While mom's away.....

...the daughters will do major yardwork/manual labor! Ugg!!!

So, my mom has been on a well-deserved 3-week vacation in Seattle with my dad's sister. She has most definitely deserved this vacation and I am so happy for her! She's ending her trip with a long weekend in Ohio to see my dad's brothers. So she'll get to catch up with everyone.

What have I been doing, you ask?! Well...yardwork...yes, yardwork. Something that I so am NOT a fan of! I'm also pretty sure I gave the neighbors something to talk about though! Imagine a "landscape artist" doing yardwork in shorts and a tube top! Yes, a tube top...hey! I have to work on my tan somehow! I surely am not getting any color sitting in an office all day Monday thru Friday! And that Jergen's stuff just wasn't cutting it for me anymore, orange just isn't my color!

On to the yardwork...I started on the 18th bright and early (well, 11:00...that's early) and dug up this little garden that my dad put in the front yard that had somehow overgrown out of the little box and had also acquired many Lillies of the Valley. I was so naive going into this project...I never realized that those little puppies had roots! I thought I could just rip them up and dig up the dirt and be on my merry way. Boy was I wrong! Those things have roots! Deep roots! I dug that stuff up for a bit and then went on to my next task of destroying these barrel type things that were in the yard too. They're like planters, but they pretty much just had weeds in them. There were 4 and they came apart quite nicely. I only took apart 3 of the 4, as the 4th one seemed to have what looks like a snake hole in it...so I left that one. I don't do reptiles...or whatever a snake is classified as! After destroying those things, I moved on to weeding the gardens to prepare for my next task....mulching. Woo hoo!!!

That following Tuesday, I ran to my mom's house during lunch to find a bird on the front walkway. I attempted to scare it away, but it would not move. I tried to avoid the thing, as I thought it would attack me if I got too close. Before I left the house to go back to work, to checked out the front door to check on it and it was still there. I ended up leaving through the garage. After work I had to stop back at my mom's on my way home and the damn thing was dead! Great! Another thing to deal with!!! Ugggg!!!! That poor thing stayed there until the following Saturday, I didn't have the guts or patience to deal with disposing of the dead critter during the week. I was kind of hoping that the boy that cuts the grass would find it and dispose of it, or that the guys who delivered the mulch would have found it and disposed of it...wishful thinking, huh?

Now on to this past Saturday...another "early" morning drive to my mom's. Today was dispose of dead bird and do the mulching day!! Wahoo!! The bird is now resting peacefully in the over grownness of crap back by the shed...RIP Birdie. And now the fun began! Let me tell you a little secret...with all of this yardwork, I had NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING the whole time! Just a little disclaimer. Luckily, I had a little helper for the mulching in the form of Sarah G. Patram! I was so happy to see her. Until she started making fun of me for wear jean shorts and my toes not being in the best condition, but I digress. We had a ball mulching together. And the gardens look fabulous! I think our mom will be very happy with the end result. After mulching, I attmepted to dig up more of the one garden that I destroyed the week prior to not much avail. Oh well, it'll get done eventually I suppose. I'm just glad we got the mulching done and everything looks pretty.

My mom is, as we speak (I think), getting on a plane to return to the East Coast area. Well, she's on her way to Ohio for a long weekend. And Sarah and Tristan will be leaving for Ohio tonight/early Friday morning to go retrieve her. Speaking of Sarah...the poor girl has had the 2 weeks from hell. She got picked for Jury Duty LAST Tuesday, and has been busting her butt between Jury Duty, work and Tristan. To make matters even worse, a tree fell on her house yesterday! There were some pretty craptastic storms in the area, and her house was one of the lucky ones to get a tree to fall. Luckily no one was hurt and there was no major damage (that has been found) to her home. Ugg...poor kid.