I have to admit I’m solar-powered. You always wondered why I’m full of enthusiasm and great ideas. Well, that’s my secret. It’s the sun. When the sun goes down so do I. So I get plenty of sleep which is awesome. I’m like Wall-E when I wake up. I have to situate my face so that the sun can fill up my battery reserves and then BVrrroooong! I make that sound a mac makes when it starts up and you forget to turn off the volume before shut down last time (Don’t you hate it when that happens at the library?).

This also goes for my moods. Sunny = Happy. Cloudy = Sad.

It’s great that I live in Southern California where it is sunny 90 percent of the time but when it’s cloudy I suddenly become like the rest of you sad people on anti-depressants and I don’t know what to do with all this gloom! It’s so murky and, and…awful!!! How do you cope?!! How do you get anything done? Ugh. I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes and my arms are stuck to the ground with strings of chewing gum. I just want to go crawl into a hole and die.

This is all not very fantastic when you’re planning a birthday party for a little girl who is turning six and birthday parties are what you are good at. There is no failing at birthday-party-planning in this house. No sadness allowed! We eat obstacles for lunch. Bring on the challenges!!! Fifty people in a small mobile home with muddy feet?! I can do it!!!!

As you can see, my winter-wonderland of backyard fun with stumps for chairs and bedspreads for tents might not be happening. My visions of tulle strung from the trees and girls sipping lemonade is vanishing before my very eyes. All I can see are freezing cold fairies with muddy feet running in and out of my house and tracking mud all over my peach-colored carpet. Which I hate anyway so I guess it’s not that big of a deal but I’m still getting hives over it. Ugh! Mud! Kids! Hyperactivity! The bounce house people won’t deliver the bounce house if it’s going to rain!! What am I going to do?!!!!

There is a thirty-percent chance of rain predicted for Saturday. I know in Portland that would be a perfect day for an outdoor party. You might even throw a pool party on a day like that and wear a bikini but here? We are weeenies! We are freezing our butts off!!! We are seriously shivering and moaning. It’s sad and pathetic and majorly cramping my party-planning style.

Well, until the sun comes out. When the sun shines I can think of all kinds of crazy ideas. I can do this. We can have an indoor party. I am excellent at crafts! But when the sun goes back behind a cloud again I shrivel up. The obstacles! It’s too hard! I just want to cancel the whole thing.

Such crazy talk.

So here’s my plan: The bounce house people said I can decide on the day of the party whether or not to have a bounce house. If it’s raining we’ll just move on. If it’s not really raining we will move the bounce house to the front yard and put it on the driveway where there is no mud. I don’t know where people are going to park but that’s their problem.

Inside: I’m going to move all my furniture to the side and create a big open space in my living room/office. Maybe I’ll talk Toby into letting me borrow the giant heirloom Persian rug that he has rolled up in Bug’s room at his house that is not getting used. He won’t mind too terribly if it gets chocolate cake ground into it, right? Hmmm…that probably won’t fly.

Then I’ll use all that tulle that I was going to put in the trees outside, inside. It will be like prom night! I’ll just hang it from the ceiling from an old hula hoop or something.

I bet you wondered why I have a whole bolt of tulle. That’s a good question. I’m weird. I used to do flowers for weddings back in the 90′s and I had a much bigger budget back then. I guess I just bought a whole bolt of tulle and I still have it to this day. I have a whole shed full of floral supplies leftover from those days. It’s coming in very handy.

So with the tulle and these stars it could be magical, right? Bug and I made silver stars the other day with card stock and glitter. I was going to hang them from the trees outside with my fairy orbs but now I think I’ll just hang them inside. Maybe I’ll get crazy with some sheets and make fairy tents inside too. That will be super fun when the kids pull them down along with the sheetrock from my ceiling. Oh boy.

I wish I had a man around the house who liked to build things. That would be so awesome. I could probably install a giant branch in the middle of my living room and bolt it to the ceiling. The cats would go crazy. (Note to self: If ever dating again make sure to date someone handy.) But I have no man around the house and my dad is working until Saturday so I’ll probably have to scale back my visions. That’s okay. It’s gonna happen. We’ll make it work. It always does.

Ugh. How am I going to make this work? You see this kitchen? Charming you think? Shudder. The wallpaper offends me so badly that I think I’ve blocked it out. It’s like a weird vibration in my head that makes me only see white where the little flowers are. But then I got this idea that I would rip off a part of the wallpaper near the sink. It had some water-staining and was really driving me crazy. I thought I would do what I did in my bedroom and go with the whole I-live-in-a-run-down-Parisian-apartment look where the ripped wallpaper reminds me of an Anthropolgie ad.

It did not work. Now I have a big blank spot over the sink that is still water-stained and your eye is drawn to it because it is NOT wall-papered!!! I might as well install neon signs pointing at all the ugliness. This would not be a big deal if the weather was great. I would just route everybody straight to the backyard and they would avoid the kitchen but now all my guests are going to be filing through my kitchen and silently judging me. I just know it.

If I had a man around the house I would ask him to paint all the wallpaper red for me or maybe pistachio green to match the cupboards. (Boy, don’t I seem like a catch?) I would do it myself except all those shelves would have to be removed (and the screw holes are puddied) and there is this light fixture contraption near the sink that my Grandpa installed that is bent on electrocuting me. I already tried to de-install it once and it zapped and ker-powed at me like a comic book villain. I’ve decided to leave it alone. So I don’t think this kitchen eyesore is going to be magically beautiful before the party. Back to blocking it out.

Did I mention that we went to one of Bug’s friend’s party this last weekend and they had a huge perfect house where they regularly host weddings in their living room? Yeah. No pressure. None at all. How does one go about canceling a party at the last minute again? Can I just board up my house and pretend I don’t live here?

Let’s talk about what is working. The craft ideas for the party are going along swimmingly. I know it’s hard to tell when I’m being sarcastic and when I’m not but here I’m actually happy about something. I decided to use Momfluential’s idea for fairy house kits. All those floral supplies I have on hand totally saved me. I didn’t even have to buy one thing to make all these bags up. It’s kinda scary that I have that much crap on hand but hey, it works out. I get to get rid of a lot of stuff and the kids get make fun fairy house with odd bits and bobs. I hope they are into it. I know I will be. I am all over this kind of craft like a fly on…nevermind. You get the picture. It’s going to be fun.

I think I’ll give each kid a stump disc and maybe some putty to stick things into. I was going to be on glue-gun duty but I decided with thirty-some kids they’d probably all want me to glue something and one of them was bound to get burnt. Since I don’t know every kid as well as I usually do I think I’ll pass on all the possible lawsuits. I think they can manage with sticks and putty and chennile stems and string. It’ll be fun.

The next thing that is working are the fairy drinks. I bought a whole bunch of canning jars and covered the printing on the lid with some silk flowers.

Then I punched a hole through the metal lid with my trusty metal hole-puncher and my super human man-hand strength. Actually, I only did one. It was pretty tough but it can be done. I’m leaving the rest of the lids for Saturday and I’ll let my Dad do it. Or any other random strong person who comes around.

Then I filled the jar with ice, a lemon slice and some delicious homemade lemonade from my backyard. I screwed the lid back on, stuck a pretty striped straw through the hole and presto! A perfect fairy drink!

So I’m making it work. When the sun comes out I’m pretty positive.

Bug has been begging me to pick lemons for weeks now. I was putting it off because once you start picking, you have to process the lemons right away. You can’t just let them sit around on your table looking pretty for weeks and weeks. They can sit around on the tree for months and months however. But the draw of fresh lemons was strong so I finally gave in and let Bug pick a bushel when Anna was here visiting. We had to treat our out-of-towner to something special after all.

So we squeezed them and made lemonade.

Anna taught me how to make sangria with lemonade. I had no idea that was the a way to make it and here I’ve had a lemon tree at my beck and call all this time. The sangria is made with just one part orange juice, one part lemonade and one part cheap red wine with lots of fruit thrown in for the pretty. It was delicious.

I made some lemon bars too because that’s just what you do when you have guests and a whole lotta lemons!

All photos by Anna.

Yesterday was a very big day. My dad came over to chop down my front yard pine tree with his trusty chainsaw.

You could say we were excited about it.

No, this is not a sponsored post for chainsaws.

So here’s my front yard with my funny pine tree. It’s kind of hard to see because there are multitude of landscaping errors going on here that are distracting. But if you look close, you’ll see there are two palm trees growing beside the misshapen pine tree. They are volunteers. It happens around here. Palm tree seeds fall from the big palm trees and next thing you know you have a little sprout growing. The sprouts seem innocent at first but if you don’t pull them out right away then they grow into giant trees that have to be pulled out with a semi. I’m serious.

We did that with another palm tree in my side yard because it was uprooting a brick wall. It was a crazy job. My dad actually hooked chains to his 18-wheeler cab and hauled the thing out. It left a huge hole and then the fallen palm tree sat around in my side yard for six months because it was too heavy to carry away. I had to pay something like ten gardeners to chop it into smaller pieces and finally get rid of it for me. Those palm trees may look majestic and beautiful when they are tall but you better make sure the sprouts land where you want them to or they might just take out your house. I’m not kidding.

This is all backstory to my pine tree story. You see, when my Grandpa lived here he intended to take out the two small volunteer palm trees when they were sprouts but he never got around to it. They were growing out of the side of this lighter-colored gravel-diamond that mobile home parks call landscaping around here and they offended him greatly. My neighbors recall him mumbling about them but never actually taking them out.

Fast-forward ten years and now I’m here. My immediate opinion was that the pine tree in the middle looked like a bonsai hack-job gone wrong. Somebody (probably my Grandpa who was known to be a little short-sighted when it came to gardening) trimmed it very badly over the years (or maybe the weather broke a central branch or something) and it looked like nothing you would see growing naturally in nature. It just looked bad.

I figured: take out the pine tree and leave the volunteer palm trees that would be murder to take out anyway. They might be a little off-center according to that lighter-colored gravel diamond but they didn’t offend me nearly as much as the Frankenstein pine tree with branches sticking out like broken arms. Not to mention the palm trees would make a huge mess when they were up-rooted from the green-cement fake grass.

I could write a whole post about that stuff. I don’t even know what it’s called. It’s some wonder-garden water-efficiencey landscaping idea left over from the 60′s. I hate it. I think it looks as much like grass as astro-turf but it’s low maintenance so I overlook it. It’s just part of life out here.

ANYWAY!

The trees were all growing so close together that the palm fronds were getting stuck up sideways along the pine tree branches. Are you following me still? Let’s just cut to the chase and say that it was a “cluster.” And that is why my dad was here to cut it down. Well, that and I wanted some stumps for the Fairy party. Yeah, I know. Ulterior motives.

So cut cut he did!

Zwirrrrrrrrr! Zwirrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

Yes, it was kind of sad to see that big tree topple. I hate cutting down living things. But I think it’s for the better.

At least the tree will live on in wonderful little stump art! Stumps! Stumps! Stumps!

My dad is the best in that he humors my silly visions. He made me every size stump I could ever ask for.

He even cut some thin disks that I can make into signs! Something like “Fairies This Way.” Can you see it?

I’m so excited. I’m going to let them dry out for a day (they are very sappy right now) and then shellack them so they are pretty and shiny. Maybe I’ll paint a sign first or burn a message into them. I haven’t quite figured out that part.

I love wood grain.

Except when it makes my hands like this. Though, I did figure out a magical way to remove tree-sap from your skin. I don’t know if this is common knowledge but when I was taking a shower and madly scrubbing at them, I tried a little droplet of bath oil and voilá! It came right off! Who knew?!! Not me. I tried the oil again with Bug and it worked for her too. So there you go: Have tree sap? Try bath oil. I recommend Neutragena because it smells lightly of sesame.

I’ve yet to figure out how to remove sap from my expensive sheepskin boots though. I was such an idiot to wear them. Ugh. Blarg.

Anyway, it took the rest of the day to clean up the mess and now my yard looks like this:

It’s going to take a few days for the palm trees to adjust to their new-found freedom and I need to hire someone to blow away all the sawdust bits but I think it looks better.

It is what it is. Don’t even get me started on those lumps we call Juniper bushes. I’m going to do something with them but I’m not going to carve them into squares like everyone wants me to. I just can’t do that. I want them to be more oval like trees if it’s possible but I’m still trying to find someone who will lend me their hedge trimmer. It’s a process…

A very, very long process that I probably will never get to see to completion. But in the meantime, the stump makes a mighty fine coffee table for me while I sit and contemplate the possibilities.