From the beginning....this is a LONG entry!

The first photos here were taken 6-11-08 according to my computer's photoviewer.  My camera at the time had datestamp function errors, so if you see red numbers at the corner of any of them (it happens randomly) just ignore it. lol

I have posted the pictures on my Facebook page and shared them in other places, but for the sake of Blog continuity, i am going to redo it here as well.

So as you may be able to tell from the date i stated, this is what the property looked like the summer following the fire that happened sometime in February.

The owner had much of the worst of the debris cleared up  and her son came and salvaged a lot of the big pieces of scrap metal. That was during the beginning of the current economic downturn that began a while ago,  where it was a trend to collect scrap metal and turn it in, it was a big boom at the time and the son was able to line his pockets with the proceeds of his mother's loss.

During this time, the large gaping pit- 8-10 feet deep in places was a huge temptation for some neighborhood boys.  Nobody in this neighborhood watches their kids, with the exception of the people that live directly across the street in front of our house.

It was frustrating and a bit scary to watch these kids keep sneaking onto this yard. Under the grass, weeds and plants lurked broken glass, rusty nails, jagged boards, wires....  a very serious situation and not a safe place to play.  The police kept putting up caution tape, but the unregulated kids just kept taking it down.  Since this land adjoined ours, the kids would also come right onto our yard and started messing around with our stuff!

At this time, i was still recovering from the car accident and had just graduated to crutches.  I was still barely able to get outside on my own. I think these were pictures of the first day i was able to get out and take a close look at what things were like out there.  It was a beautiful day and i think that is what lured me out.  I was 90% bedridden for about 4 months prior so getting up and out the door was a real treat.

This picture reminds me of the day a few days after this, when i caught some kids playing in my yard at our basketball hoop. The accident totally destroyed my Hyundai, so when my hubby was at work there were no cars indicating anyone was home. I was taking a nap when i heard the basket ball being dribbled and skateboards running in the driveway. I was so mad. These kids had been asked nicely to not mess around in our yard, but of course they thought they could sneak in when they thought nobody was home.  Of course i yelled.

This is something i never would have done as a child. We had respect instilled in us... never would this have been an issue in my youth. I don't think i can accept it.  The parents do nothing about it either.

That is part of the reason for the stockade fence we have been putting up.

Below is a picture of part of the front of our house. Mostly for clarity purposes since most of the houses that will be seen in the pictures are not ours. The big white one with the melted siding belongs to the not-so-nice neighbors. We have had many issues with them.

 

My flower garden dosen't look so hot because i was not able to do anything with them that spring. Usually i would have been out there as soon as possible, weeding and thinning.  That is if i wasn't too tired from work or dealing with depression. But my gardens have been neglected for 2 summers now, this year mostly because rainy weather still makes me very lame and not much can be done when the weather is as soggy as this summer's was!  Slugs and snails galore!

But anyway, this is what our house looked like before we got our new siding- remember that we had some fire damage...

That is the day the siding was beginning to be installed.  The heat from the house fire had bubbled the paint that was on the asbestos siding and it had begun to peel.  Bare asbestos is not something that anyone wants to have around, so the insurance gave us some money to repaint that side. Well, we had planned to get siding done so we used what we got for insurance to supplement the cost of new siding over all.  That silver board leaning up against the house is called Fanfold, and we went and had it put under the siding. It adds insulation and sound dampening and also can help keep the asbestos siding isolated better.

My dad's good friend does siding installations so we hired him to do it for us since he does great work. My dad also wanted to help with the installation, so we got him for free.. I love my dad.

We went with a fairly premium siding, we had the money from the fire insurance, plus some pain and suffering payout from my accident, so we figured while we were in a position to do so, why not get the good stuff. Its more of an investment than a silly splurge.

The house isn't quite square to the ground anymore- its over 100 years old.... but it wasn't bad... Up go the corner edges. That is the foundation for the siding lengths.

Then the Fanfold insulation , worth every penny. It noticeably cut down on the house's  draftiness level.

The new color, versus the old color.

I didn't take as many pictures of the siding as i thought i had, i also can't find the finished pics. I think they got lost in a computer crash i had earlier this spring.  So that is it for this subject!

On to the yard remake!

We were able to get the purchase of the land finalized late fall of 2008.

I don't remember where the date is written down, but i could look it up later and edit in the details.

But due to issues we have had with the neighbors across the lot, there was no way we were starting anything without getting a surveyor to give us the exact and correct  property lines.  We also knew the lines on the side with the nice neighbors were not entirely right and we certainly did not want to take what did not belong to us on either side--- But i paid a pretty penny for that lot (let's not forget that the money came from pain and suffering payout from a car accident with a drunk, that almost killed me) and i wanted every honest inch that i had paid for.

The only thing we did was go along and mow down some of the growth and dump one load of fill into the pit- which the not-so-nice neighbors promptly called the town about to complain.

Lying, she said we had a dump truck (it was my dad's trailer on his Ford pickup) full of clean fill.

We had already asked about permits and were told we didn't need any for what little dirt we had at the time. But that doesn't stop  people who are just nasty. 

Anyway, the town official recognized that it wasn't a dump truck load of fill and confirmed no permit needed

and that was all. We only had the one load to do anyway- to fill in the deepest part of the pit for the neighborhood kids' safety.

We got rid of this shrub, which crowded into our driveway every summer

We also cleaned much of the "garden"debris, well i say "we" but it was mostly my mother and hubby that did the cleaning.

The former owner was a collector of many garden trinkets, large and small....  broken and whole, concrete and plastic.  There was about 40 years worth of kitschy clutter in there.  About six of my dad's trailer loads full.  We did some cleaning that fall, but the bulk of it was done after the survey was completed and the snow was all melted in the spring of 2009.

So the surveying had began sometime after snowfall and i took some pictures, but i think those were lost along with the siding documentation, and the surveying was completed early this past spring.  After that was settled, and we found that the not-so-nice neighbor's fence was indeed on our property.. as much as 4 feet over, we had to get some simple legal advice on what to do about it.

A registered letter requesting that they remove it within 30 days was advised, and we sent it- giving 45 days in an effort to be accommodating ...  which was ignored.

In fact, they ignored us almost completely except for the one finger salute they would give us every time they drove by.
Not rain nor snow nor dark of night kept them from giving us and anyone in our yard, driveway, sidewalk or window this historical signal of friendship and respect...cough....cough....

We got a little help with fill from the people that live at the other end of the street.  The spit of land where the trees were (that i posted pics being cut down a few days ago) had  a number of large boulders on it.  They asked if they could discard them in our pit since there was no other place to do so.  We were only too happy to accept the rocks which was a solution that saved us all a bit of money.  So those neighbors used their little Bobcat and moved all the rocks and that was done in a day.

So, the real work began April 18, 2009

 

You can see the boulders in the pit and where my dad used his tractor to scrape the edges down a bit.

There were a lot of pretty nice landscape plants that had been planted in the yard. There were a ton of Hostas, and my mother loves Hostas. I am not a big fan, so i was more than happy to let her have them all since she was being so helpful to me in doing so much yard work that i am not able to do.

  I went all over the yard for a few days  before the guys got too crazy and i took pink spray paint and pink survey tape and marked every ornamental plant that i wanted saved.

There had to be at least 30 different Hostas, large leafed, small leafed, variegated, margined, ruffly, flat....  all types.

There were a ton of old fashioned lilac, purple and white flowered. There was one French lilac, a nice Yew (you can see it in the first picture in this entry where it has a lot of orange where it got fire damage- but it recovered very nicely), a red twigged, variegated dogwood,  a white rugosa rose, the beautiful Tree Hydrangea that is my profile picture, a double magenta Rose of Sharon, a female holly, the two dwarf grafted apple trees, a huge flowering quince, a number of old fashioned peonies, pink turtlehead, a bleeding heart and way more than i can list.

There were a couple ornamental pines but they were so misshapen from being planted next to structures or having junk piled on top of them over the years, that we just cut them down.

We saved what we could, and dug up and sent almost all of it to live at my parent's house. We only discarded a few plants, just the pines really. We kept the apples, the Rose of Sharon and the tree Hydrangea, the rest went to live on my parents' seven or so acres. Once i get things settled and plotted, i can take cuttings or suckers if i want. I hope the free landscaping plants feel like a fair trade to my parents' for all the help they give us and are still giving us.  Of course they have never asked for anything in return,  but i hope they are as happy to have the plants as i was happy to provide something-anything to show my thanks.

This picture shows the Yew and a burning bush and i think maybe the French lilac.

One of the pines we had to cut down is in the pit and you can see a couple green plants down there with the apple trees.... i think one is a holly and the other might be the other pune tree that we cut down.  You can see to the far left of the picture, yet another Box Elder that had to be removed. Its freshly-cut stump is a cream colored speck. That tree was growing right into their roof and the roots were into the basement, i'm surprised it didn't collapse the house.

More dirt pushing.  What would we do without my dad and his John Deere?

Hubby is leaning on the stack of fence panels that he spent all summer painting one by one. Something like 30 of them all counted.

Dad was trying to bury the platform that held the black oil tank that had belonged to the burned house. It was a very large concrete slab with rebar sticking out all over. It took a lot of digging and shoving, but it got put under eventually!

They had also removed the huge flowering quince, so the hole it left was good for burying the slab.

Between scraping down the edges and the big rocks, most of the pit was filled.  One thing good about all the rain we got this spring and summer  was that it compacted the soil and collapsed any subterranean voids, so we should not end up with little sinkholes  all over the place in the future.

We need a break from all the brown....  These are my nice spring flowers. The roses aren't awake yet,  but right now everything else looks happy.

 

The old shed came with the yard. Hubby  had gone inside, put his hands on the roof and turned it around  to face this direction, so we used it for the snow blower  last winter.  But that was its last gasp because it was so rickety we decided to just discard it. I was disappointed that we couldn't use it more, but it really was in bad shape, all the seams were loose and the corners were bowing in.

One of the survey pins. Shows how far over the property line that fence is.

Some of the lilacs that we dug up and saved.

When the not-so-nice neighbors put the fence on the former owner's property, they plunked it down right in the middle of some of her lilacs.  There was yet another Box Elder tree growing in that cluster and it was such a mess that we had to forget this bunch of lilacs  and cut it all down.  I didn't really want to, but it was going to be too hard to get the lilacs out and we already had dug up and saved so many, it wasn't so bad.

The Surveyor stake, the milk can and the stone monument...

Its not the best angle, but you can see the stone monument that is within our property line. The line goes at an angle off to the right, the other surveyor stake is past the swing set all the way back. It is just about in line with where the closest leg of the swing set is in the ground.

Digging up some lilacs.

We were careful to not dig too far over and get into their side. I don't know what is up with that storm window against their house.  Hoping we'd break it so they could accuse us of vandalism? Haha.  It didn't move an inch, and as far as i know, its still there to this day!

Into the truck ya go!  Off to wide open spaces and sweeter soil!

Moving the Burning Bush. I took lots of pictures because where we were so close to their house, i didn't want any accusations of how we damaged anything, so i documented exactly where and how we dug and maneuvered. Everything!

But it makes a pretty cool pictorial sequence, and i omitted a lot of them.

 

 

 

Gone!

Then the trouble began...

When we tried to move the tree hydrangea in the photo below.

This tree was planted by the mother of the person we bought the yard from. But as soon as we moved it, the not-so-nice neighbors began to have a fit.  Police were called, etc. We showed the police the survey map,  nsn-neighbors tried to justify themselves by making up a story about how we hired a bunch of different surveyors until we found one that gave us the property lines we wanted and a whole bunch of really pathetic inventions. It was quite sad, really.

As anyone who knows understands,  that is not how surveying works!

The officer looked at the survey map and basically said "carry on"....  and so we did.  But i didn't snap any more photos until the nsn-neighbors left because i didn't know if that would provoke anything and we really were trying to be decent.

 

But this picture (showing the survey line and the hydrangea on the left) is worth the proverbial 1,000 words.

 

The hydrangea's new home.

This is the first hole for the first post for the fence....!

We didn't really intend it to look like this... but it has a sort of   "Talk to the hand!"  effect....  i think hubby and my dad kind of liked that impression.  They were the ones that bore the nsn-neighbors' verbal assault.

So, there is the first corner.

We also moved that Rose of Sharon tree up to the front. It had been in the way back in the shade and i don't think it had flowered much cause i never noticed it at all.  Justin is setting paver bricks along the bottom of the fence to see if we can keep weeds from growing too much there and becoming a real pain.

The tree hydrangea looks quite happy there.

A much improved view.

7-12-09

We had some dirt delivered, i think 3 dump truck-loads.  So dad came and spread it out in the areas where all the plants we wanted to move had been.

There are still a ton of lilacs in this picture- that's the big shrubby stuff over to the left a way.

The posts on the left were  painted by hubby and he dunked them in driveway sealer to see if it would help keep the wood preserved a little longer..Its pressure treated, but he was hoping for an extra measure, at least to keep us from having to do any digging over the fence in the near future!

Lilacs....  here today.....

Well, this pic is from like 2 weeks later and the lilacs are still there....  but they are waaaay back.  We asked the nice neighbors if they wanted them and they said they would like them, so we moved them down the slope.

Then my dad and hubby built the retaining wall.  My dad had felled a few old pines in his back yard, and he stripped them of branches.  That is what they used to build the wall.

I didn't get to take any pictures since the baby was being rather fussy and i couldn't get her to nap so i could make my escape...

By the time i got out to take pics, they were mostly done.

We'd had a few more loads of dirt delivered, and my dad trucked in a few piles of the town's recycle compost.  They got that all the sand spread out before the day was over.

 

This is the retaining wall.  I think its about 3' high...  It had to be done so we didn't have such a sharp grade from the front yard to the back yard.  The front turned out pretty level on its own, but about halfway to the back and where the properties met (old and new) was a pretty sharp drop that was more on the new side than on the old, water would rush down and was causing a slow erosion.

 

looking West-ish.

 

Looking, NorthEast-ish.



A few days before my dad went off to work on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, he came over and helped my hubby finish the main part of the remaining fences.

Since we had nsn-neighbor issues and they never bothered to remobe the fence, we weren't sure what to expect,  so i was out there, camera ready to show that we were attempting to be as non-invasive as humanly possible.

We carefully re-strung the lines, once again. (The nsn-neighbors cut it down every time we had one up so we had to re-do it each time.)

 

I'm glad they had the auger, there were so many rocks in the ground, it would have taken them hours to dig each hole with just the post-hole digger.

 

I took pictures of each panel of their fence in case any questions arose about whether we were being careful.  I guess technically, the fence belonged to us since our "please remove" letter was ignored.  I think they consider it abandoned material.  But i guess hubby had some civil discussion with them and we agreed to stack the fence pieces in their yard so they could close off the back of their yard with it.  So, anyway, we were careful.  Dad pulled their posts by wrapping them with chain and using the bucket of his tractor to pull them up.

We did bust one post, it split when it came up, but we replaced it with an extra unpainted post that we had.

 

I don't know what we can do with these apples, we propped them so i hope they make it through winter. Next spring i can see if they make it then figure out how to treat them.

 

 

There is a gap in the fence all the way to the back corner.  We will have to put a panel down to size and fit it in, but the main part is finished.  We plan to close off the back part with the tall fence panels all the way across.

For the side where the nicer neighbors are, we plan on only doing a 4 foot fence.  It will be the same height  as we had before, but it won't be white pickets. It will have to match the stockade fence,  so it will be painted the same color.  But they do say that good fences make good neighbors, and i think it will simply neaten the look of our place up.  It looks kinda funny right now, all half fenced in.

Ok, thats it so far!

Watching grass grow, part deux....

I guess you could gauge the quality of life by the level of excitement that arises from the observation of certain things that have become cliche'.  But in a way its not quite accurate in this case.  My life is actually quite busy some days and rather relaxed on others, but since i have not decided how personal i will allow this blog to become, some activities won't be posted. Its kind f a safety issue for my kids.  I have only shared this link with a few friends and some family, but it looks as though anyone can read this if they find it.
It all sounds very dramatic and i suppose with all the other very descriptive blogs out there, statistically mine is on the low end of risk, but until i get a feel for things, i'm not going to risk too much right off.

So, back to grass growing!

You can see the green "haze" around ground level....

What is exciting about this is that it means that the money spent on the seed hasn't been wasted and when spring rains arrive after this winter, hopefully, we won't lose a few 100 dollars worth of soil when the road floods and the water goes barreling down the back yard.  It also means that my garden will have some extra goodness in it, because the roots and tops will be tilled in later in the spring.  Rye grass also is said to have a stunting effect on weeds, its a weed inhibitor.  I don't know very much about this, not sure if it is a physical action of literally choking out or shading weeds to their demise or if there is some sort of chemical warfare thing going on. All i know is that its said to not harm or inhibit actual garden crops.

Here a couple pics of what i was gardening in before the addition of the new property. These pics are dated 6/11/08

They are surrounded by standard landscape timbers,  but i'm not sure what the dimensions were.  My stated guesses have been anywhere from 6'x4', 5'x7'...

This one i think was at least 6' long, but only about 3' wide....

I have planted in them since we moved into this house in Spring 2004,  the first year i did flowers on the 'side garden'  and the 'back' garden i had just made.  The flowers did ok,  but it was a struggle since we discovered that we were to be plagued with woodchucks. 
The woodchucks ate my Cosmos and many of my Gazanias.  I love Gazanias and Cosmos and we didn't have a whole lot of money at the time since we had just signed the paperwork for the house, so i was livid when i came home from work and saw my seedling flowers have been mowed down by a fat, hairy ground rat.

Normally i love animals, but there are a few that i can't find any use for... The woodchuck is at the top of that very short list.
Because of them (and local zoning laws prohibiting shotguns),  my selection of food plants has been limited to things that woodchucks won't eat (and things that fit in tiny spaces).  Tomatoes, zucchini and summer squash,  peppers, corn, cucumber and radishes. Woodchucks won't touch basil or rosemary either it seems.  Broccoli, kholrabi, cabbage, cauliflower, peas and beans were simply whistle-pig bait.

Anyway,  out of those things, only so many can fit in that space.  I also had to consider determinate varieties of tomato...and of course the ones that looked really exciting in the catalogs were all indeterminate ... being heirloom type; stemming from a time not so long ago when most people had at least one acre all to themselves and tomatoes could ramble along a stout trellising system.
  I tried  both and had some success with each.  Usually at the expense of something else.  Patio type tomato plants only gave me small fruits, the mid size determinate plants gave regular sized fruits, but were still too big for their spots and the indeterminate types gave me nice tomatoes but took over everything else and competed with each other.

Aside from tomatoes, another problem with small gardens is the effect of over crowding.  I read a little about square-foot gardening (but never bought the books),  and i wonder if they address the problem of what happens when dense growth collides with moist conditions and a bit too much shade.  Add snails and disgusting earwigs to the mix and you get to enjoy the mess i had.

The snails would scrape away at the skins of the vegetables and cause them to look unpalatable if ripe, and would cause them to rot before ripening if they were green.  The earwigs would eat through the walls of the peppers and set up a pantry inside them.  The earwigs would also hang out in the corn stalks and get into the corn silk and eat at the ears.
I'm glad there was no space or time for gardening this year,  so much rain had earwigs coming into the house! I can't imagine the damage they and the snails would have done if i tried to grow food this year. What they did to my perennial flowers was bad enough!

It has been a rough few years of experimenting and losing time and much of what little money has been available. I never seem to have all the right stuff to combat what goes wrong, but i'm not giving up!

I've been grateful for what the gardens have produced,  we have gotten some lovely tomatoes and radishes, plenty of zucchini,  i had lots of  delicious winter squash last year and it has been a learning experience and a good hobby.  The effort has been worth it and i think i have gotten most of my money's worth. I don't think i would have had as much fun if equal money were spent on things like movies at the theater or fast food...

A few boring days.

I have not been feeling very cheerful for the last few days. I think its just hormones so i'll leave it at that.

Yesterday was dull weather, today is sunny and chilly. Still waiting for that ryegrass to grow. From some experience in sprouting wheat grass for spring decorations and for the cat to chew on, i know that the roots take off first. So as long as the seeds are sending down roots enough to hold the soil it does not matter so much how green the top gets.

This might be a good day to try and start posting and explaining all the before and after photos of the yard.

I'll start with the pics of the house that burned down:

These pictures were taken on March 14, 2008.  I think the demolition i took pictures of came more than a few weeks after the fire.  But i don't seem to have any pics of just after the fire.  The cause had to be investigated as normal, but there was some question of whether the son had started it intentionally because of the carelessness surrounding the actual cause.  The mother who owned the house was wintering over in Florida at the time and had all but given the house to her son and his girlfriend. They weren't the nicest of people, smoking, drinking, drugging, yelling, fighting and generally unpleasant.  But we simply didn't associate since hubby and i both worked more than 40 hours a week.

 

The fire happened while i was still pretty messed from the car accident i had got into on New Year's Day. Three months later i was beginning too just be able to hobble around with a walker.  I had to take these pictures through the kitchen window and the side door window cause i could not get outside.

So, that's why some of them are not so great.

The front of the house was completely black and the smell of burned plastics was very cloying. The wind blowing stuff around could be heard at night and it really stressed out my daughter.  I took lots of these pictures so she could see how a house gets torn down.  I hoped it could add some closure for her, since the fire itself freaked her out very much. 

Her school is basically at one end of the road and during winter when the leaves are off the trees she can see the row of houses through her classroom window.  The students saw the blaze and knew she lived around there.

So, through the classroom window, she had a moment of shock before she saw that it was not our house, but it didn't help much knowing that her mom with the severely broken leg was right next to a burning house . At the time she didn't know for sure that her dad was home with me that morning.  I was also so freaked out as i was hobbling away from the house when the police insisted we evacuate.  Where it was March, we had been having icy weather, so everything was slick and bumpy. I had a police officer cheering me on as i nervously shuffled along. I was so scared that the firetrucks would come rumbling down the road and have to stop for me. lol

Another reason that the fire freaked my daughter out was because when she was about 3 years old, we were living in a townhouse apartment, and the neighbor there had a fire. We were awakened in the middle of the night to the smell of burning and that scary orange glowy color and the banging and popping sound of burning wood--- this fire was also in the winter.   So it had this flashback quality that was unnerving.

So for my daughter, coming home to see that the remains of the building had finally been knocked down and mostly carted away was a relief to her.

For me, it was a fascinating process.   I tend to find a lot of things to be very interesting. Especially when its something that thankfully, does not happen every day where you can see it.

The demo has gotten to where you can see the heat damage that was done to the next house. Their vinyl siding melted and buckled.  We were lucky that the fire happened on a virtually windless day. You know the saying about how March comes in like a lion?  Well.... March was being very lamb-like on that day, the surrounding days were as lionlike as ever.  Thank God. Because if it had been consistently windy, we and the other neighbors could have lost our homes as well.

In the next pictures, you will be able to see how close this house was to ours. But for now i will say that hubby an i were very grateful that our house was clad in asbestos siding.  We had a lot of heat bubbling,  enough to have to call on the insurance company.  Nobody wants unsealed asbestos around. But the asbestos certainly prevented any further damage that could have happened.  If we'd had vinyl at the time, it would have looked far worse.

This picture was taken from our side door, all that was between us and this house is the narrow driveway and maybe 3 feet of unpaved ground.  So, many kudos go to the firemen.

The yellow tape is actually about a foot away from the drive way and you can see the 'path' that we used to shovel to their monitor heater vent. We used to make sure to keep the vent clear of snow and ice, we started doing it for the lady that owned the house and continued to do it for her son and his pregnant girlfriend.

 Since we had to evacuate, we spent the rest of the day at my parents' house one town over. If i remember correctly, the fire happened around 11am, so my daughter had the better part of the school day to finish, but we were certain she had seen the fire from the classroom or at least the faculty had. So we stopped by to let everyone know that all was well, though the house was destroyed nobody was injured and we thought the best thing was for our daughter to finish the day like normal and we'd be at her Nana and Papa's until it was time to pick her up.

The fire was spectacular enough that it made the local news and for about 2 weeks after, people were detouring to the dead end road we live on to gawk. I have to say i was getting pretty annoyed with it because people were constantly turning around in our driveway and i never knew if it was someone coming to visit us or just rubberneckers.

We did use the small amount of insurance money that we got for the heat damage to the side of the house to help put up vinyl siding. We figured that since there was now little risk of fire damage from the next house, the following summer was the time to do it.  Where we had some extra money we opted to have fan-fold insulation installed underneath and it made a big difference in lowering heat loss and it also made the house quieter by blocking more outside noise.

So in a way i guess its an "all's well that ends well" sort of thing.  Eventually the investigation ended and the owner was given the insurance money. Not sure that she got very much because the house was in pretty bad condition, really only one inspection away from being condemned...  but it was her home, with lots of memories, photos and belongings inside, but i hope she got enough to soften the blow.

But it was pretty sad to see the remains of the house and wonder how the owner was getting along. Where she was living in Florida we didn't really get a chance to send any regards.

I think it was around May before we even considered asking if she was thinking of rebuilding or selling, and we had to go through other neighbors in order to contact her.

Ok, so that is how the yard became available for us in the first place.

The glory of the Lobster

This was a fun day. Especially where i don't get out much, but even for someone who does get out quite often, this would be ranked pretty high on the scale of fun. (especially for  a wannabe foodie such as myself!)

Today was the day that my sister-in-law got to compete as one of the three finalists in a state wide cooking contest. The cooking contest was to find  Maine's Lobster Chef of the Year.
This is not a small deal.
The 3 finalists were chosen from recipe submissions that came in from all over the state. All three of the finalists were Maine born-and-raised which wasn't a requirement, but it was a nice fact.
Another interesting fact is that my sister-in-law, aside from being the only female finalist, was also the only finalist without any formal training as a chef, the guys she was competing against were graduates of either Le Cordon Bleu North America or  the Culinary Institute of America. Now if that doesn't sound impressive, i don't know what is.

Now, i had intended to take a photo of each sample dish as the tasting was going on,  but i was trying my best to be objective and discussing it with hubby and listening to and watching the demonstration- as each chef prepared the dishes while we were tasting.

I did however photograph my SIL' tasting sample:

Maple Butter Poached Lobster Tail with Sweet Potato and Fuji Apple Bisque and Fizzles of Green Onion 

That is quite a mouthful of a name for what is known as an "amuse bouche" . It looks like a nice piece of lobster tail on in a small pool of clarified butter, but looks are deceiving. The butter-like substance is the Bisque of Fuji apple and sweet potato, it has a nice creamy texture with a good balance of sweet and just a touch of tartness. The recipe also contains orange zest and i noticed it as a pleasant extra touch that kept the bisque from tasting flat.

There is a lot of butter in the recipe, but since the lobster is simply poached in the butter, you don't actually eat very much of it. The maple syrup as it is properly used in this dish, brought out the sweetness of the lobster without being  cloying.  This is an important thing to note since i think many people might think that real maple syrup is similar to pancake syrup. They are totally different entities.

There is a reason why you can get 32 ounces of pancake syrup for $2.50 but 8oz of real maple syrup costs at least $5.00. 

I think my favorite quote from my SIL's demonstration was when asked about why she uses unsalted butter...

the reply was "Because salt is one of those things you should watch your intake of."  as she deftly began  a pound and a half of butter melting in a pot.

Now you know why i like her so much!

i might write more on this later. i started it Friday night and finally got enough written for it to make sense this Saturday morning!  Or i may leave it at this :-)

More tree removal!

I believe i have established my almost complete hatred for the Box Elder variety of tree, so today, much to my delight,  the neighbors who live down the road decided to remove the trees that are across the road in front of our house!

I was so excited to see this day finally come, that i happily took my camera in hand to document the process!

It took me a while before i realized what was going on, i really thought maybe they were just going to prune them because it seems everyone around here thinks that these hideous trees are just dandy.

I gotta get me one of these!

The house in the picture is not the home of the same people that own the spit of land that the trees are on.  I consider the people that live in this house among our nice neighbors.  They have two girls about my daughter's age and they make good friends,  though all of us adults are too busy to do much together.

Like butter!!!

 

 

Just a little off the top...

 

 

 

I was so happy i couldn't stop taking pictures!

 

 

 

Gonna have to nickname him Eileene

 

 

The long gray building is the home the tree owners live in. Its a family apartment since the grandparents own it and their kids and grand kids live there.  Not a bad setup with all that space i imagine is in there.

 

Then they chipped up the branches, left the logs for later and that was it for the day!  They started around 1:00 and were done by 4:30.

Not a bad day's work.

This view is in an easterly direction.  We will be getting lots of afternoon sun through our living room windows now!