It’s not bad enough that Lake Shitticaca shows up on my driveway every time it rains, reminding me of the Upcoming Great Retaining Wall Explosion Get Your Own Now Only $75,000 event, but we had quite a downpour yesterday and I could see just how quickly the bare ground, exposed by my overenthusiastic neighbor when he weed-whacked my blackberries (without asking), is going to wash away. Scary.
So I got a hook thingie and using all the muscle I’ve built this year pulled out from the trailing-blackberry cover the spring’s clematis prunings, which are conveniently wrapped up in bird netting, hauled the whole mess over to the naked area and plopped it over the worst part, hoping it will provide at least partial protection until I can get with a neighbor who has a pickup and go get 10 or 12 bags of mulch to cover it, and some jute cloth (ideally, but it seems to be hard to find locally) or more bird netting to anchor it to the ground. That ought to work, except that it looks as if one of the drainage channels is going to go from neighbor’s side of the property to mine, and I don’t want that At All. I may do some judicious dirt rearranging to make sure that doesn’t happen. His foundation goes down to bedrock, so his house won’t be floating down the ravine if all that dirt goes away; mine, as far as I know, has no footings at all. Of course. Having that shored up would probably be another $75,000 project. I don’t even want to know.
Neither of these has been good for the Anxiety Monster, who’s been feeding on them very happily and making my life a living hell. Acupuncture this a.m. helped a lot, but the effect starts to wear off after seven or eight hours, which is frustrating.
Good news is that I went to a readers’ theater group today and we ran through two old radio-show scripts from “Suspense,” and it was a lot of fun. And they let me in and were nice to the new kid and everything.
The “landscaping for erosion control using native plants” class I’m taking is going to be much more comprehensive than I really want, but I learned a lot in Monday’s class and the teacher said we’re starting on erosion control tomorrow. I’m surprised that the five-hour-per-day class exhausts me, but it does. Monday’s included about two hours in a local nature reserve that has about 100 native plant species. I discovered that I have a few red elderberries along with the sword ferns (which I will protect with my life, since they do extremely well with soil retention), a bunch of not-terribly-helpful bracken ferns, enough trailing blackberries to stock a nursery (which I’m sure everybody else has, too), and of course the big, non-native, invasive Himalayan blackberries (the huge, bushy ones that cities have to cut back every year and have thorns the size of a football field) that I have learned do a very poor job with soil retention. It’s not going to be pleasant trying to figure out how to get those things out (if I do) and put other, more suitable things in, and even less pleasant actually doing it.
So there’s my current life: one fresh hell after another.
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