A touch of irony.

Sooooo.... raise your hand if you need a long week to recover from your long weekend.  And now, if you're raising your hand, you can put it down because you look silly - we can't see you.  But if we could, we'd be all for commiserating.  We fully understand that the long Memorial Day weekend is a time to commemorate and remember, and we spent Monday morning doing just that while sitting at the side of the local parade route and watching young children maul each other over thrown pieces of candy, but the rest of the weekend we used to get started on the plans we have for our new yard.  We started this task at ten in the morning on Saturday, armed with a couple of shovels, and finished our work just before dinner on Monday after putting away the pick ax and sledge hammer that we'd added to our selection of handy tools.  If we've learned one thing this weekend it's that clay, especially bone dry clay, is not a digging friendly medium.  But even taking into account such breaks as the pizza party with Jon's family on Saturday, the BBQ ribs party with my family for Sunday dinner, the bonfire with the neighbors on Sunday night (have we mentioned how much we love our new neighborhood?), and the parade on Monday morning, we have a long list of accomplishments to tack on our refrigerator door before bed tonight.  We ripped out two to three feet of sod all the way around the house, and improved the grading where needed;  we extended our sump pump pipe by five feet, dug a trench, hauled in a trunk full of free rocks from a local farm, and installed a dry creek to disperse the flow of water; we removed a large area of sod from the SE corner of our backyard, added a property defining garden, then transplanted two bushes and one tree from our overcrowded front garden to populate it and hauled in ten 40lb bags of topsoil to mix into it; and we removed two rather large and rather dead bushes from by the front walk way.  It may not sound like much, but ask our muscles and I'm guessing they'll disagree.

And what about the above mentioned irony?  We spent hours upon aching hours chopping at the sod with such inefficient tools as shovels, trowels, and even the aforementioned pick ax.  Then the very last thing we did on Monday night was ask our neighbor if we could borrow his lawn mower again (since ours is still at the old house that we are still mowing), only to have him ask if we might also want to borrow his sod ripper.  Say what?  At least the parade was fun.

Garden pictures in the Yard Transformation album. 

Parade and other new pictures in the May 2008 album.