We did this today, after an exhausting weekend of having a yard sale. I also spent a little time at Art-A-Whirl. It was a busy weekend! We decided on the raised bed “square foot” method because of the arsenic in our neighborhood and because we don’t know much about gardening and this seemed like a simple method. We’ll see!

We’re painting the porch, peeling the cool-but-aged wallpaper & painting in the stairwell this weekend. Here’s some before-photos from scraping the porch. Fun! Lead!

This weekend has been crazy — old friends in town, a bunch of shows, blowing insulation, a four-hour seizure from Tippy at 3:30 this morning…

The weird portholes you have to drill to fit the insulation blower into the wall.

I was HOPING that insulating would be like having backpacks of cotton candy that we blow at each other. It’s not really like that.

Our back yard looks like a junk yard right now. That’s ok.

As we tear out rot on the house, we are finding that someone used newspaper to insulate the house in 1944. I took photos of my favorite shreds.

This one is particularly appropriate: an ad for a Peter Lorre movie, The Mask of Demetrios… I’m going to Chicago next weekend to see the World/Inferno Friendship Society touring with their album based on the story of his life.

Progress on the kitchen counter…

And my friend’s house around the corner had a rad sign out today:

I’m fresh out of photoshop on my new computer, sadly. I’ll be rocking the gimp for a while… we’ll see how that goes.

Lots of work on the house this weekend, finally pulled the last of the asbestos siding off today. Ah, the most beautiful house on the block!

Dead bird from the eaves of the house:

New kitchen counter in the window. Of course, it will need some tile… another project!

Had a nice dinner with some folks the other night about the local currency/hours exchange project. I’m pretty excited about that (and a billion other projects I keep somehow getting involved in.) What I like about this is it requires (relatively) low maintenance for it to work. My contribution, at the very list, could be to help build a computer program for managing all the currency users — so we can have a spot to list skills and also write “reviews” of peoples’ work.

If you are in town, keep an eye out for flyers to fill out with what skills you would like to trade, and skills you would like to barter for — and feel free to think creatively about what those might be.

Bryan & Justin started building our new fence this weekend! I’m sorry I wasn’t around to help — I did three workshops at the Simultaneous Fest, which was really fun. I think the timebank/hours exchange program might actually take off. I was thinking about how it might work, and I wonder if I’d even want to list web dev as a sharable skill — I do it too much for regular money I don’t want to burn out. There are other skills I’d happily share… we’ll see.

The fence in the background is the new fence; the one in the fore we are getting rid of, giving us more yard!

…and a butterfly I found and released from our kitchen.

A few friends of mine have been working nonstop all summer to put this awesome fest together at the Soap Factory. There’ll be music, art & workshops — some of which I’m helping with. OpenCircuit is doing a wiki workshop, and FWD-MN will be doing some workshops on alternative economies.

In other news, I came into some Einstürzende Neubauten, X and Diamanda Galas records this weekend. I never imagined “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” could sound so frightening.

More work on the siding.

Found some rough spots.

And it looks like a smurf village is growing in our yard!

Now we’re in the process of pulling the siding off the house. One side done, three to go!

Tip had two seizures on Saturday — one in the bathtub while I was trying to clean her up from her first one. Poor girl. I treated her afterwards with a little bit of ice cream, then a walk over to the dog park.