Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e always have our first barbeque of the season on the weekend that falls around July 1st which happens to be my birthday.  This year, we had this barbeque on July 1st.  If anyone is wondering, I turned 61 years old this year.  Unfortunately, most days, I feel like I'm 81 and I have difficulty and a lot of pain trying to get around and I even look the part due to being hunched over and having difficulty standing.  Contrary to how I feel on these days, my birth certificate claims I am 61 years old this year.   We had a very dry spring to the point where everything in the yard was dying and turning brown but the past two weeks were filled with day after day of solid rain until the day before our scheduled barbeque.  The rain stopped just in time for me to mow the lawn, do some much needed landscaping and set up the backyard for our barbeque.  It was sunny, hot and humid with a bit of smoke from Canadian wildfires hanging in the air.  My health didn't fare so well and I ended up

L ukey and Kenzie arrived yesterday to stay with us for a couple of weeks.  It was a nice first day with them and they were greeted with a nice surprise when they arrived...  waiting in the yard were two new bicycles!  They had outgrown their old bicycles so Gee and Papa purchased two size-appropriate bicycles.  Needless to say, they were pretty excited so this was their first activity of the day.  Actually, they did a lot of riding... Kenzie arrived at the house wearing sandals but she changed into sneakers immediately so she could ride her new bike... While I was waiting for Lukey and Kenzie to make a lap past our house, I decided to shoot a photo of the house... I think Lukey was a bit torn between riding his new bike and playing golf.  After some initial bike riding, Lukey and I spent a lot of time pitching with a wedge onto the green and then putting on the green.  Lukey even got a hole-in-one once! After a short while, I realized that we needed to do some groundskeeping so I pull

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.

I t has been about two weeks since I seeded the new putting green in our backyard.  The grass is coming up nicely but it is a slow and almost painful process watching new grass grow while hoping it would finally be mature enough to do some pitching and putting.   I've been watering all the new grass around the property every morning and every evening so I'm really not just sitting around waiting for the grass to grow.  I have a bajillion other springtime projects that are keeping me busy when my health allows too.  Waiting for this new grass to grow does seem like an awful lot of waiting though.   In the first photo, above right, we are looking at the putting green from our backyard.  The grassy field beyond the putting green in this photo is our neighbor's yard.  The putting green is in the farthest back part of our yard.  The photo below, at bottom, is looking at the putting green from the new area that I cleared out and also seeded.  This will be an area for pitching ont

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