Another attempt at being outside

Continuing last week’s attempt at luring in spring type weather, I ordered a load of mulch to spread in the landscape beds around the house.  When I say a “load” I mean 8 cubic yards of mulch, imagine a 3 foot x 3 foot x 3 foot box full of mulch and then multiply that by 8.  Photos don't do it justice, it is a lot of mulch, which I will be moving and spreading by hand. 

 

The sad thing is, this is only enough to do the beds directly around the house and won’t cover any of the beds along the outside of the sod in our back yard. I spread 40 cubic yards over that area two years ago, so this pile seems small in comparison. Fortunately, my native grass plantings are covering a lot of that area now so that whole area shouldn't need to be mulched again. However, I probably need another 8-10 cubic yards to do a 6 foot wide swath along the edge of the sod so it matches the beds around the house. That will require more money, so for now I will save that for another day.

The weather forecast for Saturday said it was going to be nice outside, and Karen had a morning meeting, so I thought I would get 4 hours of good yard work in.  But then it started raining lightly...  I decided to continue working through the rain, until my wheel barrow broke.  I finally realized that the stars were not going to align for me to be outside!  One of the bolts that attaches the wheel  to the wheel barrow came loose and fell out and that caused the axle to go all wonky and it ended up breaking off the metal tab that was supposed to hold it in place.  I ended up having to make a run to Lowe's and spent over an hour (trip to Lowe's included) fixing the wheel.  By the time I was done, it was time to eat lunch and get ready to go to a wedding.

One of the guys on my curling team got married Saturday afternoon, so we got dressed up and went to the wedding.  Sadly, we didn’t take a single picture of ourselves while we were there, I'm sure you are all disappointed about that.  This was a big wedding, over 280 people by our estimates (counting the number of tables) and the only people that we thought we would know there was the bride and groom and another curling couple.  I’m not a huge fan of going to things when you aren’t going to know many people there, but you do what you’ve got to do.  Surprisingly, we ran into a couple from our neighborhood (they used to live near my friend’s parents) and a couple that I sold a car to when I worked at the dealership. 

It rained all day Sunday, forcing me back inside.  I know that the CFO is probably tired of hearing me complain about 1) being stuck inside every weekend during the wintertime and 2) not having a project car to work on.  If I had a project that I could work on in the garage, spending the winter indoors wouldn’t be so annoying.  I can only sit still for a little while (10-20 minutes!) before I am ready to do something; this mentality does not work well with cold winters.   I wish I could lay around all day reading and napping (her specialties), but I can’t. We definitely didn’t take this into consideration when we decided to move up here!

I did manage to sit still long enough to write plant names on the ID tags that the CFO gave me for my birthday. This will definitely help us remember the specific names for the plants in the yard.

Warm weather + rain + melting snow = a lot of water that has to go somewhere. The swale in the farmer’s field that drains into a drainage channel that runs along one of our property lines was flowing like a small river on Sunday. This is the most water that we have seen running through there in the two years that we have lived here.