How does your garden grow?

:: before & after ::

Yes, indeed, through the toil of our backs and the sweat of our brows, we have managed to bring life up from the loam of the earth.

After all the digging,






and planting,















and flippin' cute sign-making (thanks to katie!),











we have radishes, beets, spinach, kale, raspberries, strawberries, and tomatoes growing -- and more on the way! Katie even got dirt under her fingernails (a big step!), I got more muscles (hard to believe, no?) and we got to inhale the lovely stench of chicken manure for a full day! Who could ask for more?

And the flag is gone.

This flag sticker on the back door really needed to go away.  So it did in about 20 seconds, as soon as I got my hands on a razor blade.  Hope you guys won't miss it.  (It didn't really seem like your style!)

One move, two hours!

I have moved a lot lately--three times in the last year? Yikes! But I have always had decent weather for moving, which is pretty impressive in Portland, considering that I've moved in the spring and fall.

This time, not so much, though I'm hoping that's a good sign. Good weather moving in = place I want to leave soon. Bad weather moving in = I think this is a place I'd like to stay a while.

Even with the rain, it was my smoothest move yet (don't think about that too hard). One U-haul, two hours from first box in to last box out, and a crew of hardcore movers.


(Katie takes the best arm's length self-portraits ever!)

I didn't get any shots of the actual Disaster of Boxes (yes, this is the official term for a large collection of boxes, like a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows), but there's still a large collection of plastic tubs outside my door to by dealt with.

In our next installment: How I Doubled My Closet Space and Learned to Hate Lowe's AND Ikea is Ruining My Soul.

The first thing we did...created a blog.

Alright, so maybe not the first thing. The first thing was watching Back to the Future II. The second was drinking all the leftover booze. The third was moving Molly in (and boy! You thought I was bad?). The fourth = blog.

Although it's likely that these snapshots into the lives of your motley crew of tenants will more likely frighten than amuse you, here's to hoping that amid the terror that may be the color I paint the attic ceiling, you will find moments of happiness about what we did to your house while you were away.