I realized I hadn’t penned a post for a while. If you are still sheltering in place like we are, life is pretty mundane (luckily). Things are opening up here, which freaks me out. The population of ex-pats that is still residing here (and haven’t escaped back to their summer homes) consists of a lot of people at-risk because of their age. I worry about our community, but I can’t make choices for other people, so I’m just going to have to let that go.

Instead, I’ll talk about how we’ve been spending our calories these days. Landscaping!

hard labor

It’s a DIY household here and what we do feel comfortable to make on our own we do our best to execute. We had a bit of a failed experiment making concrete shelves in the utility room, closets and pantries; so we broke down and decided to stimulate the local economy by having them done by professionals. We are into week 5 of that project. It is going slower than we’d like, but they are doing a really nice job, so I’m not complaining. We had a fair amount of trepidation having workers in the house, but they are being as safe as possible, we have the house fully open and ventilated, and we keep ourselves isolated in other areas of the house while they are working.

Since the concrete work is taken care of now, we switched our efforts to landscaping. After construction, we were left with a large pile of foundation rocks in our backyard which promptly became a home for a family of ground squirrels. We are slowly removing the rocks around the outside of Marmot Mountain (as it has been dubbed) and re-using them for paths through the yard. The path below is the finished product.

So far, we’ve done the path from the door to the gate and a path to the bodega (pictured above). Now, this is just hard-ass labor – no other way to spin it. The ground is very hard packed and dry, so we need a pick-axe to loosen the dirt. I never thought I would get proficient with a pick-axe, but I can confirm that I can now wield that sucker like the best of ’em. We dig down about 4-5″ then fill with sand and place the rocks on the sand and fill in around them.

We’re now building paths around the house. Once these are in place, I’ll start doing more landscaping. I’ve been rescuing pieces of cactus and discards from yard waste piles to give them a new home in our yard. That, I will save for another post!