Ghost Town Map and more!
It has been, as usual, a busy week. Weekish. Week plus? One of those things. There was (another) heat wave, I dug a trench in my backyard, we had a visit from a fox, the fireplace had its annual maintenance inspection, a noisy holiday occurred, and—big shoutycaps achievement here—I HAVE FINALLY COMPLETED A REAL MAP OF MY FICTIONAL TOWN, along with a numbered list key for all of the important locations in both present-day and ghost-occupied states. It took a lot of drafting and I kept getting distracted by research into things like street naming conventions, and the history of Illinois, and picking up Proceate and spending time playing with digital pens and pencils. (I totally don’t need Procreate, but it was fun to draw dopey little sketches of cats and dragons on my iPad as a break from squinting at the map.) ANYWAY.
Mapping in progress. iPad for sketching into Canva, building list and blank map printout and colored pens for the literal big picture work that’s much easier to do physically than digitally.
The map still isn’t in the format I want. What I want is an Illustrator-style file with organized folders/layer groups of the drawn and labeled streets, buildings, geographic features etc, but what I have is the best I can do with Canva. IT EXISTS, and with the creation complete, I can always RE-make it in a different format. Kinda the graphic equivalent of “finish the draft, can always edit later.”
Canva’s did well enough to go on with. And Canva does have one big advantage! I can share the results even though the digital whiteboard is much too unwieldy to print out, and when I make an image of it all the text is like, 2 pts high.
Canva lets me do public links, so you can zoom in and out on the originals here, should you so desire.
overview map of town and surrounding area
The project has pushed “learn how Affinity Designer works” to a higher point on my ever-growing list of things I want to do. It’s an Adobe Illustrator alternative, so it should be a good program for drawing straight lines/shapes and adding labels etc—and as a non-visualizing kind of person, I need to diagram a LOT of scenes whine I write. Problem has been that every time I think I have it figured out, I change some setting, everything goes weird and I cannot figure out how to undo it. The big thing I want to learn is to draw a rough shape and have the program clean it up into a nice neat one.
But that’s a project for another time. Ghost Town Gridley truly exists, and as always happens when I make up one thing, I ended up with a ton of other little stories attached to it. So there are REASONS the streets are laid out the way they are & have the names they do, I know when different developments broke ground and who did the work,, and some streets change names or jog weirdly at intersections due to past power plays, political scandals or payoffs, etc. Basically, I set out to draw a map and ended up planting lots and LOTs of story seeds in the process. Pure happy-happy-joy-joy funtimes.
So, onward. About the trench I mentioned in the intro.
My tiny pocket of nature in the back of my yard was originally meant as a rain garden, to soak up the astonishing amounts of water that come off the house during Big Storms. Now, for a rain garden to work, it needs to be a large zone LOWER than the drainage from the house. Unfortunately my Tiny Nature Pocket & Firefly Nursery(tm) is noticeably higher than the lawn. NO, I didn’t add soil. I’ve only even put down mulch there once since it was planted. The soil in the plantings has just expanded as it recovers from decades of Toxic American Lawn Care.
Now, that expansion should’ve been taken into account when the landscaping was done in the first place, and I did explicitly ask that the are be dug out lower before planting was done…but that’s an old dissatisfaction. I’m working with what I have, not what I asked for and didn’t get, which means I’m trenching from the drywell catch basin at the end of the buried downspout piping, leading back into the little area we always wanted the water to go.
That’s a very specific little area 10 ft from property lines but 25 ft from the house. (WHY ISN’T THAT WHERE THE DRY WELL WENT IN THE FIRST PLACE? That one I cannot blame the landscaping company for. OUR TOWN’S BONKERS NONSENSICAL RESTRICTIONS PROHIBITED IT. This is a municipality that until 2014 only allowed downspouts to extend maximum 6 ft from the house. SIX FREAKING FEET. They extended it to 10 ft in 2014. Which is still decades behind modern drainage recommendations.
BUT I DIGRESS. Also, I am evidently in a shoutycaps mood. Anyway. Once I have the trench done (technically a “French drain” or as I will refer to it, the “Sunken Road") I will then excavate a nice, wide sweep of lower ground and plant it with lotsa native grasses and perennials that can handle both droughty times and occasional floods ones. Transplanting most of them, to be fair.
Not sure how the shrubs and trees already in that area are going to handle the digging, but they’ll either cope or get replaced. The redbud is the only big one and it’ll be fine. I’m digging way out at the edge of its canopy, and redbuds are resilient.
The biggest issue is getting rid of the extra dirt. I was carrying it to various low spots in the yard in buckets, but a) there’s A LOT of dirt, and b) I ended up with a whopping huge bruise on my forearm from the handle,. My general life rule is that when I injure myself, I do not continue project util injury is healed. The bruise is almost gone, but I need to find a wheelbarrow to borrow before I continue.
Pretty sure my neighbor has one. So. When I have a wheelbarrow, some slightly cooler weather, and no more bruised arm, there will be more playing in the dirt.
Not gonna lie, digging holes is wildly and disproportionately satisfying activity. Very much, “LOOKIT, I DID THAT. I EXERTEC MY WILL UPON THE PHYSICAL WORLD.” I expect people who have the dexterity to make handicrafts get that same sense of satisfaction, probably with less sweat and fewer bruises.
Hard to see, since dirt doesn’t offer a lot of contrast, but here ‘tis, six feet or so of trench, from the gray rocks over the catch basin drain heading back into the shade past thirsty plants.
That’s a good place to stop. Cat pic, and then signing off. Until later!
A DIFFERENT picture of Pippin lounging on his big gray fleece bed.