensible, I've come through the summer in such good shape it seems a bit silly.) I'm thinking I will limit myself to twice a week until the new year and then ramp up again.
Thinking of Henry Ryecroft, something else struck me, his attitude toward his health problems. And presumably this was true of George Gissing as well. Where as today we do battle with illness, he retreated to the countryside to try to enjoy what time remained. Today this would be a startling act for anyone not destitute or deranged. And yet who really enjoys those battles in and out of hospitals? I suppose enough people win to make it seem worth the effort, but I wonder.
Landscaping
I'm now learning a great deal about landscaping with gravel. We just want a thick layer of something in the back to prevent weeds from growing there. The ideal solution seems to be something called decomposed granite (DG). The one landscaper I've managed to get here to look at the site suggested it, and I've since studied up. If you pack it down, it almost resembles paving. The landscaper recommended five inches of the stuff to cover all the roots and vines down there.
The problem is that bags of the stuff are quite heavy (over 40 lbs) and since that landscaper never got back to me with the estimate he promised, it looks like I may have to do this myself. An alternative is red lava, which is under 30 lbs for the same volume and cheaper as well.
A great option would be 60 bags of the red lava as a base which would then be topped off with 57 bags of DG. This would give most of the advantages of the nearly solid (weed blocking) power of the DG but with a much lighter in weight (and cost) alternative underneath, where it shouldn't make much difference.
There are several other options: pea gravel, and a general purpose gravel that is even cheaper but still heavy. Just thinking about my back and our budget, the thought of simply having 80-100 bags of red lava delivered rather appeals to me. If it turns out that isn't quite doing what we want, we can always add a layer of DG sometime in the future.
And I just now discovered I can first put down a heavy duty tarp for under $50. So maybe just 80 bags of lava rock? I just want to get past this so I can finish up the damn painting.
