Warm days, cold nights!

Nothing froze last night. My new plant, a lovely purple bougainvillea on a trellis, might just make a home in my trouble spot in the front, where the arctic winds rush down from Georgia in the winter and the sun burns fiery in the summer. I also stuck a little sedum in the front yard and put some stones around it so big oafy Carl wouldn't smash the poor thing.  It looked very chipper when I went to get the paper.

But the BIG NEWS is that yesterday I BEGAN and FINISHED (at least it's in Stage One) a craft project for my backyard.   I have been anguishing over my ugly walkways and lack therof for some time.  The house came with some old hexagonals by the backdoor and a really ugly big concrete patio in the back.  And that was it.  In my urgent recycling way, I dragged back from the dump some chunks  of concrete that didn't really improve matters much, even the concrete pieces that were formerly one of those tile tables.

Then I read Matthew Levesque's new The Revolutionary Yardscape: Ideas for Repurposing Local Materials to Create Containers, Pathways, Lighting, and More. Matthew's vision is lovely but he includes things like directions for sawing through heavy metals -- and I don't saw. I don't hammer very often either.  I was doing that turn-the-pages-and-despair thing one does with craft and cookbooks, when I came to a spot where he advised that when you are looking for pieces of granite, which is cheap these days, go downstream for the source.  Go to the people who install granite and ask them to sell you their bits and pieces cheaply. I called a place on 22nd Avenue and they said sure, they'd give it to me!  Yesterday I got out a new aluminum pan I had that was too nice to recycle -- mixed up some Sakrete -- stuck in the gorgeous, gleaming granite chunks -- and this morning they are setting up nicely! 

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