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

I did some mower blade sharpening and balancing this morning.  That little bit of activity started another coughing bout which helped to clear out my lungs a bit so I guess that is a good outcome.   This illness/virus just won't go away though.  My O2 level is at 94% now which is not great but better than it has been.  I've been as low as the mid-80s.  So, I suppose I am improving...  slowly...  very slowly.  I suspect that the low oxygen intake is adding to my usual overwhelming fatigue.  Anyway, I did a little bit of very light work in the yard this morning. Oh yeah...  before I did the blade sharpening, I also sheared a bush in the yard that was far too shaggy.  Shaggy, sloppy landscaping drives me crazy.  There is rarely a good excuse for it so I hate seeing it.  Shaggy, sloppy landscaping is more often due to laziness and I hate laziness and procrastination as well.   The most strenuous part of cleaning up that one tall bush in our yard was pulling out a step ladder and c

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

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

The past week has been quite lousy as far as my health goes... and, as a result, I've accomplished almost nothing this week. This morning, however, was finally a productive morning! I can't begin to explain how good that feels! First, I did some weed-whacking... then mowed the lawn. The weather is considerably cooler this morning so I managed to mow the lawn and be able to breath. Usually, I am struggling to breath when I cut the lawn... weak... close to losing consciousness... my health crashing... I finished with the lawn by 9:30 am and still felt pretty good, relatively speaking. The sign of a good, clean caulking job... a nice wide bead yet it is invisible! Since it was only 9:30 am and I was still feeling fairly well, I decided to get some work accomplished in Adam's old bedroom. It still needs another coat of paint... two colors... but I decided to tackle something I've been putting off doing. The windows needed to be re-caulked.  Before I could re-caul

I've been really busy with adding a small half bath to the house lately. Unfortunately, I still have my regular bouts with quite lousy health too. The combination of these two things leaves little time nor energy to get anything else accomplished around the house. One thing I've let go over the past couple of weeks is the lawn. I had some really crappy health yesterday which kept me very close to the bathroom all day so that means it was very difficult to have a productive day. Even on a relatively "good" day, I am only capable of a couple of hours of work at about half speed, at best. On fairly lousy days, I'm lucky if I can clean myself and cook for myself so simple household chores get put on hold quite regularly because of my health. On miserable days, I can do nothing and just walking to and from the bathroom requires more energy than I have to spare. This morning I felt halfway decent and the weather was nice and cool (my health crashes rather quickl

Back a couple of years ago, we bought a fairly nice lawnmower. It was definitely more mower than we needed for our lawn but I didn't want to buy something that would be a pile of junk within a couple of years. Adam started using it to cut a neighbor's lawn in addition to cutting our lawn when I wasn't feeling up to it. This was all fine and dandy until some carelessness entered the picture... I kept harping on Adam to make sure the oil level is good since this is a four-cycle engine and, as such, oil was needed in a separate reservoir to keep the engine lubed. If the oil level gets low, the engine will seize up. Well... long story short... at some point between the two lawns Adam was cutting, the engine seized up.  I finished out that season cutting our entire lawn with a weed-whacker each week... fun times.  The following season I looked into buying a new engine... the cost of a new engine would cost more than a new lawnmower! That brought us again to the task of loo