Or something like that.

For some reason, we’ve been enjoying the backyard probably more that we ever really have before.  Maybe the weekend weather has been especially conducive to outside activities?  We’re not really sure, but whatever it is, it is good.

Spent a good amount of time doing the usual maintenance stuff – I cut the lawn yesterday, and E. planted a few more flowers in the front of the house, before we headed over to her parents’ house for her sister’s husband’s birthday.  This morning I headed over to the Home Depot to pick up a cinder block, 60 lb. of concrete, and a 4 lb. sledgehammer, all needed to complete today’s project:  install E.’s new umbrella clothesline.  A few weeks back when we hosted W.’s first Holy Communion shindig, I had removed a post, to which had been attached E.’s previous clothesline.  The post was simply in the way of where the tent needed to be, so out it came.  E., God bless her, has been practicing green laundering for many years now, way before it became fashionable; in fact, one of the feature that really sold E. on this house when we bought in was the clothesline.  Must have come from watching all of those episodes of Little House On The Prairie as a child.  Anyway, I had to promise to replace the clothesline, and I was able to convince E. to replace the old post with a new umbrella model, which I installed today.  First I dug a 12″ square hole, 16″ deep, and put a layer of rocks in the bottom.  I then took Mr. Shepherd’s cold chisel (Mr. Shepherd was the original owner, c. 1938, of our house; he was a mason, and many of masonry tools are still in my basement.  He passed on many years ago, and his widow finally sold the house after 60 years to the Neilsens.  Mr. Neilsen was not much of a handyman, and had no use for the former owner’s tools, but he was kind of enough to leave them in the basement workshop when we bought the house in 2002) and separated the cinder block into two halves, inserted the pole sleeve into the half with 4 sides intact and filled up the void with concrete.  After letting the concrete set up for a bit, I placed the cinder block and pole sleeve into the hole and filled up the sides with more concrete.  I was constantly checking for level and plumb, and I’m pretty sure once the concrete is cured the umbrella pole will be secure and ready for E. to use.  We’ll see how it holds up when E. gives it a proper workout next weekend.

I also finally cleaned up the remainder of the branches I had cut down a few weeks back when they were hanging over our fence fro the back neighbor’s yard.  I had gathered the branches into a tarp which was set aside until today, when I dumped them into a trash can and brought the can out to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup.  Of course afterward I needed to clean up the tarp, along wth the shovel and wheelbarrow from the concrete…

Grilled up some chicken, served with broccoli and rice, for dinner.  After dinner I out away the tarp, and finally fertilized the vegetables and flowers with Miracle-Gro.

For all of this work, there is still more to be done that I did not get to yet – need to tie up the rose bush in the front garden, as it has become top heavy and is sprawling into the surrounding flowers, and I still need to put down some new topsoil and grass seed where the tree used to be on the front lawn.

<Yawn>

It will have to wait until another day.