The Hubby’s mom came out to visit last week (hence the lack of posting . . . well, that, and a turbo toddler might have something to do with that):  she had been to a conference in Cali and figured stopping by Oregon on the way home wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  It’s funny how grandparents manage to make a couple hundred miles and a couple day detour convenient.    As grandparents tend to do, she came bearing gifts:  articles, pictures, sugar-free gummi bears (yum).  And even though she was visiting, she brought grubby clothes to get down and dirty in our yard for Non-Extreme Yard Maintenance 2006.
I’ve never been one to have a green thumb:  it’s usually a more brown color from adding cocoa powder to cookies.  And Hubby has the ability to garden, but he also has the ability to work on websites and yell at the Red Sox on TV.  We planted some herbs and had them in the kitchen window sill where they could get sun and actually be watered (yay for a stretchy kitchen sink faucet!).  But then they started to look like my Dad’s toes:  smooshed from inadequate room to grow.
Our fam moved into this abode in late August:  this year has been spent more getting to know the house, the neighborhood, the weather, and the landscape.  I know:  getting to know a house?  Yes:  things like how hot the bathroom gets if the heat comes on too early in the morning (like a sauna:  woo wee) or how cold the downstairs gets if you leave the window open (me thinks it will become our mid-July bunker) or how the fence can barely be opened if it rains a lot (I’m so glad I’m not the only thing around here suffering from water retention).

All that to say, we haven’t seen how the landscape looks in the summertime:  I don’t know what was planted (both in the sense of where and what the heck is that funny looking bush thing) or when things bloom and grow.  But the Hubby’s mom could figure things like that out, so she plunged right in and I baked lots of cookies (everyone was being productive in their element).

So, now we have ground cover in our yard.  We have a well-treated rose bush.  We have  freshly re-planted herbs on the deck.  We also have weeded flowerbeds, which is a good and bad thing:  part of my reason for not working in the yard is that I honestly didn’t know what was intentionally planted and what was trying to make a hostile takeover.  Now that I know, I get/have to weed with knowledge.

JJ decided he wanted to help with the Not-Extreme Yard Makeover, but I think he has a little more Ty in him than the helpful/useful/productive members of the team.  Sure, Ty does a room, but do we ever actually see him working?  No.  We seem with megaphones and videocameras and generally being loud and obnoxious.  JJ did not have a megaphone (he *is* a megaphone), but he did have some gardening tools, the sprayer for the hose, and a sliding glass door.

So pretty, just like Ty.

Yes, the glass is dirty.  Yes, I had cleaned it two days earlier.  Yes, while I was cleaning it, I thought to myself:  “Why am I doing this?”

Daily Drivel, JJ Jawings