Is this thing still on...?

What the hell, am I made of money?

meh

Awhile back when My Love first pitched the idea of cutting back her hours at the office, she mentioned that she could always return to full-time hours, if needed. As I am the somewhat reluctant 'saver' in the relationship and she the buck-wild, former credit card melting, bane of savings accounts everywhere, patron saint of sales clerks' childrens college funds etc etc, I immediately told her she needed to stay full time. Heck, pick up some OT, while she was at it.

After further discussion, we decided that it would be a good idea for her to go part-time.

meh

She's now gone from part-time to no-time, at that job.

meh

Now that she's 'spending' (meh) alot more time at the house, making plans for future upgrades, paint-schemes, redecorating, future purchases and the like, I've been putting in quite a bit of time outside of the house, in the yard. Now, before I get to much further, I should mention that we're fortunate in that her quitting her job is not the end of the world, financially. (I just like to piss and moan). As it looks, we might have to tighten our belts a bit, but nothing that'll lead to me hanging out on the corner showin' a little leg... yet.


Back to the yard.


My yard is lookin' awesome.


Know what really helps out, yard maintenance-wise, besides a wife that's planning to paint the downstairs bathroom for the 12th time?

That's right, the recent run on ammo.


See, I haven't actually bought ammo for a quite a few months now, and while I'm not resigned to collecting rocks for slingshots or anything, I've started to keep an eye on my 'cache', with a mind to conservation. The question arose then of what to do with my ammo acquisition funds. I was mowing my rocks and weeds one day, thinking these deep thoughts, when the mowers started kicking up something totally unexpected. No, it wasn't forgotten lawn ornaments, my feet, feral cats, or small children, but grass. Lush, thick, green grass.


Yeah, 'WTH' was my thought, as well.


I remembered the fertilizer and composts that I was playing around with a couple years back. I had bought a few different type of compost, place some here, scattered some there, and in the end usually managed to sequester roughly half the bag in my pants cuffs for the trip inside the house. It worked pretty good, but after a buddy mentioned some types of fertilizer, I made a trip over to the local Home Depot. I bought a bag, brought it home, poured the stuff in the spreader, and started out. Of course something came up, as it usually does (if I remember correctly it was buying antique furniture), and the bag o' fertilizer spent a bit more time in the spreader than is probably recommended.


I believe it was about 3 or 4 months-ish.


Come spring time (of '08), I dragged the spreader out of the garage, and promptly dropped the ass-end of the spreader (and the solidified fertilizer it held) onto the driveway. I'm not a pro, but I figured that fertilizer on the driveway wouldn't help out too much, and the solid mass of of fertilizer should probably go in the yard. It wasn't all solid,though, there was some brownish liquid that spread out quite nicely with a healthy application of the hose. There was a strip of 'grass' between one side of my driveway and the neighbor's yard that was my lawn-products test strip, so that's where the fertilizer went. All of it (enough for most of the front and back yards) went in that strip.

So here we are, more than a year later, and I have some sort of mutant grass in that strip that grows roughly three inches by the time I've finished mowing it, isn't afraid to reach up and turn the spigot for itself when it gets thirsty, and, (coincidence?) the neighbor lady's cat Fluffy is still missing.


So yeah, I've been putting down compost and fertilizer all over the rest of the yard, in an effort to help it catch up to the mutant-strip.


That, putting in some plants and flowers, re-planting the flowers that died right after planting, replanting those flowers that somebody *innocent whistle* forgot (again?) to water, digging a garden we wanted, filling in the preliminary holes that we dug when we decided that we wanted our garden in a slightly different position, and well, that's what I've been doing for the past month or so.