As much as I’d love to keep on reliving our vacation, we’ve been back home a week and there’s lots going on here. We’re mostly unpacked but we got a pretty good amount of souvenirs, some of them still need a home. Which predictably kicks of a whole defragging the house project.
Things are busy at work all of a sudden, even though alot of people are still out on vacation. We’re converting our whole product to run on Docker containers so everyone has to get up to speed. Lots of training sessions.
I gave Michelle her first driving lesson the other day. Laps around to parking lot of the local high school, and pulling in an out of parking spaces. She did great.
The weather has been really hot this summer, but also there’s been a good amount of rain. So the yard is like a jungle, everything growing like crazy. I mowed the lawn the day we left for our trip and it was overdue by the day we got back. I’ve spent four major sessions in the last few weeks trimming and weeding and pruning and edging, on top of the usual routine. And due to the extreme heat it’s not fun to stay outside for even a half hour, let alone doing hard physical work in the full heat of the day for hours on end. Been trying to do more in the mornings and evenings.
The neighbors behind us have a willow tree that’s gotten pretty big and is hanging down over our hedgerow and into our yard. I bought a tool that’s basically a mini chainsaw on a ten-foot pole in the spring to help prune back the tree. And then from the next neighbor’s yard up sprang a vine that was growing up into the tree. There are several trees in the neighborhood being choked to death by out of control weeds, so I didn’t want to let this go. So another major effort. This was back in July. But the willow grows so fast it’ll need it again soon.
Then in the other corner of my hedgerow were more vines coming from the neighbors on the other side. When I went to take these out I discovered a wasp nest under the eave of my neighbor’s garage, right at the corner of my property, and got stung up. I swear, these hedges use to be so well maintained but my neighbors are letting theirs get all overgrown. Someday I’m going to have to tear mine out and replace it with a fence.
To top it all off there’s a new species of weeds I’ve never seen before, that gives my fingers blisters when I pull it. On the plus side our sunflowers and tomatoes are doing great.