We are tired.

We had big, ambitious plans for the weekend. It wasn't clear that we were going to even come close to knocking everything off of our list, but, frankly, we kicked ass.

The office is no longer a dark hole of black and green paint:
Going...

Going...


Gone...



Just in the nick of time - my little sister is coming to visit us for two days starting tomorrow morning. Now we actually have a pleasant room for guests to sleep in.

The color is a silvery blue, instead of the gray-blue that I was initially aiming for. I knew I was running the risk of erring on this side because I was very concerned about not picking anything too dark (the room gets very little sunlight). The good news is that blue is my favorite color, so I'm happy with just about any shade.

We also had to completely dismantle one half of the L-shaped desk to get it into the room (it has been sitting in the living room waiting for us to paint). The upside is that the pieces are much lighter than the whole.

Putting the office together also freed up some room in the living room to actually put the furniture in place. If you squint hard, you can almost imagine this as a habitable room. Now J just needs to unpack his 23904823940283402 books and we will be well on our way to clearing the moving boxes out of this room.

Finally, we solved the bizarre backyard dog mystery.
Around 4 weeks ago the poo suddenly started refusing to walk on the grass in our backyard. She was fine on the back patio, fine in our front yard and fine wandering around anyone else's yard on walks. She simply would.not.under.any.circumstances voluntarily walk on the grass in our backyard. Even if her favorite person (me) stood 5' into the yard with a treat.
It was very bizarre. It all started one Saturday afternoon while we were out. There was a large thunderstorm while we were away and when we got back, she started up with this. I called the vet after exhausting all of my ideas and they suggested that maybe there had been a lightening strike in/near the backyard that had freaked her out. With their advice we tried to coax her back into the yard with treats and praise - still nothing. I spent an afternoon with the landscaping rake pulling all of the dead thatch out of the grass to see if that helped. No. We watered the grass repeatedly, thinking it was something in the rain. No. We thought maybe she didn't like the saw dust from the recycled timbers we'd used to build the raised garden bed - so we spread some top soil and new grass seed over the area where we'd been working. No.
Finally I thought that it might be the diseased apple tree in the middle of the yard. It was located in a position where the canopy reached right to the edge of the patio and covered the area of the yard that she was the freakiest about. The tree had to come down anyway because it is A. diseased B. non-fruiting C. smack dab in the middle of the yard D. growing into the overhead cable and phone lines.
This weekend it was only in the 70s and the best chance for outdoor manual labor in a long time. So we went for it - we took the tree down, picked up all the debris and raked the diseased leaves out of the grass. The dog now happily romps all over the back yard.

Before:

During:
After: