Hey, Wow, the Earth Did not Stop Rotating on its Axis

Day One of no poker went reasonably well. It helps when you're really busy, running around, and out of earshot of the siren's call of the computer.

It's amazing how much pleasure one can get from simply, umm, getting rid of junk and debris. Especially when said junk has been sitting there, mocking you, for years. One side of our house has been, pretty much from day one, the designated place to hide assorted unwanted items, especially bulky things that won't fit in the trash. It's a fairly narrow strip, about 10 feet wide, gets no sun at all, between the house and the fence line, so it's really not big enough (and not visible at all, from anywhere inside or outside the house) to do much with, other than keep the lawnmower there.

But all sorts of stuff has accumulated over the years, as far as old doors, pots, pavers, scrap wood, you name it. Despite intentions to clean it out, once and for all, it never quite happened. So it kept growing. And growing. The biggest non-motivating factor was probably three or four hundred pounds of old pavers and stones the previous owners had sunk throughout the yard, for no apparent reason, that I dug up when we moved in, and then stacked up, on the side of the house. I'd get motivated to clean out the side of the house, walk over there, see many, many, many pounds of stone staring me back in the face, and say Screw it, I'd rather play poker.

Yesterday was finally the day of reckoning, though. And I will fully admit that I wussed out, and called 1800GotJunk, and paid more than I should have for other grown men to come and haul off all our junk. It wasn't all that much more, though, than I would have paid to haul off four or five truckloads of trash to the dump, plus it was completely and utterly done in all of half an hour.

Which then meant I was finally able to lug the last of the limestone I bought last spring out of the way, so that our driveway is now nice and neat and doesn't have a half-full pallet of limestone blocks sitting in it. Today's plan is to rake out the side of the house, so that I can get much decomposed granite delivered, get that down, and voila, the side of the house will be transformed from heaps o' junk to a nice clean space to set up a kiln for ScurvyWife and a place to weld without setting many things afire.

I also worked on my project for the bronze class I'm taking, which ended up being the world's heaviest clock. Haven't done any patinas yet, so it's not really done, but I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.