Not-Friday bullets - May 30, 2020

I just couldn't be light-hearted and blithe yesterday; the world was too sad a place. It still is too sad a place, but we have to keep moving forward, don't we?

• They say gardening is good for the soul, so we did quite a bit of soul work these past couple of days. The weather has been gorgeous and we took advantage of it. First I want to show you the before pictures of the area we have been working on.

This is looking towards the front of the house from the drive. Do people really live here? You'd never know it, huh?

The "garden" across the front of the house. There really are peonies and iris in there somewhere.

This is the small garden right in front of the parking spot for the van.

That same area looking the other direction.

This is looking toward the front yard from the sidewalk going up to the house.

Same spot, looking across the front.

• Here was the front yard after yesterday's work.

We managed to cut down enough volunteer bushes to allow J. to get into the yard with the mower. This helped immensely.

You can see I got about halfway through by the time I was ready to head in for a shower.

Here is the path from the front porch down to the van. Now it's just overgrown on one side, which I will slowly reform into an actual garden.

• And here is where we ended up after another day's work.

I did some cleaning out and cutting back in the small garden in front of the parking spot.

I got all the weeds and bushes cut down along the drive, and J. seeded the lawn to try to get more grass to grow in it.

I even uncovered some desirable plants, such as these ferns. I ran out of steam, but have some other plants to add around here.

That view from the end of the yard to the house. Look! People live here.

• At one point A. offered money to anyone who could climb one of the trees. Here is L. desperately trying to get up to the first branch.

• I have seen a lot of reading lists dealing with the subjects of racism, diversity, and white privilege. One book I would add would be, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School by Carla Shababy. I found it to be a challenging book. Challenging because it did force me to look at some issues in education from a very different angle. Highly recommended.
• I received a gift this past week, and kind of love it.

Currently I have it sitting on the table by my reading chair.

But I'm afraid it is a bit lost here. My family know me, after all. Do you think it might be over the top to take it with me to new doctor's appointments? 

• The goose, Dahlia, is still broody. I did see them together briefly so that I could figure out who was who.
• The baby robins in the nest under out mailbox are getting much bigger. So big that I wonder how they all manage to fit inside the nest. It looks a wee bit crowded in there.
• Yard work is not the only outside project that was being worked on. When we had all that rain a couple of weeks ago, the gravel around the culvert was nearly all washed away. Today, J. and M. worked on figuring out how to repair it. Here is where they were starting.

And here is the current progress.

• M. has also been making significant progress on the pond.

It's becoming hard to tell it was a hot tub previously, huh?!

• We finally finished The Wonderful Adventures of Nils! There was much rejoicing. As much as it needed a significant amount of editing, I actually liked it. Well, at least the parts about Nils and Goosey-Gander and the wild geese. We all became rather attached to those characters since we had spent the better part of three months with them all. In fact, I was a bit surprised when I teared up a little bit at the end when Nils has to say good-bye to Akka, the leader of the wild geese. Go figure. 
• We are now reading A Wrinkle in Time for something completely different. L. has already read it, but is happy to listen to it. I have now reached the point with the youngest group of children where it is beginning to prove difficult to find a book that no one has read. 
• D. can now walk all the way across the slack line. 
• Finally, because everyone could use a little something to smile about, even if it is only 9 seconds long, enjoy our happy ducks when they discovered that pond had water in it.