New wall

In typical fashion, I didn't take any "before" pictures. This is picture of the wall that Brice and I built. Previously it was only finished on the inside of the shop and had the studs exposed on the wall that faced the patio, making it seem like an after thought. I still need to paint, but it looks much better than the exposed studs.

Outdoor Soccer

The outdoor spring season finished up last weekend. We only had one loss and two ties all season and ended up tied for second place. I noticed that the kept track of leading goal scorers for the league, so I checked out where I fell in the standings. I was tied for 7th out of the entire league....even with all the wide open goals that I missed :-) Brice was kind enough to ask out of how many people....there were 10 teams in the league.....so a lot of people.....not just 7 :-)

My indoor soccer team is still undefeated, we finished our last regular season game on Wednesday night and start the playoffs this coming week.

We have grass

Yep, that's right we have grass! I bought one piece of sod :-) The cashier made a comment about how weird it was to buy a single piece of sod. But the other day, Bailey had an upset stomach was looking for grass to eat in the yard. For some reason dogs always want to eat grass when they have upset stomachs. So we put a single piece of sod just off the porch, so we have just a little for the pups to munch on while we finish trying to figure out how we want to finish up the yard. There is currently an ongoing debate about if we want to hire someone to help and at what point do we want to be when/if we do hire someone to help. Here are a couple pictures of my new planter by the front door. I saw it at Tuesday Morning, last weekend, but I didn't get it. I was glad that they still had one left when I went back today.

Checking out the grass

My two tier planter

Bottom Tier

Top Tier

Yard Progress....front flowerbed

I found a couple of these hanging baskets for a good price, so I bought two of them. I planted two different colors of petunias, the pink/white and some solid pink that are hard to see in the photo

Here is a picture of the front flowerbed after planting everything. It was previously only rocks, so once everything starts to grow is will be nice to have some color. Everything I planted are perineals and low water once they are established so it should be fairly easy to maintain. I planted everything on April 30th in really nice weather then today we had a little rain/snow mix that wasn't in the forcast. I'll take an moisture we can get because it has been so dry here.

This is one of my baby box woods. I got a moderately slow growing variety

This is my fragrant sun wallflower. I liked to color of the leaves. It also has a long blooming season should be covered with the little yellow flowers from June to September. It is also supposed to smell amazing, according to what I've read, hence the name.

Iceplant. Mom and Dad picked up a xeriscape book that was from Albuquerque at their gardening classes and this plant was in it. I actually bought it in Amarillo on the way out of town when I was there for Easter. It is supposed to spread and form a nice mat and will flower all summer. It also is supposed to grow well over rocks.

Dianthis, I have pots flanking each side of the garage.

Fattie

Bacon Weave

Sausage

After smokin

Stuffed with peppers, chedder, and montery jack cheese

Hold me....

Bailey gets so excited before a walk. You'd think that they never get walked, but they get it twice a day. Bailey now associates tennis shoes with walks and gets very excited. This was the other day before Brice and I took Rust and B around. Bailey is so excited she jumps into Brice's arms.

Yard Progress

We have put in a lot of time cleaning up our mess of a backyard and you can finally see some progress being made, even though we have a lot more work to go. You can find some of before and progress pictures her: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2224747&id=18304404&l=cde4d136ce.

I'm ready to have the yard finished, so I have been trying to spend as much time as possible cleaning. Brice isn't quite as motivated, but he did spend some time out there with me this afternoon. I think my motivation is to just get everything done so that we can get to a point where all the major projects are done and we can relax.

We finished taking out the half wall on the patio, it really opened it up and made it seem bigger.

Some of the "damage" from today. I went to town on some over grown shrubs. I still need to tackle the sage. We get trash picked up once a week, and everything has to fit inside a can that we roll out to the street, so we will slowly be getting rid of the bags. We typically only have one bag of household trash, so we can usually throw out 3 or 4 bags from the yard. This area had some large flowering perennials, that I trimmed back to the grown. There are new ones sprouting up. I dug out a few of these in another section and they have a pretty nasty root system. I'm not really sure what they are, but they have really pretty yellow flowers in September, but I think they can be pretty invasive, so I want to be sure they don't get out of control

I really should invest in a wheelbarrow. These are rocks that were randomly thrown around the yard. I still have a lot more to move. I have a 5 gallons bucket that I've been using to move the rocks. We plan to use some of these once we get every cleaned up and stat putting it back together again. I set up my stereo that I got for Christmas back in high school in our shed and pull the speakers when I'm working in the yard. It makes it a lot better having music to listen to. Here's a view were you can definitely see progress. We (I) removed a flower bed, some shrubs, and random rocks. I still have more rocks to move, before I can finish removing the shrub, but I ran into fire ants and decided I'd move on to another area. The willow still needs more trimming. We are still planning on adding a small area of grass in the yard, but have to finish the cleaning first.