Everyday Stupidities

Wow, has it been a month? Sorry... I remember saying that I would blog from the road, and I did have online access every day (if you follow my Flickr stream you had daily updates), but as for writing? I kinda put it off. We left Tacoma on May 11 (happy 41st birthday, Karen) and drove to La Grande, Oregon for the night... We buzzed halfway through Idaho and spent the night in Tremonten, Utah... Drove all the way through Utah for a surreal night at the Tropicana in Las Vegas... visited Hoover Dam and since we had the Grand Canyon on our agenda we spent the night in Williams, Arizona and then visited the Canyon in the early afternoon... Finally we got to auntie's house in Sun City, Arizona on the evening of the 15th. Here's the Grand Canyon [click picture for a screen-size version]:
We stayed with her through the weekend, taking a day trip to the ghost town of Congress and the future ghost town of Yarnell, and saw other relatives. So we picked up our stakes on the 19th and cruised over to Banning, California... California is a long-ass state so we had a second night there, halfway up the map in Merced... Determined to get the hell out of California we stopped driving in Ashland, Oregon, home of the perpetual Shakespeare festival... We had a date in Portland with a friend of mine after he got off of work at 6 p.m. so we had a great time in the historic town of Jacksonville to pass the time, then met up with him for a fancy dinner, and since it's only another 120 miles to Tacoma from Portland we were in our driveway at ten minutes until midnight on the 21st (see the odometer, posted at 4 a.m. May 23nd).

We slept and lounged for the next three days. So since that point, once we got our butts back in gear, we've acquired materials for our next home improvement project: we're connecting the edge of the in-spite-of fence we put up between us and the neighbors a year ago to the unused side of the house (having ripped out the rotting fence that was there over the last few months), ripping up the weed-choked ground on that side of the house -- an 8' by 25' area -- to lay down weed blocker and put in a couple 8' by 3' planter boxes which I'm currently building, plus there will be the cleanup / weed-blocking / re-doing of the path between the porch and the side of the house as well as the planting area in the front yard next to where we're doing all this work. I haven't posted any pictures on Flickr of the progress yet, so the two below are more than anyone else in the world has seen unless you come by the house (y'all are welcome):
The big picture on the left is the Before image, the huge mess that side of the yard has become. The smaller picture on the right is the visible progress -- stained and bolted a 4x4 to the corner post (because of where the phone boxes are on the side of the house, the gatelatch post on the house side has to be back a bit) plus stained and rigged up a 2x6 to close the intentional gap between my front fence and the neighbor's back fence, and I've cut down the weeds so I could spray them with Roundup. Once those are dead I'll rake up and rototill the area, plant the center post for holding up the fence and a gate, etcetera ad nauseum.

What else is there to report? Eh, probably plenty. Maybe next week.