Oh, right. The yard.

So much activity this past weekend! Busy weekends are good. Tiring, but good. And I'm sure you're dying to know what we did.

Saturday was yard day. My mother came up to help us with yard chores and also to act as our ride back from the car dealer (we got the car a service level three package, which meant that it had to be there for something like three hours, and because it's our only car and we didn't want to sit in the dealer for three hours waiting for it we got my mom to be our taxi). It was a good thing that my mom came up to help - we got all the planned yard chores done in no time, and we even did some that weren't planned, like work on the gutters a little and also take down the dead rose bush. I give my mother all the credit for convincing Doug to allow us to cut that down. I understand Doug's hesitation; when we moved in the rose bush was in full bloom, healthy, with tons of flowers. However, as the season wore on, the bush looked a little worse for wear, and then this year it became overgrown, diseased, and a general mess. There would be no way for us to really revive it, and it's not like we have the time or energy to maintain a rose bush (which takes a lot of skill to maintain, and we can't even remember to water the hardy mums in our window boxes). Anyway, on Saturday everyone finally came to the same conclusion that it made sense to cut down the rose bush and to think about planting something more user-friendly in its place. My mother was so excited to cut it down: And while there is a bare spot where the bush once was the side of the house looks so much better - cleaner, less cluttered. More manageable. If only we could cut down most of the trees and raze the front gardens! How I'd love to just start over with a clean slate.

Because one thing that is not clean is our yard. We have so many trees on our western property line it is not funny. Really. I know there are more, but from memory I can count six big, tall trees. Maples? Oaks? Not sure, but they are extremely tall and have too many leaves. All they do is breed spiders and keep the yard and house moist, and if I had my way we'd be cutting quite a few down. Again, thank you to my mom - and also to our lovely neighbor whose yard many of the branches from these giant trees hang over - for convincing Doug to get someone in to look at the trees and determine which ones should be trimmed back. This will greatly reduce the number of spiders and other disgusting creepy-crawlies that are all over the place, and also maybe brighten up the back yard to make the patio more appealing for outdoor furniture. But most importantly - fewer leaves! Me, my mother, and Doug were raking machines on Saturday, filling a total of twenty-two leaf bags (reduced from last year's twenty-five, but we'll still have plenty more to rake since several of our trees have leaves that haven't even turned color yet). Doug and my mom had a great system - we would all rake a pile and then Doug would hold the bag as my mother scooped the leaves into the leaf bag.We really were able to zip through the raking, finishing the whole yard in about two hours.

But, because we were on such a roll, Doug decided that he wanted to clean the gutters, so he borrowed our neighbor's ladder and set about pulling all the debris out of the gutters. He even managed to get himself onto the roof but this wasn't a great angle from which to clean the gutters so quickly got down. The neighbor children asked Doug while he was on the roof if he was afraid of heights, to which he replied no, but I'm not aware of anyone who really likes to be on roofs. People just aren't made to be that high off the ground. Much more appealing is being a few steps up on a ladder, like my mother was when she was helping us reconnect one of our gutters to our house. Look at my mom - banging nails into the side of our house like a master carpenter! My mother never ceases to amaze me with her handiness. She paints, wallpapers, does minor electrical work, carpentry... you name it, she does it. They don't make them like her anymore, do they. I sure didn't get her handiness genes, though I prefer to think that they just haven't fully developed yet.

And, not only did my mother do all of this handy work, she also cooked us a fabulous dinner that night, complete with a homemade pumpkin pie for dessert. Look what would have happened had I made the dinner and dessert - a recent creation of mine that somehow went majorly wrong. The blondies looked done on the outside, but were just as raw on the inside after thirty minutes of cooking as they were when I put them in. And I'd been doing so well! Next time I'll channel my mother when attempting something in the kitchen. Hopefully this will do the trick.