My Labor Day Weekend

As soon as C left to go to New Jersey for an undetermined amount of time (I'm thinking he may be home by Thanksgiving) I felt like my social life went down the tubes.   Originally we were going to go camping in Wisconsin this past labor day, but a $300 plane ticket is pretty expensive just to go camping.  So we cancelled and I was left at home with no plans.  Since my house is under construction, and has been since June 6th, I've been living with my dog in my parents house.  I should have moved into my house 3 weeks ago (I hate village inspectors), and I had reserved most of my fall weekends for getting the house livable and doing projects.  Since I am not living in the house my weekends are WIDE open. Which is another way of saying I'm spending a lot of Friday's at home.  Normally when I decide I want to stay at home on Friday and watch movies its not lame, however if I were to tell you I am staying at home on Friday with my dog and watching movies with my parents the lame factor SKYROCKETS.  All I picture when I hear that sentence is a spinster.  The story would only be better if it was a cat instead of a dog.   So I decided to tackle some of the landscaping at my house to at least be lame and productive this past weekend.   

A few months ago, I made a comment to one of my friends about how many weeds we have.  They said "Why should you pull them if you wont get in the house until winter anyway?" I thought over that response and decided it was logical, why should I pull them? 

I'll tell you why you should pull them, you should pull them because they will grow to be ~ 3 feet tall!  The picture to the left shows a small portion of my "garden."  Basically just weeds.  And that was after my mom pulled the entire pile of weeds in the picture below.  

Now, I will bet you $100 (figuratively, I don't have that kind of cash laying around now that I bought a house) that the old lady who lived here had gardeners at one point and then just stopped caring.  There is no other logical reason why on earth she would have gardened the way she did.  She had bushes in the middle of the yard (which makes mowing the lawn a pain in the butt), a garden walk way that you have to use to get to the ally where you put the garbage can that you couldn't actually walk through because the bushes were placed too close together, random rock gardens... its nuts.  I'm pretty sure she was also a pack rat because there were old broken clay planters she had in her rock garden... it didn't look pretty at all.  But we didn't buy the house for the gorgeous landscaping, we bought it for the potential.

But by far the most annoying thing (related to landscaping) was this 4 foot tall evergreen tree in the middle of the yard with 2 more evergreen trees next to it.  I don't know what she was thinking except for the fact that having a shade tree in the middle of the yard would be nice.  Why she would plant an evergreen, I have no idea.  I mean I know nothing about gardening and even I know that evergreens take forever to grow.  If you want a nice shade tree plant a maple!  Anyway, C and I did not like this random tree in our backyard so we planned on removing it as soon as we moved in.  

Well, thanks to the drought, the tree died. :) So I didn't feel like a bad person cutting down a perfectly healthy tree.  

And I spent my labor day eve (Sunday) cutting down the tree.  I didn't trust myself to use a chain saw, so I used a hand saw.  It wasn't really all that bad.  My arms got a good workout.  

But it would have been a lot easier if I trusted myself to use the chain saw.  I even used my brand new shovel to remove the stump! :) The picture to the right shows the other 2 trees smack dab in the middle of the yard, and you can see where the evergreen used to be.  

I don't mean to toot my own horn or anything, but personally, I think I did a pretty good job. :)