As I wander through the house a mere month before the wedding, I make a mental list of stuff that I’d like to do or have done. Besides the obviously huge projects (central air, adding that wing off the back for the wine cellar, putting the second floor studio on the garage, fencing the yard, bulldozing the neighbors’ yard for our hedge maze), there’s a pile of smaller things I’d like to do when we get back from Italy:

• Keyed locksets for the doors. (We have more keys for this house than the Home Depot.)
• A bird feeder. (All of the feeders I’ve seen so far are crap—thin plastic, cheap-ass poles, or pitifully ugly. I want to feed the birds, not run a squirrel soup kitchen.)
• A ladder. (Our gutters are full of more gunk than a restauraunt sink drain, and we have a house’s worth of windows crying for paint. Nevermind the rest of the house.)
• A dishwasher. (Cheap by itself, but the reconfiguring of our door-tastic kitchen is going to take a lot of work.)
• Shelving for the basement. (Getting all the crap off the front porch into the basement is simply moving one mess to another location; organization is in order here.)
• A new dryer. (The Brady Bunch-era unit we use now is both useless and small, and we need some serious commercial drying muscle—as well as better energy efficiency.)
• A gas range. (Oh, my HELL, to borrow a phrase from the P.S.D.F., does our electric oven suck donkeys. I’m sure we bring down the power grid in Catonsville every time we turn on the damned thing, and it cooks as well as a heroin addict.)

Spurred on by a comment from Lis, I posted a bunch of pictures of our garden I took this weekend. For the tech-heads, I’m using a Canon G3 with a 58mm close-up lens (thanks Dad) in natural sunlight. The one on the home page is the only one I lit additionally—just a mini-maglight from underneath to brighten the center.

I also got off my ass and started up the picture-a-week thing I’ve been threatening for years; I’m going to try to post a new illustration on varying topics, and I’m going to involve you, my four loyal readers. Each Monday, I’ll take suggestions from you for an interesting editorial story, article, or biography, and choose one for an illustration, and then post it (gulp) by Friday. So, send me an interesting article you’ve seen online (please keep it under 2-3 pages) that could make for an interesting illustration, and I’ll draw you a drawering.