Lambson version "Groundhog Day"

Is it feeling like that for you, too?  Nothing new or exciting to report.  We thought James would be coming on Wednesday to resume work on the house but, nope.  Is this an exercise in patience or what? Yep.  Is it time to tell him to fish or cut bait?  Good question.  Will we find anyone else to do the work at the same prices? Nope!

In the meantime, yard work continues.  Steve and I got the grass seed planted in the backyard.  I straightened up the bricks that separate the back lawn from the back "wild" area and I pulled out "bad" plants (dandelions, invasive honeysuckle, trash trees) from about one third of that area.  I really believe that in this coming week - which is not supposed to be very rainy - we will have all the areas around the house cleaned out and then it will just be regular maintenance.

Everyone around us is receiving their stimulus checks.  Not us yet.  We just finally got our income taxes prepared on Thursday.  But, at least that is done and we have enough money saved in our income tax savings to cover the accountant, how much we owe, and have 77 dollars leftover.  Not bad!  All of our stimulus money will go to paying for the rest of our remodeling.

We finished up season one of the Mandalorian Tuesday night.  We had a Zoom discussion with Elise, Sarah, and Steven about season one of Picard.  We watched "Solo" on Netflix.  We watched our DVD copy of "The Rookie".  We ventured out to buy groceries one day and to two hardware stores another day.  We made a few ministering visits throughout the week.  One was to pick up some extra produce from Ron M. who got all of it from our local food pantry and he couldn't, or didn't want to, use it all.  This is what he passed on to us:  4 salmon filets, 6 bunches of asparagus, 2 bags of sweet potatoes, a mess of green beans, 3 dozen eggs.  I have no idea what he actually kept for himself.  But the question is......why is the food pantry giving a single man SO MUCH FOOD???!?!?!?  I shared the sweet potatoes and some of the asparagus with others, I froze the salmon and have found a couple of recipes to try, I blanched and froze the asparagus, I cooked the green beans, and I found a sweet potato muffin recipe I want to use since they are high in potassium and Steve can't eat them.

OH!!!  Sarah had a birthday on Friday - all by herself in Ogden, Utah.  She had to make her own ice cream cake for the first time and she did a terrific job.  She had a Zoom viewing of  "Field of Dreams" with some friends.  She went kayaking on Saturday.  We wished we could have been with her.

And, we bought gasoline yesterday at $1.26 per gallon......

Same old same old

Another week down in coronavirus world.  How many more to go????

Good news is that our contractor, James, texted that he hopes to start work on our exterior projects next week....

More good news is that our yard continues to look better and better.  Weeds are being pulled.  The sister missionaries came over Wednesday morning to help move that project along.  While they worked, Steve and I moved dirt from our backyard by-the-house beds (the ones that were surrounded by the landscape bricks I sold) over to the front of the house and now grass seed is planted there. 

Below is the area where the sister missionaries worked.  Next week it will get grass seed.  And below that are the areas from where Steve and I got the dirt AND the front yard all planted with grass seed.  

Friday was a cloudy, raw, nasty day but I went anyway with my friend Elizabeth to Home Depot to buy plants.  She got a whole bunch for her yard.  I just got some snapdragons to put in the pot on our front porch.  

Saturday was sunny, warmer, and perfect for working in the yard.  I bundled up the rest of the deck debris to set out for the trash next Friday.  All we have left are two very long boards that I guess James will have to cut up and haul off....

In addition to deck debris, the garage is full of stuff waiting for coronavirus to end: 

Stuff to take to hazardous waste disposal.

Stuff to take to Habitat For Humanity's ReStore (not the garden tools in front, though)

I WAS able to get rid of three bags of aluminum cans that I had been collecting along Blue Ridge road over the past several months during my morning walks.  I got a whole two dollars for them from a metal recycling place in town.  

Below is how our above-the-front-door looks.  No bird's nests ever since we installed the mesh.  Hooray!

I worked at the Music Suite two days last week.  Steve installed a toilet paper holder and a towel rack in the bathroom.  He is not really into the handy-man scene so for him to do this was a big deal.  I continued to work on Days for Girls stuff throughout the week - cutting & sewing.  And, we watched four movies over the week.  Well, I guess you can't call the Mandalorian a movie but we got in three episodes on Tuesday night.  We also watched "Field of Dreams" (Steve's April movie), "Troop Zero" (on Netflix - cute and quirky but the "bad guys" didn't get their comeuppance like they should have), and "Seabiscuit" (Steve picked this one our of our DVD collection and what a great movie! Glad we have it)

I will close with tulips from our front yard and violets in the back yard (they are my weed of choice)

Easter!!!

Yep, the Easter bunny (or should I say Easter lamb) came to our house!  And to the whole earth, in spite of Covid19.  

The pink blossoms were from a morning walk.  The white blossoms are our apple tree.  You can see from the first picture the purplish stuff growing around the base of the trunk - it is called hensbit and I have been gradually digging it up and putting grass seed in its place.  I have about a four-foot square patch left to tackle.  We had a frost one night last week and so, once again, Steve and I covered all our blossoming fruit trees with sheets.  However, since their radical pruning earlier this year, it wasn't such a difficult job..... the ones below are the apple trees and you can see where the new grass has been planted...

These are the cherry trees in the front yard the next morning and happily, all the blossoms survived the frost (although some of them didn't survive the sheets!  😒)

We sold our Mantis tiller on Friday through Facebook marketplace.  It was a finicky and annoying little machine from day one and so we hardly ever used it.  Since we don't plan to have a huge garden in St. Louis,  why keep it?  We are still trying to sell the chainsaw - our prospective buyer was a no call/no show yesterday.  Gas powered engines are a pain so we plan to buy an electric chainsaw with the profits of this sale.

Friday, Steve and I tackled the kitchen cabinets.  He removed and replaced hardware and I scrubbed off grime and glop.  These cabinets are odd in that they have two holes.  That would make one think that they were made for a handle.  But, they are so close together that there is not a handle anywhere that would work.  So, instead, a backplate was used to cover one of the holes and a knob was screwed in through the backplate hole.  It worked but it also looked dated.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do to solve the problem but I bought a set of 25 black knobs anyway.  And, then on Friday, in a flash of inspiration, I decided to screw knobs into both holes and "ta da"!  With the addition of five new drawer pulls, I really like the results.

 

I spent yesterday in the yard - digging up the hensbit around the apple tree and trying to get the part of our front yard into shape where the piers were placed.  The big machines kind of mixed up the good top soil with the icky clay soil and just plumped it all down in lumps when they finished.  Look up by the house especially.  And, by the sidewalk, the dirt made mud puddles every time it rained.  What I want is a slope of grass going down and away from the house and the driveway.  You can see small patches of grass trying to grow from the trauma it suffered in December.

BEFORE

It is kind of hard to tell but I leveled off the dirt up by the house and dug away the dirt by the sidewalk yesterday.  We have piles of good dirt in the backyard that were surrounded by the landscape brick I sold a couple of weeks ago. This coming week, Steve and I will haul that dirt to this front area and then plant grass seed. 

AFTER 

We have watched a lot of television - Steven came over on Tuesday and introduced us to the first three episodes of the Mandalorian and we finished up Season 1 of Picard yesterday.  We watched the live action Beauty and the Beast on Friday night and Star Trek Nemesis last night (tying in with Picard)  

I will close with a yard sign found in our neighborhood....

First week in April

It has been a lovely week and the warmer temperatures have brought more and more blossoms.  Here are some pictures around our house....

Steve and I have worked in the yard most every day.  One of the current objectives is to plant grass seed where gardens used to be.  Steve worked on the hybrid iris bed near the driveway and I worked on the apple tree area in the back.  As you can see, there is still more to do.  On the left is a weed called hensbit with little purple flowers.  Pretty but not a lawn.  I transplanted a little dwarf apple tree from our front yard to be by the other two apple trees (it is the smaller twig in the front of the other two) so now you could say that we have a little orchard.  I am also happy to see that, even though I pruned the fruit trees very radically, they are still alive and sending out little green leaves.

Elise came over three evenings so she and I could work on her t-shirt quilt project.  She has SO many t-shirts that we are going about it a little differently than other t-shirt quilts I have made.  With hers, we are focusing on cutting out just the actual design. Ultimately, all these small, medium, and large designs will be appliqued onto a large sheet in a free-format rather than rectangles on a grid.  We watched movies while we worked - Monday was "Lady In The Water", Tuesday was "Unbreakable" and Friday was the 1950's "Sabrina" (which Elise owns) because on Thursday evening, while I baked sugar cookies, Steve and I watched the 1995 "Sabrina".  

I decorated the sugar cookies yesterday morning and then we watched General Conference the rest of the day.  Steve is a ministering brother to Teresa Torres who has no access to any kind of internet so she joined us.  When I was not watching or eating or napping, I worked on face masks.  I hear mixed messages as to the effectiveness of homemade masks and I am actually leaning more towards the "they do not help" camp but Beckie asked if I could make some for herself and Kyle and Micah so I made several of two different styles.