Seven gables and twenty five leaf bags.

Dear Diary,

(Why do I feel like this is my new journal? Next thing you know I'll be talking about my crushes and complaining about how my parents are so mean for making me clean my room or something.)

This weekend was a fun one, but also a very cold one! Doug (I won't even bother to link to his blog because why waste the time?) and I jammed it with good things. Saturday went like this: Curves, car dealer to get the oil changed and car inspected, lunch at High Street Cafe in Dedham Square (would be a good place to take my Dad for breakfast, and we can even walk there if we are ambitious), then on to Salem. We had no destination in Salem; we thought maybe the Peabody Essex Museum, but neither of us had the stamina to stand around and look at art that day, even if it was really cool art. We went to a couple of antique stores and then headed down to the water. We ended up at the House of Seven Gables, apparently the 9th most visited house museum in the United States. I have never read the book and neither has Doug. As a matter of fact, before we went there I didn't even know that there was a book called The House of Seven Gables. I thought the places was just a neat old house, which it is, but apparently it is the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's book by that name (even though at the time that he wrote the book the house only had three gables. The family living there had actually removed four of the gables in an effort to make the house more modern, match the style of the times). Anyway, the house was very cool. There is this secret stairwell built into the chimney that we all traveled up. It's a crazy staircase. One of the men on tour with us refused to go up it because he was claustrophobic; they took him up the alternative route. The staircase was put into the house because the lady who opened the house up to tourists in the early twentieth century wanted to make it resemble as much as possible the fictional house in Hawthorne's book. Apparently it needed this staircase. If you ever visit this house, be warned - it's steep, narrow, dark, and a little creepy.

Anyway, I've posted some pictures from Salem below. There's the House of Seven Gables; me driving a fake boat in the yard of the House of Seven Gables (it was freezing that day! I was outside long enough to pose for the photo and then went inside the museum again); a water view from the yard of the House of Seven Gables; and Doug drinking a giant cup of tea in this little coffee bar we stopped at after the tour. We were frozen. We needed hot beverages.





So that was basically Saturday. Sunday went like this: I woke up, did an exercise video (Karen Voight's B.L.T DVD, highly recommended), fed the cats, etc., and then at about 8:45am decided that it could no longer be avoided... I had to start raking the sea of leaves in our backyard. It was about 20 degrees on Sunday morning, but at least the wind had died down. It took me a little less than two hours to rake the whole yard - back, front and sides - and by then Doug had woken up and came out to help me bag them. We had seven leaf bags at that point, but we filled all seven with leaves from the driveway and front yard. We didn't even get to the giant pile in the back yet (scroll down for photos), so we made a trip to Lowe's to get more bags and bought 8 packs of 5. We laughed about how many bags we were buying, but we used quite a few - about half. It took us until about 2:30 to finish bagging the leaves, and once done we had a total of 25 filled bags. Twenty five! Our yard is not even that big, but that's just an amazing amount of bags. My arms and back are definitely sore from the work, and my wonderful rake is now broken, too. Whatever. The leaves are raked, the yard looks as good as it will look until spring, and that project is now done. One more thing checked off the list! Maybe now I can concentrate on indoor projects, though if our rain barrel ever melts we'll have to drain that, too.

Here are some photos of leaf mania 2008: This one is of our sea of leaves, pre-raking. This does not include the leaves in the front or on the sides that needed to be raked.

This is of the pile of leaves that I had raked in the back yard. The pile was very tall and very long. It was more like a leaf wall than a leaf pile.

Look! Have you ever seen so many bags of leaves? Twenty five in all, and that's not including the leaf bags that I filled the first time I raked, back in October. So how many leaf bags in total did we use this fall? Thirty? More? Wow. I now am VERY glad that we do not have a bigger yard.

Here is the backyard after all the leaves were raked. Looks much better, yes? Today there are more leaves out there littering the clean yard, but whatever, they can stay there. I am not raking anymore (not until next fall, anyway!).