Today’s weather was fabulous:  clear, dry, not too hot, blue sky.  Jim and I spent the whole day outside, working on the latest projects.  I got all of the plants from Hutchins Farm in the garden, and even bought a few more from Idylwilde Farm for some container gardens.  Can’t wait until they start blooming.

 Jim had been working on the siding of the house while I planted the plants.  Once I was done, I joined him.  And we got ambitious: we ripped off the vinyl siding on most of the remainder of the house, finding some fairly good clapboards on the dining room exterior walls, and finding some absolute nightmare clapboards on the north wall by the back door, foyer, and bathroom window.  Blech.  Too short clapboards had been terribly pasted together, and over the years water from the incorrectly installed gutters had poured down between the vinyl siding and the clapboards, making for a rotten, moldy, disgusting mess.    Blech.  I held the ladder as Jim ripped the old siding off, and I’ve never been dirtier.  Floods of dirt and dead bugs and spider webs and rotted leaves poured down on my head (thank goodness for the baseball cap) and – until I learned better – into my mouth.  Blech.

Jim and I are fans of Christopher Guest’s movies, most especially Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and Best in Show.  As we surveyed the damaged house that we had uncovered today, we both thought of one of our favorite lines from Best in Show, as Cookie and Jerry Fleck pull up to a “friend’s” house:

“What a shitbox!  I thought you said they got a better place?”

“They did…”