I finally bit the bullet and bagged leaves in my back yard this weekend. I kept up with the leaves in the front yard pretty well this year, but didn’t touch the back until yesterday. 2 days of work + about 40 yard bags later the back yard is in pretty good shape. It’s not perfect (which bothers me, because I’m from the “Any job worth doing is worth doing right” school of thought), but it’s a whole lot better than it was. I even managed to clean out the big flower bed in the front yard, clean the roof and gutters, and touch up the front yard.
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Some of the items I found under all those leaves:
- My Favorite Screwdriver (Lost last weekend while putting together the swingset)
- Pry Bar
- Garden Hose
- BBQ Grill Brush ( I bought a replacement for this missing brush a couple weeks ago )
- 2 Flower Beds (with flowers!)
- 3 plastic dishes (So thats where all of Ashes’ water bowls went to!)
- 2 of Rachel’s pony tail holders (She has pony’s in every color of the rainbow but both of these were bright blue. I guess she doesn’t like the blue ones…)
- Grass
The city garbage service stopped accepting plastic yard bags last summer. Now they’ll only accept bio-degradable bags for yard waste. This probably wouldn’t be so bad, except that the bio-safe bags are MUCH more expensive than regular plastic bags, and in my neighorhood, it would cost a fortune to buy enough paper bags to do the job. The alternative (which I’ve chosen) is to load up all of the plastic bags and haul them to the landfill myself. There, you cut open the bags and dump the contents into the compost pile, then throw the bags into the trash bin. Of course, I haven’t owned a truck for a couple years, so I have to borrow my neighbor’s Toyota. It’s a small truck, so I’m looking at 3-4 trips to the dump to haul the mess off. Maybe next weekend…
And to think, we told the realtor we wanted a house with lots of trees.
Paw Paw Steele and I (and sometimes Uncle Jeff) spent yesterday afternoon putting together Rachel’s swing set.
The final, assembled product is ok, and Rachel loves it, but the quality of the parts left a lot to be desired, and made assembly a much bigger chore than it should have been.
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Continue reading “New Swing Set”
I’ve posted ultrasound pictures from our Jan and Feb doctor visits. For the sake of modesty, I won’t upload the picture that proves it’s a boy — it’s very graphic! Click the small picture to see more.
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We painted Rachel’s new room today. I taped everything off last night, and got started painting about 9:30 this morning. I skipped church to paint - shame on me! I worked all day on it, and with help from Jamie, finally got finished about 9:45 this evening.
At some point today, Rachel came in, and being her always curious self asked: “What are you doing?”. “I’m painting your room”, I replied. This seemed to upset her a little, and she says “That’s not Rachel’s Room! That’s Paw-Paw’s Room!”
My in-laws, “Mimi and Paw-Paw” are frequent guests, and they always stay in this room. It took quite a bit explaining before we got Rachel to understand this would be her new room, but she finally accepted it. Jamie put Rachel in bed tonight because I was still working on the room, and I overheard Rachel saying “I want to sleep in my room!”. She expected to be able to start sleeping in the new room tonight, and I guess she was kinda peeved that she had to sleep in the old room another night… Poor baby!
I think we’re having company next weekend, so we’ll probably wait until after that to finish moving Rachel in. I don’t have a clue what we are going to do with guests after that. The couch sleeps pretty good I guess…
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Jamie’s been working hard cleaning out the guestroom so we can move Rachel in there. The guestroom has been the catch-all for all of our old stuff that didn’t really fit anyplace else. We want this room to be all Rachel’s and not make her co-exist with our old junk!
Continue reading “Trading Spaces”
