Gardening Stage 1: Weed Purging

My mom visited The Commune today. Don’t worry guys, there wasn’t anything scandalous in evidence. In fact, she was stoked – maybe even a little jealous. She particularly liked the yellow and seafoam tile in the kitchen (in a totally legitimate, non-ironic way), and the fact that the air vent in the upstairs bathroom blows all the toilet paper off the roll.

Seeing The Commune from my mom’s eyes, though, I noticed that our yard (other than what has been converted to farmland, of course) is FULL OF MOTHERFUCKING WEEDS. Or should I say WAS. After my mom went home, I began to purge the garden. Never fear, Pie Face – I haven’t made any changes, done anything fun or drastic, or planted/rearranged anything at all. Haha. I’m too much of an amateur for that, I need your expertise. But I didn’t want you to get here and think I’d been ignoring the yard completely ;). What I did do was rip up more weeds than I thought possible (and I’m pretty sure there are more). They were huge. They were everywhere. Some of them had spikes. It was totally satisfying.

Under the weeds in the big box against the garage I found all kinds off cool things! Parsley (grown extremely tall and stalky due to weed chokage), rosemary (2 bushes!), a miniature peony (and you know how I feel about peonies ❤ ❤ <3), forget-me-nots (also tall and stalky), bluebells (done blooming though, boo), a pink snapdragon, and a couple of plants I cannot name but I know are not weeds (PF…? haha). There’s so many plants here! And does anybody know what the small tree with the light pink/purple flowers next to the grassy area is? I’d take a picture now but it’s dark out.

Jon suggested we plant mint. My response? Dude, fuck mint. If we plant any mint it goes in a damn pot.

Mint aside, I’m excited!!

The box behind the garage. I realized afterwards that I should have done a before and after... instead, here is a mid-point shot.

A rousing game of Apples to Apples brought some of the Commune residents together this evening, coming to a peak when the green card “spunky” was drawn. Red cards played upon this included “Bill Clinton”, “Claire” and “Anal Sex”. After some delay due to difficulty breathing, “Anal Sex” was declared the winner.
A picture was taken, but unfortunately the camera was set on lock, and it has vanished into the abyss. If I ever have the patience to recreate it, I will post it. For now, use your imagination.

I’m not… keeeyn… on these keys

Fuck these keys.

So The Commune is poorly designed in terms of ease of access. There are two doors (outer and inner) to the basement suite. The upstairs has a front door, and not one, but THREE back doors (one outer and two inner). Now, the problem is not that these door don’t lock. They do. The problem is that they ALL LOCK WITH DIFFERENT KEYS. Yup. There are a total of 6 keys to The Commune, plus a key to the garage and some random bedroom door locks and closet locks as well (some of which don’t have keys at all).

Our bro-dude landlord was kind enough to drop off keys to all of said locks for us yesterday (not including keys to the mystery rooms and closets), so Gregg and I decided that this afternoon would be a good time to go get copies made for everyone.

There is a place that cuts keys that I walk past every day on my way to work, so we headed there. It turned out to be an Indian grocery and halal meat shop. Sketchy, but we proceeded with our transaction. It took roughly 8,000,000 years. Give or take several hundred thousand.

We proudly came home with our jailer’s ring of keys (and a box of Pocky) and decided to be responsible and check that they worked before distributing them to the others. We began by opening the front door – huzzah! We could open our own front door! …with only 2.5 of the 5 keys we had cut for it. (I say 2.5 because one key would lock, but not unlock, the door). Beginning to be concerned, we checked the back upstairs outer door. None of the keys worked. Becoming further alarmed, we checked the outer basement door – victory! Then the inner basement door – 50% success rate.

By now it had been about an hour and a half and we were too irritated to continue. We piled the keys on the dishwasher, and sat down to drink beer instead. I am tempted to say farewell to the $30 I spent on keys today and not return to have them re-cut by the same guy. I fear recurring problems and feel like not being further pissed off is worth it.

For now, the keys stay where they are, and people can just come in whatever door they happen to have a functional key for.

At least we got some Pocky.

(clever key pun courtesy of Gregg)