It’s been two weeks since I’ve blogged.

On the one hand, I like it because I’ve been so busy with work and doing stuff in the yard and traveling and all that…but on the other hand I hate it because something always seems a little off when I’m not on MySpace reading and writing and leaving drunked comments.

All day long I keep thinking things like ‘I really need to blog about that’ but then I get too caught up to open my computer, much less actually remember what I was supposed to be blogging about. Then, two weeks will go by and I will suddenly have a ton of things to tell you about and it all comes out at once.

For example, right now I want to tell you about visiting Hood Canal, the Mercedes I drove in LA, catching up with Kristen, the rock wall we’re building, the huge dahlia that finally came up on the side of the house, how I started laying out the deck yesterday, punk rock baseball, and PVDD’s dollar-bill origami collection. I want to blog about all of that, but I don’t want to blow my wad all at once. So I guess I’ll just get you caught up on the gardening/landscaping stuff and then tomorrow we’ll talk about the LA trip and the origami.

Anyway.

So we’ve had an unusual amount of rain this summer. I mean, usually in summer we can expect 2-3 months of sunny, beautiful, this-makes-the-other-9-months-of-rainy-season-worthwhile weather. However, the last three Sundays punk rock baseball has been rained out and it looks like today is no exception. We had such a bad rainstorm a while back that my petunias were flattened and their flowers turned into limp, soggy, slimy puddles of petal.

It has, however, made sure that everything gets enough water, which I suppose is okay.

So I tried to find some “before” pictures of the back yard from before we started working on it. The only ones I could find were the ones that I took after weed-whacking the “urban meadow” that covered my back yard.

This is the new left side of the house, after we put in the patio. We had just planted a few things at this point.

This was taken just a few days ago. You can see how everything has grown so much!

 

 

A great example of that is this Corsica mint:

that is now the alien plant taking over the planter:

Against the house on the right-hand side, I cleared out all the grass and rocks and made little planting beds:

I added a bunch of new pictures to my Gardening album of the flowers and stuff, but here’s some of my favorites:

So when we took out all the dirt in the right-hand yard while building the patio, I dumped it in the front of the house. My house sits on top of a hill and the yard slopes down to the sidewalk, and we decided we were going to build a rock wall terrace to extend the yard out and to build a fence on. My dad started work on that last weekend:

Of course, it was raining the day we worked on it. What else?

While they were working on that, I finished digging out the rest of the left-hand side of the house, which looked like this:

and which now looks like this:

 

The pink strings are marking where the deck will be. There’s another part of it that will extend over the concrete steps leading to the back door, and one of the deck footings will end up sitting on the patio.

Next weekend we’ll see the footings (we’re using those pier block things) go in place and then the week after that the joists and stuff. I’ll keep you posted on that.

So that’s what I’ve been working on, a lot.

The rest of today will be spent playing Punk Rock Baseball and then tonight I’ll tell you about my trip to LA and the Mercedes. Woot!

Missed you guys. Mush out.