I'm keeping my handyman busy. He's the only reliable one who actually shows up.

He easily dispatched with 4 different tree stumps that were kind of an eyesore to look at it and made it harder for my mower. (I have a "mini" chainsaw...6"...but it's not quite enough to get these larger diameter stumps.) I care about making things easier for the mower since the more back and forth maneuvers or circles he needs to make, the more likely he will gouge out the lawn, which in turn allows weeds to grow back to cover bare earth spaces.

Anyway, after the tree stumps, we set to work assembling a "tuteur" I recently purchased after a friend of mine gave me a coral (native) honeysuckle seedling that was very much wanting to grow.  I tried putting the roughly 9 foot tuteur together myself but it was just too unwieldy for me to manage so thank goodness i had someone I could call.

He did inform me he's already raised his hourly rate (!) but only for new customers, so I believe he's charging me $65/hr. Given that many small projects don't even require that much time, I figure that's a bargain. And just to get someone to show up!  

We carried the tuteur down to where I wanted to put it and set it in place. Later, after he left, I planted and watered the honeysuckle, which has been on my plant bucket list for a while. 

So Home Depot was here 6 days ago to measure the dimensions of my front door and I'm still waiting for them to call me to just schedule the new door installation. I've called many times; at least now i have the first NAME of the person who manages door installs, but she has no direct line, and when I call the general number, sometimes it just rings and rings and rings. I've left messages, etc.

So frustrating. I guess I have to be patient, but patience is one thing I lack. Things get too complicated if you try to do more than one "project" at a time, so I want to be done with this one so I can move on to the next. Plus, that door is taking up a lot of space in my one-car garage and really in the way.

Ideally, this year's home improvement list includes:

1. Front door replacement
2. Back door replacement
3. Rebuild of stone stairs at top of driveway leading to backyard
4. Replacement of vinyl siding in 2 places where there are 2 small holes

Today is dad day so I don't usually schedule much of anything else; it's just taking him to physical therapy and then we usually do lunch somewhere afterwards. I will do my volunteer editing for kiva.org this morning before I leave, though. Last I saw, I've reviewed over 3,600 loans for that organization over the course of I think 6 years. 

I did finally check my investment balances and saw that I'm down only by about $5,000 compared to before this rumpy downturn started. I know they must've been down a lot more in the last few months. I plan to resume automated withdrawals from my settlement fund, a money market account, to at least make sure I take advantage of the 12% federal tax bracket income max of about $48,000 for single filers + the $15,000 standard deduction. Reviewing my total gross income year-to-date, I don't think there will be much unspent money through the remainder of the year, but there could be a few thousand, maybe $5,000, so I may do a small Roth conversion with it.