Jon and Amber

Amber here, with a LOT of photos! We built a stairway to heaven! OK, not really – it just goes from the mailboxes on the main road, up the hill to our house. We used to just have a dirt/rock path, but now it’s prettier. VERY photo-heavy post, dial-uppers beware (or be patient!) Also, the full photoset is available on my Flickr if you are interested in looking at all the other pictures I took.

Saturday Morning, just getting started. Looking waaay down the hill. (Hi Bonzo!)

Same day, from below (it wasn’t really that dark out – my flash went off and made things look a little dark.)

Sunday, Day 2… lots more progress:

After the whole frame was built, we had no more screws left, and 5 nails:

This is the finished frame from below. It still needs to be filled in, of course. We did that the next day.

Here’s another picture of it with the mailboxes in the foreground. And now you can see that we have 6 neighbors.

Then I went for a short walk with the dog, and took some pictures of flowers. This is the one I liked best. It’s my desktop background now!

And then Bonzo rolled in another dog’s poop AND he rolled in a dead bird. Argh, that stinker. Literally. I swiped him down with his little bath-wipes and he wasn’t too stinky after that, thank god. I didn’t want to screw around with a whole bath.

“What’s that over there? More stinky stuff to roll in??”

Here’s Jon putting on a pout for the camera, and me grinning like a maniac:

On Monday (Memorial Day), we started filling in the steps:

We tossed some busted up concrete into some of the deeper ones so that we wouldn’t need to fill with as much dirt:

Bonzo followed us up and down the stairs as we filled them in. Here he is looking happy at the top step.

Next weekend, we will be putting on a railing. The idea right now is to use 2x4s or something like that as the vertical posts (although I still kind of like the idea of metal tubing…), and then run a 3/4-inch rope for the actual “railing” part. I’ll try to get more pictures when we get all that done.

We just had a very busy weekend. We spent a LOT of money on stuff for the yard – fertilizer, pesticides, seed for the patchy areas, a tow-behind lawn-spreader for Murray (still gotta get some pictures of it), and even one of those cool little lawn-tractor-sprinklers that travels along the length of the hose to water a large yard like ours! We’re hoping the lawn will get a little more green and a little less weedy by the end of the summer.

Jon also went on the roof to start cutting down a few trees that are a bit too close to the house… All this made Amber just a bit nervous every time a huge branch went flying past her kitchen window! Good progress was made, though, and no one got hurt.

We have a new vehicle which has been named “Twilight“… pictures and details soon!

It’s a 1997 Yamaha Royal Star (that’s a motorcycle)! Jon enjoys taking it for leisurely rides around the lake, and Amber has ridden with him exactly ONCE. That’s probably plenty for her.