Scattered Thoughts . . .

The weather and my health cooperated for a change so Sheila and I managed to have a relatively productive weekend. We cleaned up the yard and then I seeded the necessary areas of the lawn (lots of them for some reason) while Sheila cleaned up the flowerbed all around the house.  I pulled out the lawn mower and cut the lawn.  I worked on the putting green and added seed again.  Sheila cleaned the playhouse for the grandchildren.  I did some pruning and clearing some new growth of Sumac saplings (we hate this invasive, nasty, ugly, weedy tree).  I turned on the outdoor plumbing and found that we have a couple of very leaky ball valves.  I'll need to pickup a couple of those so I can replace them.  I had hoped to get to some woodworking but I never got to that.  The yard is looking good for this time of year though. We had two solid weeks of rain but, oddly, everything was still very dry.  The lawn mower was kicking up a dust cloud everywhere I mowed.   My bone pain and joint pain is

One evening, while Gee went to pick up Lukey and Kenzie earlier in the week, I wandered around our yard with one of my cameras in hand.  Most of our flowers are now in bloom so it was time to try to capture some nice images of the landscaping around our house.   We get a lot of compliments about our home as people walk by our house.  Actually, almost everyday we get at least one compliment.  Even while I was shooting photos on this particular evening, a neighbor walked by and told me she loved the house and that "it looks like a little paradise".  I must be doing something right with our landscaping and the exterior of the house. Here are a few photos. First, here is a photo looking toward the road... Here is our covered outdoor kitchen...  one of the most useful and nicest additions to our home... We used to cover this tree in Christmas lights every year until it grew to about 30 feet tall.  Now it is probably more than 50 feet tall... Another evening of S'mores... Two o

Today was a landscaping day.   Mostly, I was focused on the lawn and especially the new putting green.  The new grass in the putting green is filling in nicely.  The grassy area in front of the putting green is coming along but there are still a few bare spots as you can see in the second photo, below.  Some new grass should be popping up out of the bare spots in the next few days.   Mowing a putting green is something new to me.  I started with my usual mulching mower in the hope of picking up most of the debris that has already fallen from the surrounding trees.  We have all sorts of seeds that have fallen from nearby oaks and elms (I think).  After sort of vacuuming up the putting green using my usual mower, I then went at it with a reel mower.  This reel mower cuts much closer and it worked very well.  The putting green is looking very nice. The rest of the lawn around the house is looking nice too.  I spent extra time and effort on seeding bare spots and then fertilizing the lawn.

S heila and I spent much of the day yesterday doing some rather heavy landscaping work (heavy for us).  It was a productive day but all the work significantly impacted my health.  More on that later.  Yesterday's project was to remove grass from one area and move it to another area so we can have an extended putting green.  It is heavy physical work but it was well worth it in the end.  We want to add a better putting green in the yard, mostly for Lukey, but we also needed grass in the area in front of our trash shed at the front end of the property.  The logical answer was to remove the unneeded grass where we are making the putting green and lay it down in front of the trash shed.  I did the removing of sod while Sheila did all the laying of sod.  That worked out well.  Considering how this affected my health, it would have taken me days to accomplish this on my own.   Digging out the grass is tough work even if there are no complications.  Making this project even more difficult

I am now two weeks into this mild TBI...   two weeks ago I slammed the top of my head into a temporary cross-beam on a trash shed I am building, saw stars, passed out very briefly...  and I am now feeling a bit better than early after the injury.  I really haven't done much of anything over the past two weeks though.   Whenever I attempt to do anything, my headaches grow increasingly worse, sometimes throbbing, and behind my right ear begins to hurt.  I've been good about stopping whatever I'm attempting to do whenever the pain comes back or worsens.  Yesterday, I was feeling pretty good and the weather was dry.  It was hot and humid, but dry.  I knew the lawn needed some attention so I figured I would do that slowly.  Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I had my woodworking shop set up in the yard and I was finally doing some work on the trash shed again.  The heat and humidity was really affecting my mast cell disease which is my primary illness and m

After turning over the ground in the front flowerbed... I had a good day of health yesterday and it was beautiful outside so we spent the day out in the yard doing our first day of landscaping for this year.  As I've written many times before, it is a rarity when my health cooperates with the weather... good health coinciding with good weather... so, after two weeks of pretty lousy health, it felt awesome to be doing something physical and being productive for a change! We cleaned up the flowerbeds... I turned the ground over... weeded out clumps of weeds... raked... weeded again... leveled... added wildflower seeds... lightly raked again to cover most of the seeds... while Sheila pulled weeds and rearranged plantings in another flowerbed.  One of the flowerbeds, weeded and seeded... I got the weedwhacker running and knocked down some of the longer grass where the mower can't access... I also got the lawnmower running and cut the lawn.  The yard is looking much

I had another productive morning today which puts me on a pretty unusual streak. The weather is about to get lousy for a little bit so I can take a short break until it clears up since I have no room indoors to be cutting big pieces of lumber.  A piece of pine spread across the two foundation pilings... stone pathway is now extended to this new window alcove too. This morning I went outside with the intention of backfilling the dug out foundation and then quickly moving on to some carpentry indoors. Backfilling was done in a matter of minutes so I continued grading the area... then decided to continue with hard landscaping around the area. I expanded our stone pathway to where this new window alcove will be located. Then I placed some sod strips alongside the new stone... cleaned up the adjacent flower beds... did a little bit of raking... and now it is looking nice and clean out there. The two foundation pilings are slightly low (on purpose). I'll rest the outside end of

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