WE'RE GETTING THERE !!!

Wherever "there" is, that is.  Though it's not all done, "ther've been some changes made."  To start with, maybe I should show this picture.  Silas do you remember coming to Oregon with your family and climbing around in the backyard and it looked something like this?

You, and your grandma spent hours in the wood pile, sorting and grading all the timber!  What a night that was.  Well, things have changed!  Where all that wood was, now it looks like this -

looking from back fence towards house

looking from the "woodpile" (1st pic) toward the back fence

from the "woodpile" toward the gardens

Like I said - "ther've been some changes made."  It's not all done; we still have to add dirt and compost and whatever else to amend the soil and flower gardens;  there's still another area in the southwest corner of the lot that will get a makeover - but I'm likin' it!

We also decided to do something about the sun beating down on the patio (on the 17 days that it does shine)  during the summer.  A couple of years ago I asked Karina if any of her "Doc" friends were sailors ... I said I needed a used sail or two to make shade for the patio.  She snooped around and found one, who thought even though I was crazy, it might work.  Well, more than a year passed and it was still a dream ... but as we were flying home from Iowa in May - I was reading the "Sky-Mall" magazine in the plane and don't you know they actually make shade sails!  We tried to order some, but they were back-ordered until winter - that was too long - so we started snooping elsewhere and found some at Home Depot online.  We ordered a 16' x 16' square and 2 16' equilateral triangle sails.  Well,  we only need to hang one of the triangles with the square, and the shade makes such a difference!  You can't really see them very well, sand colored that they are (what you can see is the shade they provide), but they look like this ...

you can see how it shades the sliding door on our bedroom

looking up from the patio will make you seasick - with the movement of the sails - ha!

So that's about it from the left coast.  Hope you all are surviving the heat/rain/thunderstorms/and whatever else that may by your lot in life!  

By the way MN Wehrspanns - Jack looks terrific!  thanks for sharing the pics;

M & J - your quilting still astounds me;

B & B - how's flat Lydia surviving Europe?

R & L - have you started a blog yet?

Love ya!

Karina and Dan