We dozed

The rainy weather turned brilliant and scorching this weekend and so many people walked, hiked, biked past our house that I was amazed and thought "what can I sell them or give them?" I've never lived on such a remote street in my life and yet never had so many people passing by in any place I've lived. I know we're part of a popular hiking route and that the locals like to walk our street because it leads to the golf course and it's an attraction for some ungodly reason, but the rest of them? I've never said bonjour to so many strangers in one day.

What made all the passerby's even more difficult were the comments and questions about what we were doing. Seb rented a small bulldozer this weekend so he could do a few projects, mainly raze our little mountain, but also dig some holes and remove some tree stumps. The trouble with removing tree stumps is that they're like iceburgs. The stump is leetle but the rest is enourmous and the roots reach all the way to the driveway. Our yard looks like some crackhead moles had a rave. We will obviously be spending our summer planting grass, (glass is half full part of me says "yay new grass" because it was mostly just clover anyway).



The mountain of dirt was from when Seb dug out the basement, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow and then he had no idea what to do with it so it just stood there, this dirt looming over my kitchen for two months and me fielding questions about it like a president at a press conference. Yesterday he finally razed it and it added about 15 inches to our back kitchen garden which means you step out of the kitchen onto dirt now. Directly out of the kitchen. Very directly.

We're hoping to make a prety morroccan terrace out of it in a few months, a place for the kids to ride bikes and a little spot of sun in the early morning to mid afternoon. But for now it is a very, very big mudpit (see top photo).

The final project last night was moving two little trees which I hope survive, (but if they don't we have a million trees sprouting every year so we'll just grow new ones), and the ripping out of a chain link portion of the front gate which was massively tangled up in ivy and young trees, forgotten and left to weave themselves into the rusted links over the last ten years. It would have taken us two really laboured weekends of digging to get it all out but the bulldozer took it out in less than an hour, well, that and part of the sidewalk. Now we just have to rebuild the brick wall a little further and add two or three section of the wrought iron fence to finish it off. It's going to look so much cleaner and less like the abandoned house image that we're trying to shake. Meanwhile we have a "welcome please come and steal all our belongings" entryway into our house. Funny I was thinking how in France and especially in Paris everyone gates and locks their yards and really worries about it if there's a gap in the fence. In the US we don't and nobody worries. We were really stressed sleeping last night with that opening in the gate. Maybe it's just paranoia. We'll see if anyone steal our lawnmower over the next few days.