In Which I Discover Ancient Relics Beneath Cacodaemoniac Foliage

So much work has been finished on the house this week!

The sunken living room is totally gone now; the space is level with the rest of the house. Now that there's no demarcation between the living room and the rest of the space, it looks huge. We won't have any rugs in there either because they get caught up in the boys' wheels, so other than the furniture there won't be much to break up the expanse. I'm sure we'll fill it up in no time, but after living in this apartment it's going to be kind of weird to have so much breathing room. It'll probably be pretty nice, though. And once the hard floors are down we can periodically push the furniture against the walls and have a perfect bowling alley.

The crew has also framed in the new entryway from the laundry room to the kitchen, the new pantry, the new doorways to the smaller bedrooms, and the bathroom and master closet area. It's much easier to visualize the space now that the studs are up.

I was over at the house yesterday digging out the ivy that has taken over one whole end of the backyard (It's climbed through the fence and up the trees. Joy.) and guess what I found half-buried in the ground under a two-foot thick layer of vines? Roof tiles! I'm not sure how many I have yet, since because of the rain I didn't do any work today. While I'm perfectly happy to garden out in the rain and cold, (probably since I'm one of those nutso gardening fanatics and when I get really into working you could run a truck over me and I wouldn't notice) Connor does not share either my love of gardening or my functional temperature regulatory system. Therefore freezing rain is not so good for him, as he has a tendency to try and get hypothermia on me. So I can't garden while it's raining unless he's at school.

Anyway, while I'm not sure exactly how many there are under that mess, I know there are at least thirty, and so far none are broken! It's a great find because there are several tiles up on the roof that are cracked and need to be replaced. I wonder what else I'm going to find under there. Maybe a skeleton or something: I swear this stuff is like the kudzu of the Pacific Northwest, and I don't want to wade too far out into it because if I tripped and fell and hit my head, I would disappear into it and no one would ever find me.

Yet another reason not to take Connor out into it. The stuff would probably try and eat him or something. I swear I can see it breathing out of the corner of my eye-- waving its leafy tentacles around and just waiting to wrap them around my ankles when my back is turned to jerk me off my feet and drag me into its gaping green maw. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not actually pulling up English Ivy in my yard. I'm battling Ivy Cthulhu. He's teemed up with his buddy Blackberry Shoggoth and the two of them have already devoured large portions of my fence and yard and are now creeping towards my house and world domination, though not necessarily in that order.

So wish me luck. If you drive by the house and see any mice running around squeaking "Tekeli-li!" in unison then it's probably already too late.

~Jess