Things Permanently and not-so-Permanently Stuck to Walls
20 October 2003, 11:25 PM

Whew. I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

First, we made an appearance at a reception for a new exhibit at the university. It's called "Southwest Texas Women: The First 100 Years". It had originally been a temporary exhibit in the Library's big display case to highlight the women of Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University-San Marcos) and their many achievements. I was actually in the exhibit as the first University Webmaster. It was a kind of nifty 15 minutes of "fame".

Once the display came down there was a lot of talk about making it some kind of permanent collection. At first that meant developing some kind of book and archiving the materials in the library or maybe doing a web site. But that all seemed to fizzle away and I wasn't keeping up with it to know what was being developed.

So when I got the invitation a few weeks ago to the reception for our "permanent collection", I thought they meant a reception in the library, near the special collections area for another temporary display before it all went into storage - to come out every March or so. No, by permanent they meant permanent. They built the collection into the walls of the third floor of our student center and it was a wine and cheese reception with our University President and former President attending.

It's kinda ... weird ... to see my picture there in the collection, permanently, to be read by I-don't-know-how-many students who'll pass by there over the years.

So that was Friday. Since we were all dressed up, Jeff took me out to dinner at Red Lobster for some good food and even better dessert. Gods, I wants some of that cheesecake again. *drool*

So that was Friday. Saturday was a shopping day and getting small errands done.

But Sunday...

Sunday we decided to get up early (!) and do some planting and gardening. I want to work up our flower beds, to plant some nice stuff that the deer won't nibble down to nothing overnight. (Lantanas, sage and rosemary do well.) But I also wanted to get started mainly to yank out all the weeds and put down some weed barrier that would (a) keep them from coming back and (b) keep the soil from splashing up onto the house during rainstorms.

But first I wanted to get that dirt off the house. We couldn't justify the cost of renting a power washer, so kitchen scrubbies and a garden hose with a sprayer in hand, we set-to. It took us a while but we did manage to scrub nearly all of the front porch and front of the house, including the shutters by the windows.

What a HUGE difference. The one side of the house benefited from the wash, since that part was getting splashed with a lot of unprotected soil from an empty flower bed. But the most dramatic change was the front porch area. Since it was protected from rain, lots of dirt had accumulated, making the white trim grey, and the yellow siding dingy. Spiders had left cobwebs everywhere that became traps for dirt, and the mud dauber homes were all over the place.

The dirt came off in sheets and the porch now looks inviting, just in time for Halloween. I'm going to put three huge mums and a few ghostly lanterns out on Halloween and give out candy while in costume. I suppose the previous cob-webby scary and dingy porch might have been more in keeping with Halloween decorations, but I'd rather go for a bright, cheerful and inviting autumn scene.

After that feat of physical activity, I tilled up one flower bead and lay down weed barrier as well as mulch. And boy howdey, did I ever ACHE afterward. Every muscle in my upper body was stiff, which explains why the rest of the weekend was spent like a couch potato, sprawled out and unmoving. Heh.