End of Hibernation Creations

It was 60 degrees yesterday! There's still some patches of snow in the shadows, but mostly it's all melted.

You know what THAT means, especially those you you with dogs.

MUD. And lots of it.

For those of you who have been around for awhile, you remember that we had to have a portion of our yard, right near the back door, dug up last year because our main sewer line got backed up, and the pipe people originally thought it was out in the yard (it turned out to be just the pipe trap thing in the foundation), so they yanked out a shrub, tore up the grass, and dug all around. Needless to say, it never grew back, and it's been more and more muddy there ever since. No more, baby! I decided to take advantage of the pre-rainy season nice weather and fix it up with a little wall and some mulch:


Not bad, huh? It took about three and a half hours, plus the hour or so I spent on Saturday putting down the weed block fabric, three trips to Lowes for the blocks and 17 bags of mulch, and around $200. I hadn't been planning on doing it this weekend, but I was there cleaning the poop, which was finally all uncovered and was REALLY GROSS, and the whole time I could hear the dogs running through the mud, playing in the mud, digging in the mud, and I couldn't STAND it anymore! We're trapped at home, anyway, until DH is up to going out, so that was my project. I figure, now maybe Delilah will dig in the mulch, which I made about eight inches thick on purpose in the hopes that she'll get interested in that rather than the grass. Actually, I'm thinking of replacing the grass with pea gravel in their yard, which is separate from the one the kids play in, but that would be a HUGE project, so I'm going to spend this year really pampering the grass in their yard and see where it gets me. If it's still really sparse, maybe the year after when I'm (hopefully) working again and we have more money I can hire someone to do it for me.

When I've been inside, I've been fooling with my beads again, and came up with these:


(Actually, I made the green one a couple of weeks ago, but who's counting?)

I get a lot of compliments on the green one, which is a lot prettier in person because the beads have a more opaque look to them than you can really see in the photo. The pink one was the hardest necklace I've made yet because the large flowered silver rings don't have holes in them, so I had to figure out how to get them on so they would frame the pink and stay in place. I basically ended up making two necklaces and weaving them together, and I really like how it came out.

One final update on the guest-boy situation; I caught his mother in a lie. She knew he was sick, and THAT'S why she called last-minute, needing somewhere for him to stay. My friend, Kristi, was volunteering in his class that day because her twins are in there as well, and she said that he was so sick at school that, when his teacher told him he could sit in the beanbag chair for a minute, he fell asleep and stayed there. So, the whole thing about being afraid to lose him was a lie; she *couldn't * bring him to the wrestling match because he was sick, and I'm pretty sure she told him not to say that he didn't feel well, because when I asked him if he was coughing, he kind of freaked and said, 'I'm not sick!!!', when that wasn't what I had asked. We were able to bring him home before church rather than afterwards, but no one met him at the door. His mother had called and said that we could drop him off, that she was calling his father to make sure he was up, but I don't think he was - I'll bet he had unlocked the door and just gone back to bed. No one came to the car to say, 'hey, thanks for watching him on such short notice', or 'we'll send Patrick's clothes back to you' (he wore Pat's clothes all weekend because he had only brought underwear and one pair of pants in his grocery bag), or 'hey, son, glad you're home' - nothing. :(