Well, Martin and I are doing fine lately… gearing up for spring to come (if it ever decides to!) so we can start work on our yard… and I’ve been fortunate enough to have (tentatively) my contract extended until the end of June which will help pay for the schooling in July and August. I decided to postphone my BA honours until another time and signed off on the papers to complete my BA so I should be graduating in June of this year! I can always upgrade (hehe) to an honours later on but for now I needed to get the BA done so when I leave my aboriginal teacher program, I’ll be granted a Bachelor of Education… if I don’t have the BA, I don’t get the B.Ed.

Fishies? Well, they aren’t doing so great…. Crusty died the other day and another one today. There’s the fab-five left now and hopefully tomorrow I can get the fin-rot stuff so the other ones don’t keel over too (literally, hehe).

So what are our plans for the upcoming summer around the house? We need to finish off a fence between us and the “jones” — our neighbours who go out of their way to ensure they are better than us in every single way. Last year we put up our cute little garden shed and she came up to us and said, “Nice shed. When my husband gets back from Afghanistan we’re going to build an even bigger one.” And, sure enough within a week of him being home, there’s a shed twice as big as ours overshadowing our wee little cute one. Buggers.

Anyways - we got to get that fence finished so I don’t have to look at the sight of them. And then we need to build a new front porch because ours sucks and is dangerous. Both martin and i took flying leaps on it the same day, a few hours apart and had matching bruises to boot. So, we’re going to work on that and reconfigure it so it’s a bit more “safe”. So I’m looking forward to that! I’ll take some before/afters pics of it when we get around to it!

Another project is that we need to repaint our deck in the back and I’ll be putting a special kind of paint on there to help with slippage. We get a lot of dew here and ice as well as with the pool, it might be a good idea. We also need to finish repairing the deck around the pool from when we had to have the pool replaced last year. Shouldn’t take much work but - we just have to get enough ambition to do it!

Also on the deck in the back, we need to add some reinforcement to the posts by adding two extra screws into each rail. Shouldn’t take too long, especially with the help of the handy-dandy power drill

And finally! I’m putting off building our big garden I think as I had really hoped to and will instead build some planter boxes where we’ll plant the vegetables. We have the wood here to do it already so it’s just to take the time to build something. Our veggie garden in the back we wanted to build would be almost 30 feet by 20 feet and it is already there BUT the problem is we are in a very sandy zone… so we’d need to bring in a good dump-truck full of dirt just to be able to grow anything in it. My dad owns a dirt-yard but - he’s still over an hour away and unless he came up a few times with his half-tonne, we’d never get anything growing in it…. and he’s pretty busy so we likely wouldn’t be able to get that done this year anyways. Soooo, planter boxes it is!

We’re supposed to get up to 10 -20 cms of snow (again!) tonight… so much for spring! Fortunately with all of that sand we don’t get flooding much around here! Small graces, that’s for sure….  can’t wait to show you all of the changes that are going to take place over the next few months! With me being out of town again for classes, it’s going to suck again this summer but we’re going to get done what we can when we can!

Posted on April 11th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Fishies!, Garden, School