While you were out...

As Mia Wallace says in Pulp Fiction: "Don't you love it when you come back and your food's waiting for you?"

Actually, I don't love that so much -- I think it's a sign the waiter is a dork. But I do love it when I come back from vacation and new work has gotten done on the house:

It looks like a standard-issue San Francisco garage door, now. And there's also the added benefit of an additional 6 inches of door height (and, thus, car clearance), and a new garage-door opener with keypad.

Just to refresh your memory, here's what the house looked like this time last year:


And a long shot from today:


I will be so glad to see that ugly forest green disappear. For now, I'm contenting myself with tap-dancing about losing the gross seventies house numbers -- you know, the kind that spell out all the letters as words, in faux-gothic script.

Also, our new neighbors put up a little privacy screen on the upper deck. It's nice to look at, and should help keep their cats on the right side of the line:


The garden is in full summertime mode; I trimmed and topped all the herbs last night (except the purple sage, as the flowers are just too pretty) and we'll need to prune (ha ha) the plum tree this weekend; its new growth is all vertical, and will overload the trunk if we don't intervene.

Maybe the new dining-room window will arrive soon. A girl can dream!