Blue Tape Life Hack (The Cat Hurdlers)

 


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How High's the Water, Mama?

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When we bought this house, the seller's disclosure was a laugh--every box but one was checked "Don't know." The only one checked "Yes" pertained to flooding, which the seller noted in detail was a thing that happened in heavy rain. The day I introduced myself to our next door neighbor Dan, the first thing he said was, "You know it floods." Then he added helpfully, "And the roof leaks." Last week, when I took down the kitchen ceiling, I found that yes, yes indeed, there is a roof leak. And today, after days of heavy rains and snow melt, I came back to the house and found an impressive amount of water lapping at the foundation of the garage. Tempting to call it a lake, but it's only a few inches deep, and really it's more of a river, stretching all the way to the back of the lot in a graceful curve around the higher ground of the woodshop. We know the previous owners tried to address this. There's a cut filled with rock that st
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Sick Burn

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We've been going pretty hard lately but today Sarah and I both ran out of gas and lethargy overtook us. Didn't do much except burn the brushpile that's been accumulating in the driveway over the past few weeks of yard work. We'd prefer to compost it, either here or municipally, but a lot of it was invasive plants that nobody would take. As a human, I'm genetically predisposed to find fire alluring, fascinating, and hypnotic. As a child pyromaniac, I narrowly avoided burning down our garage, and more than once melted my sneakers stomping out runaway fires my friends and I had started in the name of science. I'm more careful now. Today's burn was difficult to start as the pile consisted mostly of blackberry vines, alder roots and shoots, wild rose (sounds charming but isn't), and scotch broom, much of it still green and none of it what you might call "dry." But all it took was a cardboard box, some kindling, and a blowtorch . Strategy was to conc
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Cat Branch

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