Cooler Weather

Ahhhhhh .... the heatwave broke and now we can spend more time outside .... which means finally spending some time dealing with our rather unkept front yard. There's these rather ugly (I'm sure they were once beautiful and I'm sure that with proper care they would have maintained their beauty) cypress type bushes (help Jean), well they may have served a certain degree of privacy but they mostly gave the appearance that the people that lived in the house were creepy .... we may be weird but we're not creepy so they had to go! Besides they were messy and full of bugs. We hauled the green stuff out into the forest to decompose and cut up the bigger stuff for fireplace kindling .... this little Gator made it easy ....



By the end of the day Lea had gotten the majority of them down. The reward was to go to a local nursery and get some flower plants to put into the soon to be ready flower bed.



So I guess the process for improving the looks of the front of the house has begun. We fired the landscaper and bought a lawn mower .... not the riding lawn mower we'd hoped for but this is a really good one with lots of power for our backyard slope and rear wheel drive for the "self propelling". So while Lea cut down the front yard .... I mowed the lawns .... doesn't it look pretty sitting on freshly mowed lawn? .....



Check out this bookcase that Lea built out of deck railing and stair wood ....



As you can see .... we still have a lot of work to do in the basement workshop .... we keep doing stuff instead of putting stuff away and organizing .... but we'll get to that a little at a time.

So the 4th of July is coming up and we're still not sure if we're going to do the backyard fireworks thing or go to the lake. Don't really want to walk .... I mean it's dark and there's no streetlights ..... but we don't have a clue as to what the parking situation might be like. Here's the marina at Lake Thunderbird, which is where the fireworks show will be, and as you can see it's not exactly the kind of place that accomodates huge crowds .....



BTW .... I took this picture 2 days ago and those dark skies did bring us some rain and the cooler weather. Anyway .... I wouldn't be surprised if we fall asleep and miss the whole 4th of July thing anyway .... but I will try :)