Never a dull moment around here

Our new water line trench, all filled in.

Mark mixing concrete for one part of our water line trench.

Cutie Halloween bag filled with apple tree leaves.

There it is! We do have a Japanese maple that is turning a beautiful fire red.

Cutie Halloween bag #2 full of leaves.

We've cleared out a lot of overgrown brush and tree limbs from this level of the front yard, but we still need to get rid of the pile in the middle of the yard.

Beautiful autumn colors.

My nerdy dollar tree Halloween decorations.

More nerdy decorations.

What color to choose?  Forest Khaki or Wood Smoke?

 I hate not having a dishwasher.

What better to do on an autumn day than to make chocolate chip cookies!?

We're ready and waiting for those trick-or-treaters!!

HAVE A HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween weekend everyone!  What are your plans for the spooky weekend?  Well, for us, tonight was our church's Halloween party. People brought food, candy, there was a magic show, prizes for the best costumes (yours truly won one!), a candy walk, bingo, and lots of laughter and fun. In attendance were cowboys, pirates, angels, a witch, a zebra, a 1920s flapper, a nurse, two construction workers, Cat in the Hat, Sherlock Holmes, a hippie, serial murderer, a unicorn, a chef, a werewolf and others.  I'll give you a glimpse of my prize-winning outfit:

Fancy, huh?! It was pretty fun getting all decked out.

Tomorrow, on actual Halloween, I'll have to put my fringe and fishnets away, for the majority of the day will be a work day.  Mark is working on putting a new water line in (the trench through the front yard is already dug) and I'll be raking leaves, cleaning the house and doing load after never-ending load of laundry.  The evening will be spent (I hope!) passing out candy.  I am very excited to have trick-or-treaters for really the first time ever, but I have no idea if we'll have any.  I am prepared, though!!

I'll try my best to post some pictures of our exterior clean-up and Mark's trench tomorrow.  Until then,

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Our ongoing side project

Make that ongoing outside project!

It's obvious from previous pictures that our landscaping is a wee-bit overgrown.  Well, not long after we moved in, Mark took on the grass and mowed, which actually made a world of difference, but there is much, much more to be done.

Grabbing some gloves and my handy pruners, I first tackled the 8' rhododendron in our front yard and then the ... bushy tree thing next to it. You can kind of see our first brush pile building up behind it.

The bushy tree thing next to it took forever to prune!  There were so many dead branches underneath (and still are) and they were all super skinny and you didn't know where they connected - ahhh - it was the worst!  Anyway, we then tacked the Tarzan vines that entwined one of our fir trees out front.

You can still see what we couldn't reach without a ladder. Those things are tough! (Check out growing brush pile #2!) We're going to have to get out a really tall ladder to finish off those vines.

This evening we started in on the sticker bushes that were surrounding the 5 or so mailboxes at the end of our driveway. Despite a few sticks (Mark got one right in the neck!), we managed to come out on top and removed most of them. They really don't stand a chance against me and my trusty pruners!

Underneath everything, we found a beautiful Japanese maple!  It's actually pretty huge and was getting overtaken by those pesky sticker bushes...but we took care of that problem (see scary photo of me above). Now we only have to remove some Ponderosa Pine branches above it so that it gets a wee bit more light and then it will actually be visible to us and people who drive by! (Sorry for the dark picture.)

A little down, a lot more to go, but it's looking better all the time!