A time to remember and to plan

I like simplicity.  If you look again at that patio photo in my previous post, you will note there is very little on my patio.  I have one wrought iron table and chair set, one barbecue grill, and two cat beds, one being a large chaise lounge covered in an old blanket.  The patio gets very dirty during the winter as it is open on two sides, the two sides where all the wind blows in leaves and yard trash.  I want very little out here that will need to be cleaned.  The cement floor can easily be washed off with a hose and sprayer.  The chairs and table take a little more work.  This morning I spent time on those.

I shared these photos last year, and the scene this year is very much the same:

The wrought iron chair frames

The cushions were recovered a few years back.  I think the original ones were pink so I that’s what I had the upholsterer use this time around:

Cleaning the chair cushions

Although this furniture originally belonged to Terry’s mother, I have had it for over 20 years.  I am planning to keep it and perhaps sell it.  The upholsterer told me these sets sell for about $2000.  For now, I am sitting here, at the table, sitting on one of the chairs, typing this post, enjoying a moment of complete calm.

The smell of jasmine wafts through the air.  It’s coming from some other yard as I don’t have any flowering plants in mine.  The soil is just not conducive to growing flowers.  I have two mock orange shrubs that bloom earlier in spring and make the yard smell wonderful if I can get out here to smell them at that time.  The past few years have been missed as the weather and my crazy life have kept me elsewhere.

It is quiet out here and my mind has had a chance to slow down.  I’m getting more of a sense of what I want to do for my next career.  I’m not too sure if there is such a job description, but I would like to take pictures and tell stories for non profit organizations.  I love to talk to people, to hear their “story,” I love to write, and the picture-taking thing has gotten to be more and more fun.  Oh, and I have that marketing degree.  So, now I need to figure out a way to package this idea to some non profits.

Tomorrow I return to the last hectic days of the end-of-the-school-year.  Final grades, graduation, checkout, and a few parties thrown in for good measure.  It will all be a whirlwind, and I won’t be sitting out here, on the patio, enjoying the jasmine-scented breeze, for a long time.  But, for now, it is pure pleasure.

finally, a clean patio

I usually clean the patio of all its winter dirt by Easter. This year I have been unbelievably LAZY and just got around to it on Memorial Day weekend.  Although I did clean off the greenhouse pad, I’ve never completed the job by cleaning the patio and hauling the furniture out of storage.  The furniture is still sitting in my storage unit.  Maybe next weekend.  Of course, that is what I’ve been saying since April.

I have a wrought iron table and chair set on the patio that stays there year round as it does not fold up for storage.  This is an old set, at least 40 years, and I have replaced the seat cushions once.  They are easily removed for cleaning.  Here are the chair frames, sitting in the warm sun on the greenhouse pad to dry:

 

I liked the way they looked, like they were waiting for ghost guests.

After I got the chairs cleaned, then it was the big job of getting all the dirt off of the patio.  It’s a big patio, much like cleaning another room of the house.  Here’s the finished product:

 

The clean patio with chairs back in place

It won’t stay clean for long.  The neighbor cats enjoy living here and actually spend more time on the patio than any of our family.

Summer is put in storage

Upon leaving college in December 1999, our daughter hauled furniture and furnishings back to Fresno from Oregon, knowing that in a few months she would pack it all up again and move to Berkeley for graduate school.  I did not want all this stuff in my tiny house, so we rented a storage unit nearby, in our daughter’s name.  

It’s now almost December 2008, and we still have that storage unit, still in Jen’s name.  We tease her that should one of us kill the other and put the body in the storage unit, she would be blamed.  She just rolls her eyes and goes on about her business, which by the way, is not to pay the rent on the unit.  I have always paid, and continue to do so.  Most of the stuff now belongs to me.

After Jen moved all of her belongings out, I realized there was plenty of space for me to deposit some items I no longer wanted in my way.  It started with Christmas decorations, then boxes of books, and now patio furniture in the off season.  Saturday was my day to clean all the patio furniture and haul it to the unit.  Here is the result:

And then I put it all under wraps for the winter: