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Do you remember the days when you used to get things in the mail other than bills? When was the last time you wrote someone a REAL letter (outside of Christmas card season?)

Lauowolf pointed me to Mary Robinette Kowal’s post on A Month of Letters challenge.

The idea is simple – in the month of February, commit to mailing one piece of correspondence for every day of the month that the postal service runs in your country.  You can mail postcards, letters, packages.  You can hand-write them, you can type them, you can make a ransom note out of words cut out of the newspaper, if you want.  You can send one out each day of the month, or mail them in a big batch once a week.  But send out REAL MAIL, and brighten someone’s day.  (Challenge part 2 is writing back to everyone who writes to you – I’ll leave this as an extra mission for you, should you choose to accept it.  This message will NOT self-destruct in 5 seconds.)

I’m going to participate, but so far I’m short on addresses of people to write to.  If you’d like to receive some REAL MAIL from me, send me an note with your address to rossruns@gmail.com – I promise not to share it or sell it, just like I promise that if you send me your address, you’ll get something from me in the mail!

And hey, if you want to participate too, awesome! Lauowolf is gathering peoples’ names together to get a circle of ex-Voxers and others in on the fun – if you want to participate, head over here and send Lauowolf your address (the email address is buried in the post on that link), and you’ll get some addresses in return to help you on your way.  And don’t be dissuaded by a whole Month of Letters – if you can only get out 1, or 2, or 5 letters, those are that many more that will go help put a smile on someone’s face.

If you didn’t catch it from this post’s title, summer has arrived early in North Carolina, with 90+ degree and 60%+ humidity days, driving the apparent temperature outside to well over 100 degrees.  Just stepping outside your door brings on a full-fledged sweat, and if you even think about doing any yardwork or physical activity during the day, it better be in the early-morning or late-evening hours, or you’re risking heat exhaustion or heatstroke.

So, of course, I stupidly spent most of Friday morning hauling mulch from the landscaper’s back to my house, and most of Friday afternoon transporting it from a pile beside my house into the playset in the backyard.

It was only 4.5 cubic yards of mulch, total, which compared to the 8 yards from a couple years back, didn’t make quite the same size pile as before, but since this time I transported it all by myself instead of paying for a $75 delivery fee, felt like about twice as much as I really wanted to handle.

4.5 cu. yds of cypress chips still makes a sizeable pile!

One “benefit” to the new mulch, (when compared to the shredded palettes that made up the last playground mulch I bought), is that it was significantly less dense per unit volume.  Although this meant I needed to get a little more than I wanted to get the same coverage, it made shoveling and hauling around in a wheelbarrow much easier than the last time I did this.  My nephew wanted to earn some money, so he took his turns with the mulching fork loading the wheelbarrow, which I then pushed into the play area and dumped/raked.  With copious amounts of water breaks and a couple of trips in to the air-conditioning to REALLY cool off, we finished up the mulch transport in about 4 hours or so.

Rejuvenated play area, just in time for the heat of summer.

We barely beat out an afternoon thunderstorm, which immediately flooded the storm drains and catchbasins around the play area, but the mulch bed itself weathered the storm nicely, and may have even leveled itself out a little bit more because of the torrential downpours.

So of course, by doing all this prep work to get the play area spruced up again, I’ve guaranteed that the thermometer this week isn’t going to drop below 95 degrees.  But at least it’s nice to look at, while tucked away safely indoors behind double-paned windows and basking in the cool breath of central air conditioning!