Summer activities

We've been doing some fun summer things. We've gone on several hikes at the nearby state parks. This one is at Umstead Park.

We went to the pool for the first time with the Young Women. She's the cutest little swimmer!

 Allison was pretty indifferent to the water, but that may have been because she was hungry and distracted with eating her hands.

 And we sometimes spend time sitting outside on the hammock just looking around at all the trees.

One Project Down (mostly)

Yesterday, Jeran worked and got our garden area mostly finished. It looks awesome. It was a pretty fun project. I always like the ones where we dig in the dirt and work with plants.

A before picture. This is how it looked when we moved here (for a while we had our motorcycle on the back patio under a tarp). There were some very nice flowers that died and didn't come back after a year of neglect so I dug them up to plant tomatoes.

I have wanted to do something with this garden area for a long time. When our home owner's association got a few bundles of landscape timbers and gave some to each homeowner, we decided it was time to make the change in our back garden.

We decided to use square pavers to extend the patio area a bit to give ourselves just a little more room between our patio and our new raised garden bed and somewhere to set the grill so it isn't in front of our window doors. For the garden itself, to maximize space and the short light we get due to the proximity to the house and trees, we decided to make it an L shaped bed off the corner of the patio.

Anyways, after weeks of planning and digging and waiting and working, it is mostly done!

There is still a little work and cleanup to do. This is before the excavated dirt from the pavers was filled in. We still need a little more dirt, but not as much as we expected, and the dirt we ended up with turned out to be slightly better quality that I expected. A lot of it was clay but we used as much of the solid clay to level under the paver base.

"After"

But that's not really the final product. The hardest part may yet to come, as we decide what to plant and make it something that is both pretty and functional. I'm thinking some flowers and some vegetables... but I'm totally undecided. Also, we plan to get something to sit on and probably bring our grill home from it's summer vacation in a little while. So it might look something more like this professional artist's rendition:

Next on the docket are more kitchen projects. Like that tile! It will happen someday soon and we won't be living with a bare concrete kitchen floor!

Sports and fun

Now that fall is officially here, we have been so busy! It seems like every evening we have stuff and more stuff that we need to get done (like homework, Seminary lesson, YW, dinner, going to sleep early...) so we don't get nearly enough time having fun.

Fortunately we have something to do on a lot of the evenings that we DO have free. Since it is dark and usually cold in the evenings now, we switched from playing tennis to playing racquetball. It is kind of a hard switch to make but I've heard its a lot harder to move the other direction. I guess we'll find out come spring when we move back outside. We play these sports with some friends of ours and have a great time and get in some exercise while we're at it. The other day while playing r-ball I served the ball and turned around to see where it was going when WHAM the ball hit me - hard - in the forehead. It stung a bit and I got all teary but I was mostly just in shock. It was a hard hit! But I recovered after a minute and we continued playing. It is a lot of fun and is better exercise than tennis and a lot less precision is required (which is good for me if you catch my drift).

However, yesterday was a very warm lovely day so we headed back out to the tennis courts for one of the last games of the season (boo). It was great - perfect weather, good courts, fun, blah blah blah. My serve, which was okay in the spring then went severely downhill over the summer, is on the ups again so that makes it nice since I rarely did the dreaded double-fault. Even with that though, we lost again but it was close as usual.

We have also done some other fun outdoor activities recently. We went hiking at a nearby state with some friends from the ward. I had a really good time and want to go again! Hiking around where we live is so cool mostly because it isn't like hiking in Utah where you are tired out from all the elevation gains! Nope, we decided to go on the "Moderate difficulty" hike that was 2.75 miles long. I was worried because I'm not in great shape and was never a great hiker to start with but having been on it, I would say now that a Moderate hike here equals a Beginner hike in Utah. Or maybe more it's closer to an unpaved nature trail. So as a result, I now love hiking :) I hope we can go again soon while the weather is still good. Especially if the fall foliage is still around. Ooo-la-la!

Yesterday we played some good games of sand volleyball with 6 other couples from our ward. It was way fun! I haven't been crazy about volleyball previously either and I'd really only played in YW but is was great! we played a few sets, switching up the teams now and then, just really casual-like. Yay! I hope we do that again soon too!

It is really very ironic that now that the weather is cooling down to where it is often uncomfortable to be outside, I have found all these fun things that I want to go outside and do! We'll see how many of them I can fit in, but you can bet I will be ready next spring when it warms up again!