how much is too much?

Some people blog about everything. Some of us try to be open, but keep some aspects of our lives private, or at least some of the details, for various reasons. There's a pretty interesting article about personal blogging coming out in this weekend's New York Times Magazine called "Exposed," by Emily Gould.

well, then

I was weeding the reference section at work today and came across the book American Shelter by Lester Walker. It looked like a great book (reviewers at Amazon agree with me) and I put it aside to flip through before I reshelved it. Of course, I went straight for the Craftsman era (California, 1905), and to my surprise, found a separate section a few pages later on the Bungalow style (Countrywide, 1910). While Mr. Walker had nothing but praise to lavish on the Craftsman style home, his opinion of the Bungalow was tempered by this statement:

The Bungalow Style was so popular after 1905 that it became the first style to be built in quantity by the contractor-builder. By 1910, throughout all of California and most other parts of the country, street after street was lined with differently styled bungalows built for speculative sale. Plan books and monthly journals made it possible for any contractor or future homeowner in any part of the country to rerect a bungalow. So, despite its lofty aspirations and exotic antecedants, the Bungalow Style ended up sloppily imitated in thousands of tacky boxes. It has come to represent both the best and the worst in American architecture.

Tacky and sloppy though some of them may have been (probably ours included!), they at least seem to have held up better than some of this generation's contractor-builder homes.

did i mention?

...that all of the rocks you see in the photos were dug out of the mound in the backyard? We still have enough to line a flower bed, as well as widen the path in the front, and maybe put some under the little wooden bench. I guess they were lining the pond area, and PO just covered them with dirt. The big boulder one was part of the reason it was a mound later--it wasn't buried very deep, so they just piled dirt on top of it.

In other news, I'm now the new editor of the neighborhood newsletter. This is what happens when you point out typos in the last newsletter, I think. I did find out that I don't have to distribute it, just get it put together and sent to the printer each month. Whew!

sod off!

Okay, not really. Actually, our "dig out the big mound in the back yard" project turned into a "let's order a pallet of sod for the backyard" project early this week. Check out the photos below! We haven't gotten the whole area cleaned up yet, but we did get all of the sod down.

Aren't there people you can hire for this stuff? Sigh.

a happy hiatus

Well, we just got back in the swing of things and had almost finished digging out the mound of dirt in the backyard when we got a call early Saturday morning that Brandon's sister was going into labor. So we hurried up to Asheville just in time to meet our new nephew Everett. Mother and baby are doing just fine and he is absolutely beautiful.

Today we'll get back to digging and planting!