In Greenville
Lately things have seemed pretty slow in Mississippi, especially when I juxtapose my life with my friends'. Lindsay is finishing her masters in London and will go work in the Caucasus or Eastern Russia. Beds is working for the AFL-CIO press shop. Hamm has her research posted on the front of the IWPR site. Emily and Alyssa are both going back to school. Brophy plans to do the same. Ian is working hard. I'm teaching out in the middle of nowhere.
When I get home there isn't a ton to do out here, as one might imagine. Hence the few blog posts as of late. This weekend, instead of doing random things, my roommates and I spent our time fixing up our house. Not extremely exciting, I know, but we are pumped about it and it's all I've got for the blog. Chris and Andrew raked most of the leaf-covered yard the past week and we decided that we wanted to plant some things and fix it the place.
After school on Friday we went to Lowe's and bought some flowers. We didn't really know what we were doing, except that we were spending a little money on annual flowers and a lot of money on perennials. When people asked me what kind of flowers we bought, all I could say was, "Pretty ones." Here's the yard as we were getting ready for the big planting session. This is after layers of leaves had been plowed away:
After putting in top soil, the plants, and plenty of potting soil, here is what the place looks like:
We didn't stop there, though. Andrew went and took a bunch of brick pieces from an oil refinery that burned down a few months ago and we made this pathway, complete with pebble stones.
We also wanted to get Chris' hammock up on the poles in our back yard, which at some point in time were used to dry clothes in the sun. After purchasing rope, the guys realized that it was too short to hang the hammock, so they would need to move one of the poles. Chris dug it up and, being the ox that he is, picked it and its cement base up and moved it to a new hole they dug.
Even though it was pretty far down in the hole, the cement base was popping out of the ground. I told them it wouldn't work, asking of they were familiar with center of gravity. Andrew stuck his middle finger up, asking if I was familiar with that. Instead of digging a deeper hole, Chris and Andrew decided to jump on the cement base and pound it into the ground. When they didn't get anywhere there, they got one of the many random pieces of wood in our back yard and see-sawed on it, hoping that would push it in the ground. When that failed Chris got a cinder block and started hitting it into the ground. After a couple of hits, the cinder block broke. What was more surprising was that the cement base cracked in half along with the cinder block. I told them that now they'd definitely have to dig a deeper hole. They did that, but it didn't work. Chris ended up having to cement the pole in.
The cement was dried this morning and Andrew went to test it out. It's solid, so long as you're covered with OFF! when the mosquitoes come.
Besides the yard, I also wanted to do something about the curtains in my room. Since I moved in, I had sheets and a flag tacked up to serve as curtains. I didn't mind this much, except that huge brown spiders and brown recluse spiders had elaborate webs behind the sheets. I didn't care about them being there much, because I figured they were high enough up not to bother me and that they helped eat the mosquitoes. But, I recently heard about a fellow corps member in Greenville who got bitten by a brown recluse twice in her sleep on each leg. Her legs swelled up double their normal size and she had to be rushed to the hospital. So I decided that the spiders had to go, which meant I needed to do three things: spray raid in all their hiding places, caulk all of the cracks in the windows shut, and get curtains so I can do any further maintenance. Here's what my place looked like:
The first thing I did was purchase cheap curtain rods and curtains that were on sale for $13 each. I put them up and the room looked pretty bad. Doreet said they were shit colored. I told myself that I didn't care about the color, just that they kept the sun out, and they did. But, they were dark colored and absorbed all the light, which made my room really hot. And they did look really awful. Mulling it over, I had an epiphany that I should have had before spending $80 on awful curtains. I could just buy fabric and poke holes in it to hang on shower rings. Carrie and I took back the turd-colored curtains and went looking for replacements yesterday. We decided the best thing would be to get two king-size sheets for $11 each. We cut them and hung them on the rods. They block the light pretty well, don't make the room hot, go well with my room color, look sharp, and cost 1/4 of the expensive ones. I feel like this is something they'd have on Trading Spaces.
Our next project is going to be to build a rock patio. Our landlord's boyfriend is going to get us a bunch of shale from Arkansas and we're going to get started as soon as it's here. There have been talks of making a fire pit and a lot of debate about configurations. I'll post pictures once that one's done. I'm also going to make a garden at school after the Mississippi Curriculum Test is over.
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