I’ll try to get back on the blogging wagon. I don’t know what’s been up lately, but I have not been interested in much of anything other than painting my nails. (Mothers everywhere should be pleased – I have had my nails perfectly painted every day for the past two weeks, maybe three. The moment it chips, I take it off and put on a new color. It’s a bit of an obsession, partially spurred by the fact that my nails are currently long and healthy, and partially by the nail stamping kit I bought, which is super cool.) Maybe it’s the change of seasons – I am really not looking forward to winter. Anyway.

Last weekend, , and I went on our annual apple orchard visit. did a great job of finding us a new orchard and planning the trip. We went to MacDougall’s in Hastings, which is not nearly as far away as I thought it might be. I didn’t take too many pictures this year (though has some on her blog).

Obligatory apple shot.

Sleeping bunnies. They had bunnies! And I totally didn't steal one to bring home with me, even though I wanted to. (Seriously, why can't I live somewhere warm enough to own a bunny or 12?)

It was super hot this year. Like, sweaty hot. Blech. This was unusual, especially since some of our October visits have required mega winter gear (sometimes we try to get ahead of that and go in September, but our calendars didn’t mesh up this year). There were also tons of little biting bugs that looooved me. I thought I was going crazy, but once I got home and the bites developed, I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating. I had over 2 dozen bites on my neck, chest and arms. They itched like crazy, and didn’t stop itching until Wednesday. I was not a happy camper.

Anyway, the orchard was a bit smaller (no tractor ride to the apples), and we filled up our bags fairly quickly, so we drove to downtown Hastings for a late lunch.

There was a working miniature train at the restaurant! How cute is that!

We tried going for a walk and hanging out down on the river (there was a bald eagle, but he/she wouldn’t come close enough for a decent picture), but the biting bugs were back and I couldn’t stand it.

It was a lovely trip, and hopefully next year it won’t be so hot (and maybe all the little bugs will have died from colder weather).

With volunteering, a change in ‘s workout schedule (no more training for the 10K, lots more kickboxing), the fall semester firmly under way, and the rapidly decreasing daylight hours, our weekdays are not what they used to be. We pretty much only have Friday night to do yard work together, and who wants to do yard work on a Friday night? That means the weekends require more labor than anyone should have to do. It will be over soon, and then I will be sad because there will be snow on the ground and it will be cold (I may have heard that there will be snow flurries this week, and I hope I’m mistaken).

We have managed to finally finish up the gutter project (not just cleaning, but there were some repairs needed, including replacing a down spout that dumped water onto our neighbor’s driveway) this weekend. We’ll probably have to check for leaves again once they all fall off our trees, but that’s minor compared to all the work we’ve done.

We also have the trench completely filled in. The majority of this work was done by , which included having to sift through a ton of rocks and dirt to get the dirt out. He also dug up the bushes that I’d cut down, and has started prepping that area for his hot pepper garden next year. The gigantic pile (OK, it’s like 2 cubic yards, so not really all that big) of rocks in our driveway is [hopefully] going away soon – thank goodness for Craigslist!

We’ve begun to plan out what we’ll have to do next Spring, and it involves renting some serious equipment. Did you know that there’s such a thing as a rock vac? The heavens will open up and angels will sing when the rocks finally disappear from our house.

(I wasn’t going to share pictures of the progress on our irrigation project until it was all over, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to show them to co-workers last week, after they were raving about how awesome I was. I had to prove that not everything is currently in a state of awesomeness. Thankfully, this is our backyard, and fully fenced in, and we’re the only ones to witness this… situation. Full photo documentation is on Flickr.)

Here is the sad state of the backyard right now. You can kind of see on the left the stumps of bushes that are now dug up for Prince Charming's hot pepper garden. On the right, you can see the sprinkler head for one of my veggie gardens. I finally got that bush trimmed this weekend, so it's no longer hanging over the "grass." We decided we're just going to have to till up this whole area next year, which is fine, since we were basically re-doing the boundaries on everything anyway.

This area will have more grass than it originally did. And I think those daylilies are all going to bite it. They are not endearing. You can kind of see our new water spigot there at the corner of the house. It's pretty cool. (It was part of the irrigation project.)

We’ve almost picked out the new edging bricks (well, we agree on shape and color), and have drawn out new borders. Saturday morning we had a guy come and give us an estimate on getting our trees trimmed. Good news? We have excellent, expensive [valuable] trees. Bad news? They’ve never been trimmed. Still haven’t gotten the written estimate yet, but it probably won’t be pretty. More good news? It will be fairly cheap to remove a really ugly evergreen that’s on the corner of our property, and we are super happy about that. I don’t have any pictures of it, because it’s that ugly, and seriously on the edge of our property (as in, it might actually be on the property line, and we need to ask our neighbors about that before removing it), but you can trust me that it’s a good thing it’ll go.

This weekend while was sifting out rocks and dirt to fill in the trenches and add to his hot pepper garden, I cleaned up that front garden we have (I only have one picture of it, from when we first moved in – we put in a bunch of ground cover, which got really out of control this year) and ripped a bunch of stuff up. I officially decided that it’s going to become lawn next year. That bush will have to go (oh, how sad – not really, since, as you may well know, I have waged a war on the large number of bushes that came with this house, and most of them are going to die sooner or later, because I think bushes are just terrible), and there are a few plants to transplant, but everything else was awful. My very first foray into decorative gardening failed, and I’m not at all sad about that. It will be lovely in grass, I promise. (It made a lot more sense, visually, for that garden to be there before the previous owner installed the fence, which cut through the garden that wrapped around the garage and up to the driveway. Now that the fence is there, it seems silly. And it’s full shade, which is a disaster. And right underneath a large oak tree that drops tons of leaves and other stuff. Just too much work for not enough reward.)

We also finally put covers on our window wells. We’d bought the plastic covers last fall, but since we couldn’t find ones exactly the right size, had to do some finagling to make them work. Two words: zip ties. Seriously. As long as they keep the leaves and snow out, that’s all we need. Also, the guy who gave us an estimate on painting our house noticed that some of the biggest chips are right above the window wells. Maybe this will help that problem? (Maybe properly prepping before painting will fix that problem. The last guy did some great things, but a decent exterior paint job was not one of them.)

I wore sweat pants all day yesterday, and that was awesome. In my defense, I spent 2 hours at the spa, and sweats seemed appropriately comfortable for that. And for the yard work, and cleaning up a bit in my office, and general laziness. I really should have done some sewing, but couldn’t bring myself to turn on my machine. However, I have a whole mess of projects prepared (cut out, that is), including quite a few knits, which are generally fast projects, so when my mojo comes back, I should be productive. I think part of my lack of desire to sew comes from knowing that what I really need to do is work on ‘s quilt, but I’ve hit a bit of a snag there. The fabric we picked out for the border? They’re out of it at my JoAnn’s (well, they have about 1 yard, and I need 5-ish), and so I have to drive down to Apple Valley to see if they have some. I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t. But it’s getting cold, and I don’t want to be cold at night, so I should probably get on that.

Now, see, this is what happens when I don’t blog for a while. You get paragraphs and paragraphs of boringness. My apologies.

I almost forgot to mention that I canned for the first time last weekend, and it all went well! All of the lids sealed just like they were supposed to! It was actually pretty awesome! I did 5 mini jars of pickled jalapenos, and 1 large jar of hot peppers packed in oil. I used the recipes I linked to here. Next up? Doing something with those apples from last weekend. They’re calling out to me. But first, I’m going to hang out with tonight, and maybe fancy up my nails when I get home.