The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly...

Do you ever wonder (like I do) what's just outside the frame in all those beautifully styled, perfect freeze-framed moments on blogs?  I've always been of the school of thought that it's not a bad idea to show the messy parts of life next to the beautiful ones.  I don't like to wallow in it-- you'll never get a two paragraph diatribe on exactly what the temper tantrum that ensued because we decided to serve yougert and granola instead of oatmeal for breakfast felt like to live through.   But I very well might show you a picture of the Jackson Pollack that a certain short gentleman created using said yougert on my formerly lovely dining room wall.  (Or not, since that would have required me having four hands instead of just my often ineffectual two.)

Here's a shot of our little backyard (taken by me, standing on the webbing of a deck chair 20 feet up in the air, leaning out over the edge of the deck while wearing my glasses, in which the prescription is much too strong causing me to have terrible vertigo, but which I have to keep wearing until tomorrow when I have my follow up appointment with the eye doctor to get the OK for contacts again after a terrible eye infection and hopefully, finally, get the correct lens prescription for my glasses.)

I've also learned my lesson about speaking before Googling-- I told my mom what kind of infection I thought I had.  I did not Google.  She did.  Apparently the kind of infection I told her I had is caused by your cornea contracting an STD.  The conversation to sort this all out was interesting.

So this is all just to tell you what lengths I'll go to to get a (really bad, huh?) picture.

So, back to my yard.  When we bought our house, we were so bowled over by the location (and the magnificence that was our street, lined with row after row of blooming cherry trees) that we were, apparently, temporarily blinded to certain, um, imperfections.  Like the fact that the backyard has a tricycle track.  Laid over a gas line.  And the electrical cable for the house, which I found, quite frightengly, with my shovel a mere 6 inches below the surface of the ground, right under that nearest blueberry right there.  (Whew.  That one still gives me heart palpitations.)  Meaning this track is a permanent fixture in my back yard.  On an up note, it got my house prominent feature in my friend Drew's new novel, which you of course all should read because Drew is both brilliant and grills a mean steak. ( Plus he's kind to animals and grows flowers and is expecting a baby soon, so I'm guessing those royalty checks might come in handy.)

And that darling little playhouse, a miniature of the "big house."  Which still is (as is my attic) filled with lots of weird tables covered in astroturf that the former owner used to play with his die-cast cars on.  Yes, an adult, and yes, he's the same guy who poured that track... an odd pattern emerges...

So mostly this long and fairly pointless post is to introduce you to my back yard-- the good (you saw that yesterday), the bad-- speaks for itself-- and the ugly (we're not looking at the underside of the deck, now or evermore).  We are finally in a place where I can put a little sweat equity in.  We have a luxurious weekend with Baba (read: my children will be delightedly absorbed in all manner of book-reading, possibly unclothed walking around the block (the kids, not my mom), imagining and snuggling) and Adam and I will be breaking our backs outside.  He's building gates for our front fence, I'm laying that "rustic" (read: we're not doing it at ALL right, but hopefully it will look ok) patio using repurposed pavers I've been weeding around circling that blasted track for three years now.  I'm also cleaning out the playhouse, and doing a little more digging and moving of plants, and if my back holds out, maybe installing a sand box pit out there, too.  I'm feeling ambitious.  Spring fever, I tell you.  I. Love. It. 

So hopefully there will be a lot more beautiful pictures in this little blog's future.  But just fair warning-- there's a whole lot of ugly that goes into all that pretty, so you're going to be seeing some of that, too.