I'm watching something on History International about Rome. The Sopranos is on in an hour. I should make dinner.

Heavy breakfast ham eggs cheese plus hash browns and off to Mass. Went to a friends house to see the new baby (absolutely perfect little girl) went mountain biking in some new territory with him very good riding and my rear wheel held up despite a broken spoke. Chilled over a Bass Ale in his new timber frame barn. Went home inhaled a bowl of cereal helped Pete with the yard work until she took a rode ride. Played ball with the youts and Grampie. Chowed on what we could find -sliced chicken with adobo sauce and lemon with guacomole and cheese in a corn tortilla and fresh asparagus right from the garden. Downloaded some Miles Davis and some Smithereens now what to sip while we listen?...

grumble this is griff not pete oi ve maria

we went for a nice ride in the am, got coffee, some vegetables plants for our new garden, and such. came home, jinx started on the garden, and I hung a new screen door for the back door.

here's the garden:

then we sat out back on our adirondakish bench/table/chair and chilled out with some mike's hard lemonade.

here's the view from my chair:

and this:

bunyip approves of the new screen door

and i thought it was going to be a boring day. NOT!!!!

My husband and I worked pretty hard and made some progress on the house today ("the house" being representative of all our many many projects to fix up this place.)

Filled four more bags of branches... wait, back up. When we bought the place, the previous owners had installed an aboveground pool, built this very cramped deck around it with a full height fence, planted a ton of shrubby tree things in the rest of the yard and then proceeded with the ever-popular "out of sight, out of mind" philosophy for the next 10 years or so. So when we bought it, we removed the fence around the deck (removing/rebuilding the rest of the deck probably won't happen until next fall), thus exposing the jungle the rest of the yard had become. We cut down a grand total of twelve treebush things (and left three still standing.) The pile of branches was probably around 15 feet by 10 feet, at least 6 feet tall. So now, day by day, we cut a few more into manageable pieces and cram them into lawn refuse bags so the garbage men will take them away.

Since that's backbreaking work though, and the temperatures are already in the upper 80s here, we alternated the yard work with installing the last pieces of laminate flooring in the kitchen and some small painting projects.

Now he's playing Final Fantasy X-2 and I'm feeling all that sweat dry into cakey nastiness as I briefly peruse the internet before taking a shower.

It sounds like you all had a more relaxing day than I did, but I feel pretty happy about our productivity.

I would rather feel tired and productive rather than tired and futile.

Hell yeah! I'll admit I'm pretty manic, though, when it comes to being productive. I'm one of those people who doesn't know how to relax. Fortunately I have tasks lined up for months to come, so I'm in no danger of finding myself with nothing to do.

I asked you not to tell them about that.;)

Why don't you rent a chipper for a day and turn it all into mulch. Free mulch and it keeps it out of the trash stream.:)

Why don't you rent a chipper for a day and turn it all into mulch. Free mulch and it keeps it out of the trash stream.

We thought about that, but it'd cost around $200 to get a wood chipper out to our house, and we can't really afford it right now. Lawn refuse bags are a mere $0.50 each. :) The good news is, it's not going into the landfills--the special paper bags are separate, and get mulched by the city. They then sell this "Dillo Dirt" back to people for their gardens. :)

i see a $ making oportunity here!

I came home at 4am after a hot dancing night, made some omlettes and went to bed at 5am. Slept till 12h30 and worked in the garden. Very nice weather and the neighbours invited me to have a little bbq till 16h. Packed my bag and took the train back to Brussels, talked the whole time with a beautiful young lady (but was to shy to ask her phone number). Back at the academy, shaved my hair and went to bed...