First off, Dylan built me two raised garden beds a while ago and I’ve finally taken the plunge and filled them with dirt and things that will hopefully produce vegetables – I think these things are called plants. Hopefully they can survive on primarily the elements because…well, lets just say I’m trying really hard to be dedicated to growing things. This whole thing is a big challenge that I must win! But did you know that it takes a long time for plants to actually produce vegetables even if you start with mini-plants and not seeds. I did not.

Anyway – here is my garden.

Here is one of the beds, filled with things I’m hoping don’t die now that it has gotten cool again – Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and a jalepeno. Grow little veggies, GROW!

My other bed has a lot of lettuce and a few zucchini plants and seems to be doing just fine.

I also planted strawberries back in April in those crazy topsy turvey things and it is seriously the easiest thing I have ever done. And I’m going to have a million strawberries here in a few more weeks! You can do it!

Mmmmm

And here is one of my tomato plants up close and personal because it had this cute little yellow flower, which I think is a good sign (note, it was nearly this big when I bought the plant…not that you can actually tell that it’s tall in this photo)

Our other big project involved my birthday party. We decided that we do so much entertaining in the summer and have no indoor entertaining space, that it would make sense to put in a patio. One of the reasons we bought this house was the backyard. It’s huge. But it was almost all grass. Now, we have a great seating area and still lots of grass!

And our crazy fire pit actually fits into the yard instead of sticking out awkwardly in the grass.

For my birthday, Dylan got me a hammock – I have always wanted a hammock. Because with a gift like a hammock comes permission to take naps and be lazy!

If the sun ever comes back out I’m never leaving the backyard (or more importantly…the hammock). And see those cute white lights in the background? They are from Ikea and are solar powered and come on magically when it gets dark. They’re pretty awesome, and only $10 for each one. They also come in blue and red.

So that’s been our big spring project! And it literally hasn’t stopped raining since we got the patio done. We had one nice day and night to BBQ and have people over, and then it’s rained non-stop the past 10 days.

So that’s the little tour of our backyard – we love it!

But after countless hours scattered through several months of weekends (and a little help from my sew-tastic Momma) I got it done.

This is the third one I’ve done and I will say there were far fewer screw-ups along the way than previous attempts. And because I’m a total nutters, I can never start small with these things. In my head, quilts are only useful if you can surround yourself in all their snuggly glory. And there are no babies around in my life that my mom hasn’t already made a dozen quilts for, so I’ll continue to embark on these crazy huge projects.

Branch is awesome – go there and have the gnocchi, it will change your world.

The play: Was alright. But here is the deal. I don’t like Shakespeare. I want to like Shakespeare – I minored in English (without taking one Shakespeare class mind you) but I just don’t. We left at intermission.

Halloween has come and gone. My wonderful husband humiliated himself and dressed in drag to be Miss Piggy while I was an uber-adorable Kermit the frog. We had about three trick-or-treaters (up from 1 last year) which means we have about 5 pounds of candy to eat.

Consequently, I have joined a gym.

The dog also dressed up – she was a prisoner – K98URSHOOS – get it!

And this one.

Just ignore the ugly white stuff on that leaf. Not bad for some hand-me-d0wn tubers I threw in the ground in June and hoped for the best. I’m waiting to see what color the other plants that have come up are – as I don’t know what they look like yet. And then I’ll need a few more for the yard.

If you want to grow your own – this is the place to go: Swan Island Dahlias. I went with my family a few weekends ago when they have their big show. Lots of pretty flowers to chose from, but you can order online too and they will ship them to you in the spring when you need to plan them.