Hi everyone.

What a day! Liz and I have been up and going since early this morning and we're just starting to wind down now - at 9:30. Actually, Liz is well on her way (she's been in bed for about an hour now). Anyway, I felt like getting a blog entry in about the day we've had.

Like I said yesterday, we decided to do some landscaping on the front of our house this weekend. That was today's project. We laid 2,976 pounds of retaining wall block - just shy of 1.5 tons of block (124 blocks at 24 pounds a piece). We started it last night (just barely - we tinkered with it for about an hour or so), but the bulk of it was all done today.

All in all, I think it went up quite well. We had a few issues here and there where we ran into some shallow running roots that we had to try to get around. There was a bit of chiseling done, I can tell you. Regardless, we're both quite pleased with how it turned out.

We even got out to take some pictures of it tonight before dinner and I've put them online (along with a couple pics of the huge flower pots Liz picked up yesterday). You can find thumbnails of the pics here. Just click on any of the images to see a full-sized image.

In those pics, you can see Liz's tulips. They're doing quite well, but we had to move a lot of them to make room for the retaining wall block. If you look closely in some of those pics, you can see the tulips in the back are wilting quite a bit - those are the ones she moved. I sure hope they survive. Fortunately, we've got a nice thunderstorm moving in as I write this, so I'm hoping the extra rain will help them along.

We need to fill in our raised flower-bed with dirt now. For the most part, the dirt level is pretty good, but, especially on the East side of the house (the left side of the pics), where the wall is 4 or 5 blocks high, we need to add a lot of dirt. I'm hoping all the commotion won't kill Liz's tulips. Some of them might even have to be moved again. :-(

Anyway, it was probably around 4:30 or so that we finally got the wall put in and got the front yard cleaned up. Then, we finally got to shower and I had to make a trip downtown - nothing big, really - just needed gas in the truck and I needed to pick up some car soap so I could wash the truck. The two of us lazily wandered through Target and picked up the few things we needed - we were so tired, we even left our case of soda on the bottom of the cart and had to run back when we realized we hadn't put it in the truck. :-/

So, we eventually made it home and we cleaned up the truck. There was plenty of debris inside from all of the blocks and it needed a wash, anyway.

When that was done, I got out the grill and we made bacon cheeseburgers over an open flame - some things are just wonderful. :-)

Anyway, that pretty much put a close on our day. We snapped a few pictures prior to dinner and I just finished getting them online for everyone to look at. I hope you enjoy them.

So, plans for tomorrow? Maybe we'll just sleep all day. ;-)

Take care, everyone.

Corey