Down and DIRTY!

I spent about 16 of the 48 hours of my weekend completely filthy! I played in the dirt, trimmed trees, and loaded my fair share of mulch. I'm very happy that next weekend's to-do list calls for no yard work! :)

Saturday, we got up and headed up to the church. Our Young Adults Sunday School Class had a work day to serve one of the widowed and home bound women of our church. She had some planting and yard work she wanted done. It sounded like a simple task, but when we got there we noticed there was much more we could do to help her. I can't take any of the credit outside of a couple of newly planted hibiscus, but the guys really dug in and did some series yard work! At one point, the lady we were helping said, "Is someone on my roof??" Sure enough, someone was up on the roof with the leaf blower cleaning out all of her gutters! Next thing we knew we heard a chainsaw and the guys were literally cutting down a HUGE dead branch that was hanging over her house! I'm sure she didn't even know it was there because she is in a wheelchair and might not have even been over on that side of her house in quite a while! I offered to order pizza for the group if they wanted to move the party to our house, but alas, they turned down my offer. Boo!
Off we were to do it ourselves! We have a local recycling center where you can take and dump all of your brush for free. In turn, they mulch it and you can haul off mulch for free! We were really excited because we probably need 100 bags of mulch to do our entire yard...and no, I'm not kidding! It was a great idea in theory (and in reality, we just need a few days for our soreness to wear off and then we can appreciate the cost effectiveness) but we had to SHOVEL the mulch off of the pile and load it in the truck. Unloading and laying it was the easy part (again, I can't take any credit for laying the mulch...Dave did that. But in my defense I trimmed TONS of our trees and bushes!) it was shoveling the mulch that was the hard part. Dave was considering slipping the guy with the bobcat a $20 just to put a scoop full in the truck! ha.

Thank goodness we had this guy around to help when we needed it! Talk about lazy bones! He just walked around panting and terrorizing the neighborhood! I turned my head for about 30 seconds and looked up and he was gone....I heard my neighbor saying, "Rookie, come here!" HE WENT IN THEIR HOUSE! Ha! They had the garage door open and he walked right into their house through the garage! Iy-yi-yi!

If my mother-in-law read my blog, this is the part she would be most proud of! I love rosemary and basil, and I pay $3 every time I want fresh basil at the grocery store, so I decided to try my hand at growing my own! I bought the rosemary already started at Lowe's for $5, and then I just bought basil seeds. It says 5-7 days for them to start growing, so we'll see how it works out! Do any of you grow your own herbs? If so, share your tricks!

Finally, I have been wanting a flag outside! I just love driving around and seeing the American Flag flying! Just in time for Memorial Day and honoring all of the men and women who have served our country and lost their lives defending our freedom.

While we're at it, this has nothing to do with yard work and I didn't do this this weekend, but I did do it recently....this is a small wall in my living room and it has been so boring to me! I wanted to display some pictures because there is not a lot of room in our living room for anything "personal". I decided to do a picture wall. I debated on all matching frames, but in the end, I decided I wanted to pull in all of the colors in my living/dining room and have it be a little less "perfect". This is the end result...

Now I need a weekend to relax from my weekend! What did you do, relax or work??