A Gardening Public Service Announcement

Pyracantha is the worst.  I'm not kidding - it's THE worst.

Evil spines of death.

If you ever see Pyracantha in a nursery, run away.  Unless of course, you enjoy being a human pincushion any time you come near this shrub.  Or you live in a rough neighborhood and are looking for an alternative to bars on the windows - just plant one of these under your windows.  Nobody will ever rob you.

Satan's needle bush.

For us, this shrub was planted just outside our gate.  The perfect place for it to prick us with its terrible thorns as much as possible.  On top of that, it had been planted too close to the house, so it had to go.

It didn't go without a fight.  It fought us all afternoon - and we both have a plethora of puncture wounds to prove it.  But in the end, we won.

The stump is about to meet its match - J with a mattock.

And the only remains are in seven of these ten bags of yard waste.

Sweet victory!  J + A - 1; Pyracantha - 0

The other three bags are another bush we removed that was planted WAY too close to the house.

Pulling up one of the roots.

In fact, one of the roots ran many feet along the side of our house.

Time for some Grubby's Roasted Root Stew!

And thanks to J's chainsaw and mattock - no more stump!

Sort of looks like a human heart, right?!

Not a bad day of yard work.

I Can't Believe It's Not Daddy Butter

Remember the guys who did the shopping prank at Target?

Well, they're back - this time they went to Kmart.

Warning: Put down your water glass now.  Otherwise, you will spill it and/or snort water all over your computer.

I missed these guys.

Photo Phriday

It's time to share some recent photos I've taken with my phone.

This license plate cracked me up.

As I was taking this photo J said, "I'll bet he really hates when people take pictures of his license plate."  He's probably right.  Luckily, we didn't get run off the road.

My co-worker brought "stuffed olives" to share at the office.

They were actually white chocolate covered almonds.  Talk about surprising your taste buds!

I got this necklace at a thrift store.

Best $2 I've spent in a long time.

I'm trying to decide whether getting one of these for the garage door would be a good idea.

I think it could look cute, but making a bunch of holes in the garage door really scares me.

Happy Phriday, everyone!

The Hubs

Sorry men of the world, but you'll have to try harder to keep up with my husband.

Not only did he spend the weekend re-landscaping the front of our house,

I came home from a long evening meeting at work to find that he had:

• vacuumed the living room, office, and laundry room
• washed all of the dishes
• cleaned the shower and shower caddy, and
• re-sealed the grout in the laundry room and entry way

My husband rocks.

Curb Appeal

A little landscape math...

4 days of yard work

+ 1 trip to the nursery

+ 2 trips to Lowe's

- 8 full yard waste bags

+ 22 bags of mulch

= curb appeal!

Before - check out the overgrown ground cover and weeds behind us.

Before- everything cleared out of the bed.

After - two hollies and a cherry laurel.

Before - side view.

After - side view.

The plants are small now, but we're looking forward to watching them grow and fill the space.

Fall Plant Remix

It's fall!  We spent the day sprucing up the porch and preparing our front flowerbed for new plants.

It was out with the old and in with the new.  Gone are the spring petunias and basil.  We now have fall pansies and mums!

We've FINALLY gotten the front flowerbed cleared out.  It was full of old, overgrown juniper and a bunch of weeds... not exactly a project we've been looking forward to completing, especially in the summer heat.

But J was a beast at ripping out roots with his mattock, which is especially impressive since he just had his wisdom teeth removed TWO days ago.  He should be the poster child for his oral surgeon.

The fun part of the process was picking out the new plants at the nursery.  We chose blue girl hollies to flank the outside of each window and a dwarf cherry laurel for underneath (sort of between) the front windows.

Look for another update soon with the finished product!

Wisdom Tooth Recovery

Hopefully I won't get in trouble for posting these photos (this is a blatant HIPAA violation), but they were too funny to keep to myself.

Day 1 of wisdom tooth extraction recovery:

Day 2 of wisdom tooth extraction recovery:

Farewell, Wisdom

J lost the rest of his wisdom this morning.

Wisdom teeth, that is - the last two of them.  He had the first two removed years ago.

Since teeth are apparently medical waste, he wasn't able to keep them.  But here's a police sketch of what they looked like:

Due to the aforementioned medical waste regulations, no visit from the tooth fairy will occur tonight.  Which might be a good thing if he looks like this:

I think the following items are things that J will hate after today:

1. gauze (I had to make a trip back to the oral surgeon to get more)

2. tea bags (drinking tea = tasty; biting on tea bags to stop bleeding = not tasty)

3. slim fast (a good supplement to food, but not a good replacement for food)

Here's hoping he feels better tomorrow.

Christmas in September

It's September 19th...

... seriously, Kohl's?!?!

Tuesday Things

It's been a stormy sort of day.

I've been on the lookout for animals traveling in groups of two, just to make sure I'm not missing something.

Tastily unrelated, here is the cupcake table at the event I coordinated last weekend.

As if seeing the cupcakes didn't make you drool, here are the flavors:

• vanilla with cinnamon frosting
• chocolate with cookie dough frosting
• vanilla with lemon filling and lemon frosting
• chocolate with vanilla frosting
• vanilla with vanilla frosting

I wish I could take credit, but these were baked by one of our volunteers.  She happens to have her own cake and cupcake company, which is good - otherwise, I would have suggested that she start one!

Photo Extravaganza

Some real photos from our church's block party (as opposed to photos taken with my phone).

I Survived...

...coordinating our church block party.

The key to surviving this event is making sure there's plenty of fun to go around.

Fun Thing #1: 65-foot inflatable obstacle course

That's right, I beat J while racing him on this obstacle course.  He claims that the person ahead of him had just come out of the dunk tank and caused him to slip.  A likely story.

I think I had the most fun while watching adults attempt to make it through the course (and laugh at each other):

Fun Thing #2: Bounce House

Here's the bounce house police officer in action:

"No shoes!  No horseplay!  No jumping on the little kids!"

Fun Thing #3: Dunk Tank

We dunked our new youth director as his official welcome to the church.  Or perhaps to see whether we'll scare him away any time soon.

Other Fun Things: Cotton Candy, Sno-Cones, Popcorn, Spin Art, Clowns, DJ, and a ton of food (it's a church event after all).

It was a fun day, but I'm glad it's over!

A Very Sporting Birthday

My birthday gifts from J were delivered today, so I got to open them early!

Since the pool we use is finally done with summer renovations, he got me a racing swimsuit.  It's a little more lap-swimming appropriate than bikinis are.  I learned this while watching the summer Olympics.  I mean, this isn't beach volleyball, people!

He also got me a racquet for racquetball.  I've now sustained my first injury, so I think that means I'm a legitimate competitor.

It's hard to take a self-portrait of your forearm, but you get the idea.

(I'm not going to mention the fact that I might have hit J three times during this match - there's no need to bring that up).

Virginia Beach

We spent the holiday weekend at Virginia Beach with our friends C, C, and I.  Here we are on the beach boardwalk with I:

More specifically, our beach club was on Chesapeake Bay.  Although our cottage wasn't on the beach, we could see the water from our balcony.  To get to the beach, we walked along a boardwalk:

The beach club was very small, but it had a lifeguard on duty and offered rentals such as chairs and umbrellas, kayaks, jet skis, etc:

It was overcast most of our stay (which is great for us since we're so white), but I was still able to get some beautiful photos of the sunset:

And the clouds offered some interesting photos as well:

What a great way to spend our long weekend!