Lazy Day
Kim gave me one of those 25-pound blankets for my birthday. We’ve been joking about them every time we see them advertised on TV, but I had no idea that she would buy one. For some reason I was very tired last night so I crawled into bed early and I do mean crawled because getting under that heavy blanket takes some effort. I don’t know whether it was being so tired or the heavy blanket, but I slept soundly until 6am. I’m not done testing out the concept of this heavy blanket, so I’m giving it a few more tries before I declare one way or the other on it.
We decided that it was a good day for an outing, and we agreed that going to Old Town in San Diego would be the ticket. Given the time of day, I had a few hours to kill, so I decided to do a little gardening. This burden I carry requires me to seek out something productive to do every day and I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t do it in the morning it’s highly likely that I won’t do it. So, I gathered up my low voltage lighting gear and my pruning gear and I headed off to the North side of the house. I started out on the live oak tree and pruned the shit out of the lower branches. All these trees look much better when they get thinned out in their lower parts. If I’ve learned anything from my Bonsai activities, its that trees actually do better and grow to the shape you want with regular pruning. Pruning rarely hurts a tree so long as you keep in mind that it needs enough leaves to feed itself with photosynthesis via sunlight.
After that I went at the newly planted and hopefully propagating yucca cutting I had had Victor stick in the ground next to the gravel path on that side of the house. It had leaves all the day down to and even just under the ground. It needed to be trimmed up and so I removed at least half of its leaves, once again the lower leaves. It looks good trimmed up just like the live oak looks good now that its pruned. I’m getting more confident in my pruning and have decided that much of this sort of work around the property I can do for myself rather than hire an arborist. I already had them thin out and prune the big tree, so what’s left are those which I can handle with my extending tree-pruning tool. It actually makes me feed quite powerful since the curved saw will take off quite sizable branches and the pivoting blade does a great job of slicing off smaller branches. The pole extends to perhaps fifteen feet, so it can handle quite a range of pruning tasks.
Speaking of confidence, the other project area that is working for me these days is low voltage outdoor lighting. One of the back hillside features I have highlighted is my metal sculpture of an eight-foot high Joshua tree Cactus. I thought it was the nicest metal sculpture in the Desert Steel portfolio so several years ago I bought it and brother-in-law Jeff wrestles it down to it’s home on the back Northwest corner of my lot, which is a natural promontory. At the time I was unwilling to run even low voltage lines down that far so we used what has now become two separate sets of solar lights. Their relative impotence in lighting the statue is one of the reasons I am off on solar lighting. In fact, having used it there, on the patio, on the patio path and around the pool (all removed and replaced with low voltage now), I am convinced that solar lights are useless. And based on the unreliability of the first batch of low voltage lights I have bought and found wanting, I am only willing to buy from Volt at this point. They deliver in two days so it’s quite convenient and I consider their prices very fair given their good brass quality.
Even though I put in one of the Volt lights at the Joshua Tree, it was not quite enough light to make the statue stand out from a distance, so I decided to add another. I have two more Volt spots left to put in the front entry with the additional transformer and control switch I have left, so I thought I could afford it. The hardest part of the installation is doing it on the ground and opening up the connectors. Solving the ground work is easy enough with a kneeling board and as for the connectors, the silicone gel is a bit squidgy, but easy enough to wash or wipe off. So that task was done in a few minutes, leaving me enough time to deal with about half of the live oak prunings. For that, I have a spot on the Norther part of the property where I have a cliff into the ravine from which I can easily dispose of organic landscape matter. That’s a lot easier than cutting it up and using trash bucket, though I do use that as well if I have the time to cut the branches into small enough pieces.
This all took place before 10am, so I had the time to shower and change for our outing to Old Town. Our visit to Old Town involved some shopping (fully masked). I found a few rocks to buy to add to my collection in my curio table. Kim showed me the tin smith she has frequented and we bought another Mexican bejeweled table lantern to add to our collection on the patio. We enjoyed an outdoor Mexican lunch in what seemed like almost a return to pre-COVID times. The ride home was occupied by the ever-amusing debate over the length of the centerline highway “stripes”. This is one of the better bar bets in the universe and once again I had Gary swearing that they could not possibly be longer than four feet. That is the normal response from someone riding in a fast-moving vehicle. In fact, they are ten feet long (I had remembered them longer still). It was a fine way to occupy the 30 minute ride home.
This is when the day got lazy. We have dinner guests (my sister Kathy and brother-in law Bennett) since it is Kathy’s 70th birthday tomorrow. While she has nary a grey hair on her head, three score ten, the biblical allocation for man (and woman), is a meaningful enough milestone that it deserves to be celebrated. It has always been my belief that making it to seventy means that you have broken even with life. It did not take you early and anything you get after that is a bonus. For such an occasion I need to rest up and hence my lazy day theme. It’s not my hot tub day (I try not to go in more than every other day) and I’ve dirtied myself with gardening already, so its off to the movie list to find something worthy of a lazy Sunday afternoon (we watch no football in this house if we can help it). I settled on Jungleland and John Wick 3, which are both gritty and dystopic in their own way. One is a brotherly version of Fight Club (not unlike The Fighter) and the other is a fantastical version of Bladerunner, which as we all know is an adaptation of the the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. There isn’t a lazy day between the five films, which may be why they are the perfect lazy day afternoon movie for me.