always more work to do.

I found this tiny robin's egg shell while I was sifting bulbs out of the freshly tilled soil. It must have fallen from my neighbor's tree, since I don't see any evidence of a nest in ours.

I've been slaving away in the yard for days and days and days, but it seems there is never a shortage of stuff to do, no matter how long you've been at it. I think the garden is perhaps the most difficult challenge for me to get cleaned up, since it's not an environment I can really control--weeds keep coming back, plants continuously challenge the boundaries you set for them, and neighborhood cats keep mistaking certain areas for litter boxes. I'm so, so thankful to have wonderful H. around to do all the heavy lifting and grunt-work, though--I'd never be able to accomplish half of this stuff if not for him.

I've also been busy sorting and shredding my family's financial documents from the past 20 years. Apparently my parents had been keeping all of our utility statements, phone bills, credit statements, bank statements, paycheck stubs, store receipts, check stubs, and other miscellaneous scraps of paper, all tucked away in shoe boxes on a dusty shelf in the closet. I have other plans for that shelf, though, as well as the rest of the closet, so all that stuff needs to go.

Progress with everything has been very slow, but I'll post more when I get closer to the finish line, or at least close to something that resembles a finish line. In the meanwhile, it makes me happy to see this peony in bloom, even with the ants crawling all over it. I hosed them off before I took this picture, but if you look closely you can still spot one of them huddled up in the corner. You can also kind of see the scrappy weeds peeking through around the periphery, but like I said, it's a process.