The path to progress

While Mason's been crawling under the house, working on getting water to the bathroom, I've been keeping myself busy out in the yard. Step one has been to create mulch and rock pathways around the house. This one goes from the back door to the well house, a well-traveled route. That's about an 80-foot-long path you see there in the photo. On the left side, it's lined with a ground cover plant called "mondo grass," also known as monkey grass. So far I've planted 30 of them. The right side of the path is lined with rocks from the property. Every day on our morning and evening walks, we each try to pick up about four rocks along the way (Mason picks up five -- "plus one for the Corps," says the sorry-excuse-for-an-ex-Marine). It took us about 10 days to collect enough to line the whole path. Anyway, you see all that dirt on either side of the path? OK, now close your eyes and just imagine what I'm going to plant there. Oh yeah! It's gonna be great!!

In other news, we finally met Ken, the "president" of our neighborhood "association." He's building a small but tall, three-story weekend cabin near the community lake. We met him on our nightly walk and chatted him up for a good 45 minutes to get all the dope on the 'hood. Halfway through our talk, the pistol Mason had loosely tucked into the back of his pants for our walk (you never know...) slipped, and slid down his pants leg and out onto the ground!! Hilarious! Of course, Ken didn't flinch. Nothing says Nice to Meet Ya, Neighbor like an impromptu gun show.

And while we've had our share of rain in the past week, it looks like a good stretch of sunny, 70-degree days will kick in on Thursday. So life is good.