Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

Well, August has hit.

Hubby began power washing the house yesterday - the first step in the repainting process. It'll be many more days of it, though, and includes renting one of those lifts that he can move around the house, to get the 2nd and 3rd stories washed.

I've taken down and scrubbed the vinyl shower curtain liner and bleached the ceiling in the downstairs bath. I tried doing my quarterly shredding of papers - but you could wring out the paper for the moisture it holds, so I didn't get too far.

I'm not running around the house doing anything strenuous today - too humid. So, I'm working on the boucle jacket, whilst I listen to Inspector Morse murder mysteries on the BIO channel (how I love his movies!) and continue with my pattern-collating-into-booklets. I have many photos to retake and have been cogitating on the best place to do them. We have some pine tree stumps from having recently had 8 huge pine trees taken down - they were WAY too close to the house and pine trees are shallow-rooted, so they're NOT a good option for landscaping, especially close to an antique house, whose repair, if one ever fell on it, would not be insignificant.

But they are very inexpensive and that's the only reason I can imagine the previous owners had for buying SO MANY. They're everywhere. Here's that mantra rearing its head again! - but not *maybe* in the next house, instead - *Definitely* in the next house, there will be NO pine trees, anywhere on the property!!! They are nothing but grief, and I'm a Nature-lover, a tree-hugger, if you will, so I don't feel that way about much in Nature, but I feel that way about pines. They couldn't have planted more cedars, hemlocks or mulberry?

The cedars they did plant are, once again, close to the house. There's 2 nice hemlocks, one behind the north-facing kitchen, that was overshadowed by the 5 huge pine trees in a row - were they thinking wind-break? With pines!? And there's 2 mulberry trees, or do we have 3, hmm, behind the peony beds, but one is planted too close to a lilac. No thought to the size of plants *when mature* and their individual needs for sun and water. If I had a fortune, it could easily go to redesigning and landscaping the 4 open acres of the 6 we have.

So, anyway, there's a few stumps whose view of the yard from their placement isn't bad. The pond is still green with the watermeal, so I need to avoid it for the photos, but that's hard as it's an acre-sized pond and can be seen from many angles. The house and garage aren't painted yet, so they're no good as backdrops, and I have nothing flowering. So, lawn and pine trees as a backdrop, it looks like it will be.

I've taken inside shots and it works OK when I take them upstairs in the smallest bedroom which has nice afternoon north light, but the wallpaper doesn't go with everything I need to photograph.

Back to work!