Last week: We had a successfully resolved neighbor complaint; our first since buying the house. (There was that one time some old dude across the street kept calling the Health Department about our overgrown front yard, and the Department of Public Works about our trash bins left out. He still glares at us, though the front yard looks much nicer these days and we take the bins in with haste.)
Earlier that morning, I think it was Thursday or Friday, I’d noticed strange water stains on our back fence, but Javier said they were probably just the effect of winds and morning dew and he dismissed my concerns, as is his wont. Not one hour later, our doorbell rang and an elderly woman asked if we were doing something different with our watering patterns in the last week, as their yard keeps flooding. “We’re hoping it’s not sewage from the school again,” she said (again?!) We said we’d check it out, and in so doing found a burst drip line exploding water onto the back fence, making the pattern I’d previously perceived. I called the neighbor (the number she left us was a land line — how cute) and thanked her. I imagine it’s also why two of my pea plants yellowed and died last week, since no water was actually going into the plant bed. “I’m glad you fixed it, especially with the price of water being what it is now,” she said on the phone. (What is the price of water? Has it been going up?)
Some other things we resolved at the end of last week: Our car wouldn’t start, making me late to meet Erika for a distance-walk, but Javier had a battery-powered jumper kit. Our dishwasher was mysteriously not working and then mysteriously started working again.
We found morels in the backyard.
It was a quiet, sedentary weekend: chores, lazing. On Sunday I didn’t know what to do with myself so I instituted Choose Your Own Adventure game, where Javier was the chooser and what I did was the adventure. He had me read, then go to the grocery store, then Peloton, then shower. He did a very good job.
For dinner today, I tried to copy Mallory and made banh khot. Actually, I made two recipes, since they were so different and I wanted to compare them side-by-side. They each failed in a different way. Maybe we’ll be able to have the real thing sometime, if we can ever travel again. Maybe we’ll be able to have them at a Vietnamese restaurant sometime, if we can ever go to restaurants again.