MiniBullyMom's Musings

Well....I have been busy for the past two weeks getting ready for the family reunion in Lodi, CA which was held this past weekend. It was a blast and I was able to scan well over 200 photos plus items of my Great, Great Grandparents which were in a scrapbook brought by one of my cousins. I was able to complete 11 of 75 pages of the scrapbook I've been working on digitally. Now that everyone has seen what the pages will actually look like they are all excited about it. I went ahead and had it placed in the family reuion auction with the promise that the finished pages would be mailed to the buyer to be inserted into the book. My cousin Clara placed the winning bid which was $300!! I about fell over when it was announced.

Well we have done a ton of work in the backyard this summer. We decided to hold Christina's graduation party at home. The first photo is of the garage where a huge Pampass Grass plant used to be. Mike hated it from about the second year we had it. I loved it but realized after 10 years that it had performed it's original function and was tired of it's leaves getting mowed over. So we decided to rip it out. That turned out to be a major project in itself. It took a chain saw, electric hedger, axe, pick axe and shovel to get it out of there. The plant reached all the way over to the tiki torch on the right and about a foot past the tiki torch on the left. You can actually see a patch of dirt between the torches where the plant actually covered/laid over the lawn. We ended up planting four short pyramidalis trees along the old fence to hide the neighbor's garage. I finally gathered together my three beach logs and tied them into a piling (this was a project I wanted to get done last year) and hung the buoys we found at the beach also to create my beach scene. I have glass floats resting on a "stump" of wood we found another time in the flower bed that is the just out of the photo on the right hand side.

The toilet "arrangement" is the newest thing I did to drive my hubby crazy. We ripped it out of the bathroom this past winter because it was leaking. You just can't toss them in the garbage here but they will take them at the dump. Well it was the original toilet to the house and the only reason we took it out was because we couldn't retrofit the "guts" of it inside the tank. So I decided to plant it. I placed it in a hidden corner of the yard and filled it with "Impatients" of all things. Every guy who sees it just shakes their head but the women think it was a neat idea. One of my friends even fessed up that she was thinking about doing the same thing with one they had. Two weeks later we went to her house and lo and behold she had done it. Our husbands think we are both weird.


This is the last section of the backyard that we need to finish up. We have been storing campfire wood under the tarp and after we finish reroofing/painting the garage Mike will probably build a covered storage bin for it. We have debated making an arbor or gazebo to cover this deck but resisted so far since we have a covered patio attached to the little garage closer to the house -yes we have two garages in our backyard. I'm leaning towards an arbor of some sort because that would allow sun through but I'm just not quite convinced I really want to do that. We need to pressure wash, stain and fix the lattice work that runs along the sidewalk. The only reason we really don't sit out on that patio is that everyone across the street can see that deck because they are on a hill and it faces their front yards. The other patio provides lots of shade and has electrical outlets. I'm actually sitting at the bar on the covered patio as I blog. The next priority is getting this big garage roof shored up, reroofed and replace all the wiring in it. We are hoping to shore it up in September and immediately get it roofed before the "rainy season" hits in full force. Luckily we can roof half at a time and be okay. We bought the shingles off Craigslist and have then stacked in the small garage, the plywood and 2x4's are in the big one and now I'm hunting down tar paper and deals on flashing. Next summer we should be able to repaint the big garage to match the house, put a peaked roof on the little garage, rewire it and complete turning it into an oversized shed.


Now to get back to digiscrapping. My daughter is a huge Tim Burton fan and when I saw this new kit created by "Digital Reality" it reminded me of the photos I've seen of Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in the new Alice in Wonderland movie Tim Burton is filming. You can check out the entire kit at Divine Digital. There is an absolutely awesome string of paper lanterns in the kit.