After it warming up to the upper 70’s and low 80’s for a week followed by a cold snap that brought all our plants indoors, we’ve started to warm up again. Just in time for my show to open and me to have time on the weekends to think about making it pretty. The Bald One has put in many hours while I’ve been at the theater or at my day job and all but one island in the front has been weeded and mulched. Since we were starting from a complete lack of mulch and a mess, this is an amazing feat.

The fact that our front has gotten this far has made me realize that we need a lot more work to make the front yard match the rest of the neighborhood. We don’t live in a showstopping community. It’s more of a tired, real community that your see inmore established areas. The picture perfect houses scare me. But even with a quieter set of standards, we still look too new, too disorganized.

Part of the solution will likely be adding more color. We’re slowly getting there as the roses take more presence in the yard and the burning bush is loving taking center stage against the blue-grey house. Our winter honeysuckle has established and is climbing insanely on a different side. To contrast, the jessamine has overgrown the trellis on the side of the house. It just takes time and I’m impatient.

the other thing our yard desperately needs is grass. Currently we have a mix of three different types of weeds along with bermudagrass and some kind of fescue. Pestering some of my coworkers, I discovered that the best bet for the moment is to keep the lawn and weeds closely trimmed and spray a broad-range herbicide to kill what survives trimming. This should keep things down until fall when we can re-seed. At that point we should be able to keep things at bay and crowded out by the grass root structure. Hopefully.

Really, I don’t give the Bald One enough credit. A majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting things done around the house - inside and out - is done by him. I guess it makes us even - I’ll get the bills paid and do some of the artsy point of view nonsense, and he gets to buy power tools. As I type this, supposedly I am getting wall mounted shelves put up in the office which will give us more book stashing space and a place to display his action figures.

I have a good one.