Hotel Door: 1; Me: 0

Pardon the recent lack of posts-- between the sloooooow process that is inexpertly mudding drywall and the awesome trip we took over the weekend, there's not much progress to speak of in the bedroom and laundry room.  I was all excited to get back home to finish up my mudding, but I unfortunately had a bit of a run-in with a hotel door in Lexington, Massachusetts, and now I'm stuck sitting with my foot up while my seven stitches heal.

We spent the weekend with some of our favorite people in two of our favorite places-- the Boston area and our former home of New Haven, Connecticut.  Two of our dear friends were married at the beautiful DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA and we were so excited to go.  I mean, SO excited.  Like, so excited that I absolutely knew something bad was going to happen.  You know when something is just too good to be true?  We were not only going to attend the gorgeous, intimate, personal wedding of two people we adore; but also spend time with some of our very favorite pals (also wedding guests and the owners of the best poodle ever) who just bought a house in my dream neighborhood in New-Haven-adjacent Hamden, CT.  We also planned to pop into NYC before our return flight from JFK; we were hoping to stroll around Central Park (where we got engaged) and see our niece and nephew (and their parents, of course!) in Harlem.

The first snafu occurred when we arrived at the airport in Portland on Friday and couldn't get the key out of our car's ignition.  We finally worried it enough to yank it out, but the ignition was stuck in the battery-on position, so we knew the battery would be dead by the time we got back.  And since the battery was on, the doors wouldn't lock.  But we were out of time to mess with it, so we sprinted for the shuttle and boarded our flight.  One hurdle jumped (or at least delayed).

But later that night, I was trying to pull open a stuck door at the hotel, and it finally opened with epic force and essentially cut off the tip of my toe.  A few hours later, I had stitches and antibiotics and strict instructions not to walk much.  Boo.

We did squeeze in a bit of New England tourism anyway, checking out the Buckman Tavern in Lexington (site of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War) on Saturday and Walden Pond on Sunday, and of course on Saturday evening I ignored my doctor's instructions and did a bit of cautious dancing at the wedding.  Sue me.

Sunday afternoon we returned with our pals to their beautiful new house in Connecticut, where we spent the next two days reliving the early days of our relationship and eating everything in sight.  Maybe I walked a little bit more than I should have and I definitely ate more than any doctor would recommend, but I've been looking forward to a New Haven visit pretty much since the day we moved out of our apartment there.  I wasn't about to sit on the sofa and miss out, you know?  Though sitting on the sofa with this guy is very tempting:

He had to have a drastic haircut after an encounter with a skunk a few weeks ago, but he is still every inch the charmer.

Yesterday we realized we just shouldn't try to squeeze in a trip into the city-- between time constraints and the fact that, due to my constant walking, my stitched wound was still bleeding quite a bit-- so we made our way to JFK (why, why, why aren't there ever any good flights out of LaGuardia?  It's, like, a million times more convenient) and arrived in Portland at midnight.  After collecting our bags and getting our car jumped, we started the one-and-a-half-hour drive home.

And now I'm resting on the sofa, willfully ignoring the school work, housework, and drywall work that need to be done.  Renovator, heal thyself.

More later on a pair of very exciting and adorable new additions that came home with us!

Shave and a Haircut

No indoor projects to report on this week.  I blame this guy:

You may recognize him from a post way back in October-- he belongs to our friends.  When they go out of town, we always jump at the chance to host him at our place for a few days.  He's incredibly charming and polite, and seriously-- look at that face.

For obvious reasons I've been hesitant to bust out my painting supplies and attack the ceilings in the hallway, bathroom, and guest bedroom (all of which are shiny and yellow, ugh)-- it's just not good form to get paint in your borrowed poodle's lustrous curls.  And I felt weird about sewing with him underfoot too-- what if I dropped a straight pin and he stepped on it?  Am I just using him as an excuse to be lazy?  Maybe.  He likes couch naps almost as much as I do.

But we have been busy.  As I've mentioned before, our house was a rental for several years before we bought it, and during that time the lawn got a little wild completely insane.  When we first moved in, my dad detached a dying honeysuckle bush that was literally tied to the front of the house.  The following week Ray attacked the nine-foot hedge that had been obscuring the house from the street and ripped out the first of three epic clumps of bamboo that were on the chopping block.  Since then, he's pulled out the other two bamboo blobs, cleaned up the overgrowth on the left-hand side of our driveway, cleared the huge impassable thicket of blackberry bushes on the right-hand side of our house (literally, they were so overgrown that he discovered a five-foot-high metal gate hidden in the middle of them), denuded our massive buckeye tree of the ivy that was strangling it, and removed endless bags of leaves from the property.  Lest you wonder what Ray is doing while I'm fixing the bathroom ceiling, look no further than the yard.  Believe me, he's been busy out there.

Flash forward to today, the rarest of all things-- a sunny-ish Oregon winter day.  This is going to sound crazy, but we thought we had these two enormous trees on the left-hand side of our backyard until we discovered yesterday that they are actually two normal-sized (for the Pacific Northwest, anyway) trees that have been completely taken over by ivy.  Our pest-control man told us that the trees underneath would eventually die because of the resource-stealing ivy, and if they fall, our roof is toast.  Today we decided to hack some of the ivy away and try to figure out what we were working with.  Behold:

 

See all those leaves?  They're not from the tree.  They're from the ivy.  You can see some of the tree's branches popping out of the ivy towards the top.  Yeah, we thought the leaves were part of the tree too.  So if you look carefully you can see Ray in there detaching some of the ivy from the left-hand tree with 1) a hand saw, 2) clippers, and 3) a pry-bar.  The pile of ivy behind him represents half an hour of bushwhacking to get as far in as he is in this photo.  Doesn't LeBaron look concerned?

Here's another view:

Yes.  That is ivy.  Two different species, in fact.

Deep in the ivy thicket, Ray encountered a third (much smaller-- maybe 6" in diameter) tree heavily covered with vines.  It was leaning, so we decided to remove it.  Ray cut it in half, and when he tossed it onto the ivy pile, this is what we saw:

 

I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but the tree rotted away a long time ago and is completely hollow-- only its bark, held in place by the roots, remains.  The ivy murdered this little guy.

We decided that the best approach would be to cut the ivy off from its ground-roots by cutting a full circle around the tree-trunk (which was not visible because the roots were covering it so thickly).  Here's what it looked like after Ray cut all the way around it-- see the darker, narrower trunk the in center and the lighter gnarly roots lower down and higher up?

The other thing you're seeing in the photo is our fence, or what's left of it.  Like I said, the ivy was so thick that we'd never seen this section of it.  The ivy has actually pulled the fence out of the ground and is pushing it over into our yard.  Hello, Little Shop of Horrors.

Above is a wider shot of the progress.  That dirt-pile behind Ray was once a huge (maybe 10ft high?) bamboo clump that was just randomly in the middle of the yard for no reason at all-- it'll get grass-seeded in a few weeks.  Anyhow, see all those hanging vines to Ray's right?  See the poodle-butt on the left?  Hehehe.

So this is a totally overwhelming project that will probably take one million years to complete (our town offers yard-waste pickup service once a week, so we've been operating on a fill-the-bin-wait-a-week-fill-the-bin schedule to remove our plentiful yard debris), but we're eventually hoping to make the left side of the backyard match the much-more-civil right side:

Yep, we've got a lot of work to do.  And yes, we see the ivy growing up that tree.  We're on top of it.

And the winner is...

BA-RUG OBAMA in a landslide!  Coming in with 100% of the popular vote after lots of comments via email and a couple on the blog itself, this one was the clear winner.  I called in two girlfriends (both of whom have style and taste in spades, of course) to get their in-person recommendations, and both agreed that bigger + bolder = better. 

So I spent the better part of an afternoon wrangling Mitt Rug-ney into its original packaging (not easy) and taping it up, and now it's all rolled up in the corner awaiting its return label.  One decision down; 52,734,083 to go.

Here's another view:

Ooh, nice tape measure on the mantel!

And I also thought I'd share this shot I took when we actually had all three rugs on the floor:

It kind of makes me happy, plus it really shows the color contrast between the two options.  And it also shows the desperately-needs-help upholstery on the Gold Chair (and its sad lumpy matching ottoman).  Holy Corduroy, Batman!  Note to self: get on that right away.

Next up: permanently affixing the slate tile to the fireplace hearth and trimming it out.  We thought we might get it done last weekend, but the tiling project was temporarily put on hold because of this guy:

So handsome, isn't he?  He's not ours-- he belongs to some very dear friends who asked us to poodle-sit while they took a quick jaunt to the coast this weekend-- but we were pretty busy taking him for long walks through the neighborhood, tossing squeaky toys to him, making him work for treats, and generally spoiling him rotten.  You try tiling when the dog you borrowed for the weekend really wants you to take a nap on the couch with him.  It's basically impossible.