DarqByte

So a couple weeks back, Laura’s parents decided they were going to give us their landscape bricks in their front yard. I guess they’ve decided to completely re-landscape their front yard, so they had all of these bricks they no longer needed.

Well, it didn’t take long for Laura to think of a use for them. She’s mentioned a couple times in the past that she’d like to plant a garden somewhere in the side yard, so these bricks now gave her an opportunity to get a raised bed garden. So we spent some time on Friday evening loading up all of the bricks from her parents and drove on home.

We ended up so busy on Saturday that we didn’t end up having the time to set up the bricks for the garden, so we had to play around with driving since we only had one vehicle to drive. We were approaching a problem in the fact that we really needed two vehicles to be able to attend church on Sunday, because Laura always goes ahead of me since she sings and has to get there early to practice.

So I decided I’d work on getting the bricks done in the hopes of freeing up the truck for me to drive. Well… It didn’t work out too well. By the time I got all of the bricks laid, it was already a half-hour into the church service, let alone giving me enough time to shower and drive on over. So I filled the bed in with 5 of our 6 bags of gardening soil and proceeded to work on the sand pit.

It’s not really a pit… Laura and I decided we needed to train Pepper to do her business in one area of the backyard because it’s difficult to clean up after her when she goes in the rocks. Thus, a sand pit.

Well, Laura ended up getting home before I made progress on that. We headed out, grabbed lunch and ran by Star Nursery to get the vegetables and flowers that we were going to plant in the new garden. When we got home, Laura went to work on that while I helped and also went over to rake out the area for the sand pit.

About 45 minutes later, we had the garden planted and the sand pit started. I knew I wasn’t going to have enough sand since I, at first, only used the excess sand from the brick levelling I did. I estimated I needed about 5 more bags to fill out the pit, so when Laura left for her choir concert (I was going to head out later to watch it once they started), I headed to Home Depot and grabbed the sand bags. I also got a short fence for it so that it would be relatively separated, save for a two-foot wide “entrance” for the dog. I got home and promptly filled it in, but couldn’t get the fence in all the way thanks to the monstrously hard ground that Vegas has.

What a day. What a day. I still need to wrap up the small fence, but that’s it. Slowly but surely we’re adding more landscape to our back and side yards.

Regardless of if I actually have less things to do recently than the last three weeks, I feel productive again. I feel a little energized to get stuff done. Apparently all I need is the feeling that I’m not overwhelmed. Even if I really am, haha.

I’ve only been able to explicitly work out using Wii Fit four times this month. Today will be the fifth and last, since April starts tomorrow. Other than working out today after work, I will also be tidying up the yard by bringing in a shop vac from the neighbors and vacuuming up all of the dead leaves and debris in the yard. I’ll also clean dishes and put the ones in the dishwasher away. Oh, and lets not forget about folding the laundry that I did over the weekend.

But I still feel good about all that. I’ll probably still have time to mess around should I choose to. I may end up troubleshooting the extra desktop system I’ve got to try to get the hardware working, then I’ll install Gentoo on it and turn it into a monitoring station for my web server, which this blog is on.

Oh, I’ll also probably shred some more old documents that need to be shredded. And I might start sorting out the last three months’ worth of sales tax receipts.

Also, money kinda sucks. It’s nice when Laura and I get little spurts of extra cash to get some things done, like coach lights, a Blu-Ray player (wait, I never posted about that?!) and trips to Disneyland. But some of that extra cash ran out and we’re wanting to keep more of a buffer in our checking account than we were, so it’s back to curtailing spending. Especially since we’re finally getting my life insurance setup. Beh. Money sucks.

So sue me, I couldn’t think up a cool catchy blog post title.

Oddly enough, even given this economy, Laura and I are finding some small ways here and there to get some home improvements done. For example, the curtain rod in our master bathroom was, well, kinda janky. Laura never saw the issue, but it fell once, and nearly on top of my head. It looks like KB Home tried to jam it into one of the walls because there are circular marks that look like the end of the curtain rod.

After it fell, the best I could do was prop it on top off the shower enclosure that sticks out from the wall. From that point, I was just careful not to tug outwards on the curtain because it could roll off, in theory. Otherwise, it seemed like a perfectly normal curtain rod.

I’d been wanting to get a replacement for some time, and those curved rods they have in hotels are nice. My Dad has one and it’s nice. I broke down yesterday and got one in Home Depot while I was getting plumber’s putty. I put it up last night at about 10:30. Used it this morning, and…

Wow. It’s nice. There is so much more room inside there now! It’s firkin awesome man. I also bought a scale since we didn’t have one, so now I get to know just how fat I really am.

Aside from that, we’re finally getting new couches! We’ve been running on hand-me-down couches for awhile. They’re not bad, just not nice. Haha. They’ve seen some mileage and wear and tear. But now we’ve ordered some new ones via an RC Willey President’s Day sale and they’ll arrive on the 28th.

We’re slowly making over our living room. The TV and TV stand both came from RC Willey via Black Friday, so they’re greatly contributing to our gradual home makeover via one-day sales.

Our existing couches are already spoken for. Poor Steven doesn’t have any and we’re handing them over to him, to use as a temporary stopgap until he can buy some good ones.

Let’s not forget that we got HD satellite hooked up recently as well as a nice new Harmony Remote. And I plan on getting our coach lights outside installed sometime by the end of March, and we need to install bar lights sometime soon too.

How are we affording all of this in this economy? Well, we’re planning well for these things and not rushing into anything. And we’re also getting a sizable tax return this year, which is how we’re getting the couches.