New landscaping (and a tiny John Deere)

So last Saturday, Metro Greenery brought the whole crew out and installed our new 'feature,' as well as two pallets of sod. Jackie Simpson, the owner, was extremely helpful in keeping the cost down while still improving our curb appeal. If you compare these photos to the ones after the storm, you'll see what a big improvement it is!

We decided we really have to have one more pallet of sod. It'll come next week.

And the new plants and grass mean that we have to water. And water. Twice a day for a few weeks, which just kills me, but not as much as paying for all this then letting it die. So we water. We have a sprinkler irrigation system that we haven't used, literally, since we bought the house in 1996. Surprise! It doesn't work!

Metro Greenery didn't have time to investigate, so I got in touch with Aaron Weldon of Well Done Landscaping (which I think is such a great name). I know him from a networking group. He came out himself, then brought his expert by, and they both declared our system to be beyond rescue. I had explained our situation (Rich got laid off, fixing up the house in case we have to sell, can't spend too much) and reiterated that we just couldn't afford to have a new system installed. Aaron suggested we get a traveling sprinkler as our best low-cost solution. I had never even heard of them before, but he explained that you lay out the hose in the area you want watered, and this sprinkler follows it, watering as it goes. Aaron not only pointed us toward the solution we needed, he also very graciously didn't charge anything to come out — twice. Very nice guy, and if we end up staying in this house (I hope!), we'll definitely be calling him to install a new system. Thanks again, Aaron!

So anyway, we got the sprinkler. Lowe's carries the John Deere brand version of it. So we have a tiny little John Deere, and it's the gosh darn cutest thing you've ever seen!

I still have to go out and deal with it (laying out the hose) twice a day for a while, but it's much easier (and the sprinkler is nice and low, i.e., more efficient) than a regular sprinkler. And, really, it's so cute!

The kind of thing old married people laugh at

Rich had a stress test this afternoon (his results were great, thanks for asking), and he had to fill out all the usual forms at the doctor's office. Along with other questions about medical history and conditions, there was a question about oral contraceptives. We speculated whether or not "oral contraceptives" would include him saying something so annoying to me that he got himself cut off.

We found that pretty funny.

A new yard tomorrow

We're having some more landscaping done (that's in addition to the azaleas and podocarpus we had put in a few months ago). Metro Greenery will be installing some sod and a "feature" in our barren wasteland of a front yard. I wonder if they'll pick up all the branches, too....

I guess the debris in the pool is still up to me, though. I'm betting that the temperature today, and not having an influx of cold rainwater, will warm up the water enough so that I can get in and fish out all the branches. Maybe with Seabreeze in hand. That'll move the process along. (Can you tell I'm ready for the weekend?)

We had a little wind and rain

Our front yard

Down the street

By Sprouts

Now their wi-fi connection isn't working...

...So I couldn't blog at Central Market at all! (And you'll notice I finally got rid of the "I Have..." title thing. Oh well.)

So I'm back in my office, trying to keep from being too bummed. Rich hasn't been out of work for long (he's actually still officially on the payroll for another three weeks), but is quickly sinking into...something. Not depression, exactly, because he seems pretty much okay. A little stressed, but not too bad. But I'm having to persuade him to shower, which is not good. And AmEx sent me an email saying they've lowered the credit limit on my business card, and I don't know why. Not that I need it to be really high, usually, but that's probably just an indication of my credit, and that also isn't good. Everything we talked about at Not-Net-Net this morning was depressing. Debbie's father's Alzheimer's. Property taxes and mortgages, and how the inflated home values in Tarrant County probably won't come back down to real-life levels for a couple of years. Losing business, the depressed real estate market. How it sucks being an adult.

So now I'm working on being determined and moving forward instead of deciding that it's five o'clock somewhere and Happy Hour is starting now.

I'll let you know how that goes.

I have a little Ubuntu and a big afghan

Well, this Wednesday's post is even later than usual. I have early Wednesday mornings set aside for blogging (in a time slot that used to be a networking group but is now only a social get-together-for-breakfast-if-anybody-shows-up thing), and I take my little Dell 9" Inspiron to Central Market Cafe to do it. But in one of the endless, relentless stream of updates for Ubuntu (look it up), I think I wasn't paying attention and something got messed up. My Gnome menu bar was gone, and when I managed to get it back, selecting "Quit" to restart the machine made it disappear again. So I'm wrestling with it now. I'm sure I'll get it running again, but who knows how long it'll take. And what it'll do to my blood pressure in the meantime.

So anyway...I'm spending most of my knitting time lately on Holly's afghan. Holly is my sister's husband's brother's wife. My sister-in-law-in-law. A while back she decided to learn to knit by making an afghan. Note: Your very first knitting project should probably be something like, oh, a scarf. Not only flat and easy to handle, but small. Do-able in some reasonable amount of time. Unlike an afghan, which is acres and acres, and takes for freakin' ever to finish. Holly bought the yarn and got advice on a simple pattern from the fine people at the Yarn Barn in San Antonio. She worked stalwartly and finished about a foot (that's a lot on an afghan). Unfortunately, though, there were some problems and rather than being basically rectangular shaped it was, at best, a parallelogram. Bordering on "L" shaped. So she took it back to the Yarn Barn, they frogged it for her with their ball winder, and gave her a different simple pattern. She worked on that for a while, then realized she was sick of the whole thing.

Enter yours truly. We went to S.A. for a visit, and she said she had some yarn for me. She was giving up on the afghan, and asked if I wanted the yarn. Cool; sure. I went to pick it up and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law) said, "You're just giving her the yarn? I thought you were going to get her to knit it for us." Ah-ha. I might have said no, but at that point Holly was starting the testing in preparation for a lung transplant. Seriously, how can you deny someone facing a lung transplant their own fuzzy warm afghan?

So I'm knitting an afghan. And knitting. And knitting. And knitting. It's a simple basketweave pattern, 20 stitches wide. It doesn't take much thought so it's easy to work on while I'm watching TV. It's very large, though, so progress is sloooow. I've set a quota of five rows a day, which will allow me to complete a row of squares in about five days, so the whole thing should only take...about two months.

A scarf. Seriously, start with a scarf.

I have to allow more time!

Really, I have to start allowing more time for blogging. Net-Net isn't quite as dead as I thought, so when I show up at Central Market on Wednesday mornings there are actually people there to talk to and interact with. So I end up not starting writing until later than I've planned.

So today we're in the middle of an eventful week. On Friday, the Southlake Chamber morning Leads group will have its first guest speaker (arranged by yours truly). Charles Brown (www.dynamic-copyrwriting.net) will talk to us about using social networking sites for business. As a big FaceBook/Twitter fan, I'm looking forward to it. I also hope it goes well because this is our first guest speaker, and my co-facilitator and I have a bunch more arranged. If this event is a dud, it's going to be tough to convince people to speak at future ones. So I'll be a little tense 'til it's over and people are standing and cheering. Or at least looking pleased and well informed.

And the Chamber directory is finally, finally, FINALLY going to print on Friday, or that's the plan. There have been so many delays, I'm not going to count those chickens until they're walking around making peeping noises.

And most significantly of all, Rich's last day in the office is this week. Or the last day he can go into the office. After Thursday, he'll have to be escorted through the building like anybody else off the street. Though he and all his employees are still on the payroll for another month, he goes to the office tomorrow to be processed out. And starting Friday morning, he won't have anyplace he needs to go. So far he's been pretty positive about the whole thing. I know he'll find something else; I just hope he doesn't get discouraged by the search.

We're planning to go see the new Star Trek movie on Friday. That'll be a good finish to a pretty intense week. Wish us luck!