What a summer! I have only been fishing ONCE this WHOLE SUMMER! And I have hardly posted at all - so I thought I would share more pictures of what has been keeping me occupied all summer.
In June my husband and I moved into a rental house. The prior renter had completely trashed the house and grounds - the landlord showed it to us when it was still in a very bad state…
(I know that isn’t technically a renter’s fault but this is just an example of what a mess the place was. This guy allowed his dog to pee everywhere, chew up the trim, and many other sad things.
So we decided to rent this house after an agreement with the landlord that he would fix up quite a bit of it, and we would help as well.
The sad part of it is though, this guy must have smashed hundreds of bottles in the backyard and surrounding grounds. We have been cleaning up broken glass since the day we moved in and it is so frustrating because I don’t think we will ever get it all cleaned up. Broken glass and an entire junkyard of rusted car parts. After we moved in we realized the backyard was only about 3 inches of dirt over concrete and we were sad because we thought our dreams of having a real garden were finished.
This is the backyard - with the huge ugly shed that the previous renter kept his dog in.
But then we realized that next door was a vacant lot which had, at one time, had a garden on it.
Well, Chris and I wanted a garden more than anything. And we found out through our neighbor, that the owner of that property didn’t really use it and we were welcome grow stuff there if we wanted to. Hehehe, that was all Chris and I needed. So, we got to work…
Add that example of back-breaking labor, plus some little seedlings we started at our old apartment…
And you get this:
And this:
We were in the garden every evening, water, weeding, weeding, and more weeding. That’s why we haven’t been fishing.
It has also been a dream of our to have chickens. It is not legal to have them where we live so we asked our landlord for his blessing if we decided to get chickens anyway. He approved and so we got these lovely ladies:
It was very hot that day so they were cooling themselves in my hostas. 
And then, after a while, we started getting these:
(You can see our ugly kitchen wallpaper in the background, lol.)
We replaced the big ugly shed with a little ugly shed that the chickens are in sometimes during the day if it is raining.
We try to free-range them as much as possible, but not when we are not home.
Now our time is occupied with struggling to make a winter-weather coop before winter gets here with our limited carpentry knowledge/experience/tools. I bought a craftsman table saw on Craigslist but none of the miter gauges I have found will fit it! And the company doesn’t make that part anymore so I’m still brainstorming alternatives.
Highlights of our new home have included having more space in order to be able to host people traveling through…
I will finish this post later - the chickens are clamoring to be let out of the porch! LoL!
I dearly miss you all!
Karli-Rae