Scattered Thoughts . . .

We have germination! A week or so ago, I finished installing that stone pathway between the back door to the house and the outdoor grilling kitchen area we are in the process of building. Upon completion of laying the all the stone, I sprinkled down some grass seed so we could grow some nice grass between the stones (as opposed to weeds) like our other stone pathway going to the back door.  When I cut the lawn yesterday, I noticed that the grass seeds had germinated already! Before long, the stone path will look like it has been there forever. We still have plenty of big plans for the back yard but it already looks nothing like it did when I moved here. The landscaping, just like the house, has come a long way in a few relatively short years. The weather was nice this morning... sunny and not too warm... so I decided to make some more headway on the part of the project where I lay the patio blocks for the grilling kitchen area. Area cleared, leveled, tamped and ready

I am just now getting back into a groove at home which finds me making some progress in our home renovations. As everyone already knows, much of this is completely dependent upon my health. I only manage to get a little bit accomplished each month. Not only do I struggle with my spinal injuries when trying to accomplish things around the house, but I also struggle with Systemic Mastocytosis. Avoiding anaphylaxis is a top priority which means avoiding overdoing it, staying hydrated, staying medicated with a huge cocktail of medications, and trying not to overheat my body. There are many things which can cause my health to become unstable and ruin my week... or month... and any activity compounds this risk.  You can't really see it in this small photo but all that dirt between the stones is now seeded for grass.  This weekend, however, I managed to make some headway on our stone pathway that connects the house to the area where I intend to build an outdoor kitchen grilling ar

I made a bit more progress on the outdoor grill and kitchen area which allowed me to let out a small sigh of relief after a few weeks of alternating between poor weather and poor health.  I believe we have enough patio blocks for the small kitchen area that will be under a roof. This area is only about 42 square feet so I didn't really need a whole lot of blocks. They are heavy, however, so we had to buy them in about three batches because we've been transporting them in our small cars. As a result, we encountered a problem when Lowes restocked with a different shade of block than we had originally bought in the first batch. I had to settle for two shades of gray, but it will look fine when it is all put together.  Since we were transporting these patio blocks in our cars, we had to make multiple trips back and forth to Lowes. This was fairly easy to do... whenever we were up in the Burlington area running errands, we just stopped at Lowes also to pick up about 200 lbs of b

New grill placed in the backyard in its temporary home... a new grilling kitchen area is being built off the backside of this log shed... you can see some blocks out marking locations of posts for the roof. It was a busy and productive morning today! First, I added much needed RAM to my desktop computer as well as my laptop computer. Getting that task done is a huge relief especially after the difficulties I had with the laptop computer ( see my previous post ). After accomplishing those tasks with my computers, I headed outdoors to see if I could make some headway in getting our new grill out of our living room. The grill was still sitting in the living room after assembling it a few days ago because I had no place outdoors to set it. The old grill was located in a place where we are building an outdoor kitchen grilling area under cover. If I set the new grill there, then it would be in my way while working on building this outdoor area. I first had to find a level area nearb

Our old grill finally bit the dust. I had rebuilt the grill a couple of years ago just to buy us another year or two and we clearly managed to get another couple of years out of it but now that old grill sits in the yard as a pile of rusted out metal. We have some really nice plans for the yard and those plans always included a nice area under cover for a little kitchen/grill area. On the positive side, what started out as vague ideas for our yard had already turned into specific plans before our grill bit the dust so we already had a pretty good idea of what we wanted. It had been a frigid winter here this year so we didn't use the grill much in the past six months or so. The temperatures finally moved close to freezing a few weeks ago so we fired up the grill to cook some steaks... I went outside to check on the steaks and noticed the fire was not hot and the grill sounded like a jet plane! I knew what that meant... leaking gas... there was a little flame-thrower-action go