Aww Crap!

Even if I don't post every day or week, I am thinking about what I would be blogging about, if I were blogging. Last weeks title was going to be "Aww Crap!" because that is just the kind of week I had (well, it definitely could've been worse, but I had these moments. . .)

Last Sat & Sun was when we looked at the cattle for Joe & Lisa (friends from SD ~ Chris' hometown). Here's a shot of a few of them ~ they already delivered the first load of them Thursday or Friday last week!

Here is a shot of the t-shirts I made for Steph ~ he friend and her friend's sister both have boys that were turning one and they were having a combined party! How cute do you think they looked in these???

Last Sunday I colored my hair and while that was going on, I decided to wax my eyebrows quick. Don't ever do that quick. . .
Here is a shot of the "medium brown" color ~ turned out more like BLACK!!!

AND here is how my eyebrow turned out (I had to do the other side deliberately so they kind of matched!). I was trying to reuse one of the jean strips (my "wax" is actually sugar and they reuse strips of jean material) and the part I'd used previously, went (and stuck) right through the middle of my eyebrow! I had a little hair on the outside of my eye. . . They are getting better, but it was definitely an AW CRAP! moment!!

My other Aw Crap! moment was when the reminder popped up on my computer that Bray had an ortho appt Thursday morning ~ 15 MINUTES BEFORE THE APPT!!! I brushed my teeth, ran my fingers through my hair and flew out the door! I called the school on the way and they were going to have Bray ready. Well, she called when I was about 2 blocks from the school to say his class was taking the state testing, so I couldn't pick him up! I rescheduled his 9 am appt at 9:00 and found out this weekend that he has more testing for when I rescheduled it! Geez, I just can't win. . .

Oh, here's another one from last week ~ my cell phone quit. This was while Chris was gone, I had to watch Josey, Taite's friend had called from Byron (we missed the call on our home ph, and then didn't have a way to call him back since we don't have long distance on our home phone!), etc. I tried to get my phone fixed the next day, but didn't have the password when I was at the phone place and couldn't get a hold of Chris so ended up doing it over the phone, so have to wait for the replacement to be shipped, etc. etc. Good thing it was under warranty, however the phone wasn't bad anyway ~ just the battery and had to run to a Verizon store for that anyway!

So, we are onto our weekend (this weekend) which went well! Yeah for us! hehe

I've been dying to "dig" into something ~ literally! I staked out where I want our fire pit. We put the fire ring in the area, used some block (will circle the fire ring) and set up a chair to give us an idea of how big we want it. We are putting in it a little low spot and will dig it out, so it's level, will use our retaining wall block to build a wall along the back side and will plant some bushes/plants along the back-side to help block the wind even more. Here is the circle I marked out with flags.

Here's a shot of where it will be in relation to the house. The closest tree you can see there is a cottonwood and it will be huge, but I figure it will take awhile and we will be safe with it that far away and it won't effect our fires :D

This is a shot of the tree that I've had to replace the last 2 years (they had warranties) because it didn't make it through the winter. I thought for sure it didn't again this year because my mom's similar tree is just full of green leaves ~ this one has a bunch of little buds! I'll take them! YEAH!!

This was one of my favorite little trees because it has roses that would bloom many times during the summer ~ lots of little pink blossoms. This sits right where all the snow was piled up this winter, so if I buy a replacement (no warranty as this one has been here for a few years) it will have to go in back and away from piled up snow (this had sidewalk, driveway and garage apron snow on it's pile!) RIP ~ I will miss you little tree!! The pink flowers always made me smile. . .

Here is another picture of the tree that survived! The rock it sits next to, we are thinking of having "The Heinz family" sandblasted onto it. The guy who does that has been meaning to get to our place since last fall, so we'll see if it actually gets done. He's turkey hunting now, so he said it will be awhile.

Here is a "before" picture of the back of our garage. I would like to move the cement (or add to it and re-coat it, so it all looks like one piece) so we have a patio that extends to the edge of the house. The little burning bush would be moved to behind the fire pit (appropriate ~ don't you think??)

Another "before" ~ we need to take out that one bush you see because I hate it and do something better with the slope of the hill right there.

A closer view and you can kind of see the plants (or lack of) under the deck. I'm not sure what to put there, but it needs to be redone as well.

This is the one retaining wall we are leaving as-is. It's still straight and looks great!

As you can see, we need to get some grass growing here (or the plan is to do all plants around here, so it's just a walking path from the lower patio door). In the little bush on the left, there is a little bird with a nest in there and I'm sure she about had a heart attack yesterday as the boys were sitting in the grass right by it most of the afternoon!

Here are some of the rocks we've picked up out of dad's field by our house! Well, not the big one on the left, that one came out of the field or terrace or something, but judging by the weeds around it, we obviously didn't pick it up yesterday!

This is the little patio and retaining wall that need to go. We never use this patio and the retaining wall needs to be back farther and non-tipping.

This is another retaining wall we are taking out and the block will be re-used for the fire pit area. The flowering crab is staying, so we have to be careful when working on this side of the house.

Here is the circle for the "pit" after Chris tried out his box blade he's thinking of buying. We were both impressed with the perfect circle it made! (you can see the dog in the lower right corner ~ she absolutely LOVES being outside with everyone! On Sat, I aerated the lawn and she ran back and forth, up and down the hill the whole time I was on the lawnmower!)

Here is the "during" picture from the west side of the house. Our retaining wall is out, we were going to just slope the whole side of the house and that turned into cutting out some dirt (or rather clay and sand) and using the field stone to build a bigger retaining wall and kind of terrace look.

Most of what you see was just dumped there. We are going to use pea rock to fill in the flat parts because we want to be able to add plants, shrubs, etc. later. We ran out of plastic so that's where we stopped. Note the tree is still standing! We really want to keep this one because it's got a will to live ~ when we bought it, it cost $4 at the greenhouse because it was in bad shape and a few years ago when we had the house re-sided, they broke it off and here it is today ~ doing just fine! It has lots of flowers on it, though you can't really see them in the picture!