laura705

It covers the weekend, so I guess it’s okay that it’s at least as long as 3 separate posts. 

Monday again.  I had a nice weekend, kind of full though.  Friday after work I met some hs friends for a tour and dinner.  It was a tour of haunted sites.  I’m a skeptic with that stuff, but I’d never done that type of tour (I was the only one who hadn’t!), so it was fun.  There was a lot of history with it, so I found it interesting.  Dinner afterwards was pizza, since one of our group now lives in MN.  Had to help her get her fill of Chicago food!  It was a late night by the time I got home and wound down a bit and went to sleep. 

I woke up too early, and after a couple hours of puttering, I got cleaned up and went to the dentist.  No problems there.  Afterwards was some time at home.  I pulled some weeds, and then preened that area.  I hope I preened in time because there were a ton of dandelions and they were huge and many were already in bloom or had gone to the seed stage!  I felt sort of foolish, but I actually plucked off a ton of just the blooms/seeds to try and avoid even more.  We had lunch and hit a few garage sales.  It was our annual village garage sale.  We checked out a few that had advertised patio sets, but not surprisingly, all were gone by the time we got there as it was afternoon of day 2.  We checked out shrubs at home depot, but saw nothing we wanted.

In the evening we went to the annual dinner/auction for the rescue org from which we adopted our dog.  It was a nice event.  We took bf’s mother because we knew she’d like the auction part of it.  Our bids won a couple of the live auctions, so we have some cute stuff for us and doggy - and a one hour obedience consultation!  We all enjoyed it, and the food was pretty good.  I ate too much and I felt full for quite a while – I ate too quickly, and maybe that was because the auctioneer was talking so fast.  Twisted logic there.

After that, bf’s mother went home and bf & I went to a 40^th birthday party for a friend, and thankfully it just happened to be a few minutes away from the dinner.  I was tired from too little sleep the night before, so I was ready to go home within an hour, but of course we didn’t.  People were outside, but it got very cool as it got later.  They had a fire going, but the wood was smoking, so I didn’t want to stand near it.  I finally ended up going inside with the women in the group.  Didn’t eat or drink much of anything, since I was full from the dinner.  We didn’t get home til late and didn’t go to bed until about 2 am.  I got about 7 hours of sleep, so that was alright.

Sunday I spent the morning with the newspaper, and then got out in the yard.  I trimmed back an old shrub at the very back of our yard with lots of dead wood on it.  We’ve kept forgetting about it and so I’m glad I finally sawed, lopped and pruned it back.  We’ll see if it regenerates into something nice.  I’m not even sure what this thing is, but it had a few blooms on some of the green branches.  It doesn’t get much sun, so it may never really be all it could be if it got more sun. 

I also measured out the size of our fire pit vs. the size of some large paver blocks we had just sitting around and had bf lay out 4 blocks at the back corner of the yard and put the pit on top of it.  Now we have a permanent spot for it.  Bf kept moving the fire pit around the yard, especially when he mowed the lawn.  I wanted it away from the house and patio, but on a non-grass surface, so this should work out well.  We have a good sized pile of brush that needs to be burned, so maybe we can sit out one night this week and relax by the fire. 

We went out for lunch, then to Lowe’s, where we also didn’t see any shrubs we wanted for the front landscape.  We need to go to a nursery.  Back home, I finally started shoveling out the stone and gravel that the previous owner used for mulch in several of the beds.  What a pain.  The bad part is that I’m putting the stuff I shovel into a spot on the side of our house that I know we’ll eventually get around to doing something with.  So someday we’ll be shoveling it out of there.  But it already had rock in it too, so we’d be dealing with it anyway.  Of course it’s a very dry sunny area, so maybe we can plant a rock garden there…  In the meantime, bf tried to get our weed wacker/edger going and he couldn’t.  He also couldn’t get the rototiller going.  Both will have to go to the equipment repair guy, and so neither of us were very happy about that.  I hope the tiller can be resurrected.  We bought it last fall off craigslist and I was hoping we could use it to till the veggie garden.  I want to plant this coming weekend!

Dinner was baked tilapia / rice and broccoli.  We watched our American Idol dvr’d shows.  That was about it. 

Didn’t do anything I really should have done this weekend, including exercise, shopping or laundry.  But I liked that I did some stuff in the yard.  My eyes and nose don’t like it because of the allergies, but now that I’m in our hermetically sealed office space into which no fresh air or (pollen) passes, I’m already feeling better.  My eyes were very watery when I arrived, and now they’re not. 

What else?  We’re selling our treadmill and I think our friend that’s buying it will be coming to get it this week.  Tuesday I’m skipping movie night and going to a program at the library instead.  I think that’s about it.