You know what’s cool? In the time it normally takes me to walk the five blocks to my free parking place, today I biked all the way home. It was mostly downhill from downtown, too, which made it a much more pleasant ride.
Tomorrow promises to be a sunny day so I think I’ll try it again.
The new home’s lawn will need updating soon. Its a mix of patchy fescue and crabgrass. Since I want to go green in a big way with our new home, just reseeding the fescue won’t do. I think the way to go is to plant zoysia grass.
Zoysia Farm Nursery sells zoysia plugs that should cover half my lot for less than $600. Zoysia will never need replacing, reseeding or any of the other headaches that come with fescue. It uses up to 80% less water than fescue and requires 1/3 of the mowing. It will grow thick enough to eventually choke out the weeds and existing fescue).
The only drawback I can see is that it goes dormant in the winter. With a yellow house, though, it might match better in the wintertime!
My new home has a built-in alarm system but no landline. Thus, any event will alert us, our Dobermans, and the neighbors but it won’t alert a monitoring service.
Since I don’t want to put in a landline nor subscribe to a monitoring service, and since I’m an Asterisk and Linux geek, I thought I’d see what the Internets had that might let me monitor my home with Linux and Asterisk.
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This is one time of year when it really pays to have a pollen-colored house.
In 1999, Kelly and I got married and moved in right between two hurricanes: Dennis and Floyd. We spent our first night in our Garner home right as Floyd was passing over. I’ll never forget us hunkering down in our sleeping bags on the floor of the den as the wind and rain howled. We wondered what kind of luck we had moving in the middle of a tropical storm, but it showed us some things early in our home-owning experience that were better to know immediately.
Like how the roof of our Garner home leaked.
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I rode my bike into work today. It was a shock to my poor, out of shape system but welcome at the same time. Took me about 15 minutes to get from home to office (did I mention I’m out of shape?), but it sure was nice sailing right by all those metered parking spots.
The weather may be wet this afternoon so it remains to be seen if I get home the same way. I hope so. It sure was fun!
