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LANDSCAPING
On Friday we decided to do some landscaping. Mind you, neither Jim nor I are much for the whole landscaping, mowing, weeding, gardening thing. My suggestion was that we hire a couple of guys with names like Juan and Pedro and have them come do the work, but unfortunately (cheap as they may be) Juan and Pedro cost more than I can afford. So we dusted off the shovels and got to work.
Here's the deal, last week when we put in the veggie garden, we uprooted several ugly shrubby things that had been randomly planted in front of the house. There were five lowly bushes in that plot, all kind of standing awkwardly at strange angles, like a corner full of middle schoolers at their first dance. The really tall ones were toward the back, with the short stubby ones huddled in front, and two fat ones standing with their backs to everyone else off to the side. Can you see it?
The poor uprooted shrubs have been laying on my lawn all week, naked roots exposed, with nowhere to go. So we dumped a big pile of dirt out in the corner out front and gave them a home with some structure and permanence. Just what all gawky middle-schooler shrubs need! (Don't ask me where the bizarre shrubs-as-tweenagers analogy came from, it's early and my brain goes strange places sometimes).
Anyway, after dear Jaime (that's Jim in Mexican landscaper talk) and I grumbled at eachother for an hour about how big the pile of dirt should be, where the borders of it should go, which shrubs should go where, and "why the hell didn't you ask me before you started dumping this pile???", we got it laid out and got to work.
After planting the uprooted shrubs, they still looked kind of awkward and lonely, so we wandered around the yard for the next several hours uprooting more unsuspecting foliage and adding it to the newly churned dirt. What started out as a one-hour transplanting project became an all-day landscaping venture. All-in-all it turned out pretty darn good. I don't think we killed anything and a couple of plants might actually bloom soon. I hope so, because I suffer from some serious Rhododendron envy every time I look at my neighbor's yard... I'll show you:
Neighbor's Rhodys
We also put a fence around our little garden, sort of finished cleaning off the patio, cleaned the house, and prepared for a Memorial Day weekend of guests and barbequeing. It was great fun!
Our lump o' dirt project
Jaime's great garden fence
The now useable patio
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TREE PUKE
I know that's gross, but I don't know what else to call it. Do you notice in these pictures that it looks like it has snowed at my house? Well we have this humongous tree in our frontyard that "pukes" these little seedy-pod things all over the neighborhood for a few weeks every spring. Anybody know what it is? The neighbor really wants us to cut it down so her beautiful Rhodys won't be overcome with tree puke, but it is a really cool tree and one of the few we have, so its staying. But it sure is a nuisance. I can't tell if anything is growing in my new little garden because the seedy-pod thingys are covering everything!
Baby plants in there somewhere...
Seedy-pod thingys
The culprit
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ONE FINAL NOTE
Sandy brought her new boyfriend, Jeremiah, up to meet us on Saturday. Its serious. Really. I think they're ready to run off to Vegas and just get it over with. I hope they do. I like him very much and its time for her to slow down her crazy life. Sounds like she thinks so too. 
Don't they look cute and happy? And normal?
Okay, so maybe Jeremiah looks a little drugged-up, but he did just have major surgery on that knee, so he was gonked out on a mixture of Percoset and Vicodin. He had an unfortunate run-in with a tree at Alpental last weekend. Ouch. But he was a trooper, made the trip up here with a car full of kids, tolerated our crazy household, and seamlessly fit into our often-injured family. Welcome to the gang, J!
K, nuff for now. C ya.
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