Yard Work

We're working hard to shape up the yard as we try to get it looking nice as well as putting our own personal 'stamp' on it.


Here is M peeling off some of the grass that I severed using the new edging attachment for our weedeater.




The grass after its been removed:



Melody cleaning up using our leaf blower:



After:




Ranger yawning. Its very taxing to watch all of those humans work so hard.




Saturday, M started reworking the front yard flower bed:




She took a couple of bushes out and planted them on either side of the gate:




The garden:

It only took about a week after planting for sprouts to appear in our garden. There are 20+ so far:






And finally..

Ranger examining a frog in our back yard:

The Garden

We finaly broke down and bought a tiller. We didn't want to borrow one and with the prices that were being asked to rent, we decided that it made more sense to buy. But it hurt.



Anyhow, on to the garden.

First, I ripped the sod off of the area that we wanted as a garden. Then I put the tiller together, which wasn't very difficult.



Then came the fun part.





The hardest part was getting yet more rocks out of the ground. You can see part of a big one at the bottom of the picture. There were-and are- lots of little ones.

So far, we've planted squash, watermelon & cucumber. We'll put in the tomato plants once the underground electric fence that we ordered from samsclub.com finaly gets here. With what Ranger did to the maple, we didn't want to put any plants in the garden until we had a reliable way of keeping her out.

Dad and Mom recently returned from a cruise to the west coast of Mexico. They stayed with us before flying out from the dfw airport. It was nice having them here and also nice to be able to finally show off our house to them. Here we are at Olive Garden:

Also worth mentioning: it hailed that night, and fair-sized pellets, too.







They also stayed with us after the return flight, 10 days later. Fortunately, it didn't hail that night.

The Adventures of Ranger


It rained recently and Ranger got really muddy yesterday while trying to get at her Mortal Ememies(aka, the dogs next door). M gave her a bath. Then, a couple of hours later, I checked on her outside and found this:







She had been wearing out the grass alongside the fence as she patrolled vigilantly and when it rained, the ground turned to mud. Which did not deter her from digging, unfortunately.

Now on to other Ranger Misadventures.


Here, she consented to help with kitchen cleanup after dinner one night:




And here, she's at the dog park:





Getting a drink:



Swimming in the pond behind the park:



Jumping out of the water:

Ranger Strikes

I spend a lot of time & money getting our yard looking nice. That's why I went through the roof this afternoon when I caught Ranger chewing on or new tree, a rare, expensive Chinese FireDragon Maple. We thought that we had it protected sufficiently with fencing but she threw herself against it and caved it in far enough to chew off most of the branches on one side of the tree. It will take years to overcome the damage.




She's more or less in permanent timeout right now.

Oh My

The Danger Dog Goes on Spring Break

We went to both our sets of parents over spring break. My parents have a dog too, Harley. Ranger and Harley spent some time getting to know each other.





They had somewhat of a rough relationship as Harley is older and bigger. Ranger kept wanting to play and Harley got annoyed.




That night Ranger got a good night's sleep.




We stayed there for 3 days. Then it was off to the in-laws where several family members were gathered. Ranger wanted to drive.



But we didn't think that that was such a good idea.


M's sister, Special K, brought her dog, Tucker. Ranger and Tucker had loads of fun.














I think that they were discussing how best to end world poverty.

Flower Bed

M just put some new flowers & plants in the flower bed out front.






And 3 rose bushes along the fence to the left of the house:

Snow in Texas



An interesting aspect of my trip to the BYU orchestra reunion in Utah 2 weeks ago was the weather. I left Thursday morning. By Thursday evening, the north Texas/dfw area looked like this:







It was in the mid 50's in Utah.

M didn't come to Utah with me because she teaches school and doesn't like to turn things over to a sub.

The ironic thing?

School got snowed out.

We have sod

We finally had much-needed sod installed in the backyard yesterday. Originally, we had opted not to chose that option when we had the house built thinking the price that the builder asked was exhorbitant. Instead, we seeded the backyard(the front yard sod was included in the price of the house) with rye hoping that it would grow quickly and that we we would have a nice carpet back there. In the spring we would follow up with bermuda.

The rye grew but much too thinly. We ended up with a lot of mud in the back whenever there was any moisture there. Of course, the mud tended to end up in the house, on the carpet.



So I finally tracked down Mow, Grow, & Sprinkle, the landscaping outfit that puts the sod down for HistoryMaker Homes in this area. After I left a ton of voice mails, a guy finally came over and gave me an estimate. It seemed like a reasonable price as it included installation. The guy said that they could do it on Friday. So I waited at home all day Friday and nobody showed. I left a few more voicemails and planned on finding another company to do it on Monday.

Then, Saturday at 7:30am, the doorbell rang. It was a guy with a flatbed full of sod. I had him put it over by the gate. He had no idea when the installation crew would be by.

The installation crew came by about 10:15. They no habla but they were all very good at what they did and had obviously done it quite a bit. They started off by leveling things off either by flattening the rises in soil or by filling in the depressions.



Then they started laying it down.






After it was down a couple of guys went over it with something resembling a giant rolling pin.



The final product.





The time from when the installation crew arrived until the completion of the project was about 2 hours. Not bad.

After they were done and had left, M, Ranger & I got into the car and went to a maple tree farm in Fort Worth called 'Metro Maples,' wanting a maple to provide some color in the yard. We ended up getting a Fire Dragon Shantung - a kind of chinese maple. We are looking forward to the red foliage.




Ranger promptly inagurated the new addition to the yard by chewing off a significant portion of bark from its trunk, which, as you can imagine, caused us no small amount of consternation. After all, we had just gone all the way out to Ft. Worth and bought a limited availability Fire Dragon Maple, and then come back, dug a hole, and then planted the thing. This is not an investment that I want chewed up. On Monday, we are getting some fencing to put around it.

Late Saturday night I set the sprinkler system to drench everything. Its important for the roots to get into the ground as soon as possible.