RIP Grassy Jungle
July 3rd, 2005 will forever be remembered as the day the jungle was destroyed. Laura and I went into the backyard and totally demolished the 3 ft. tall razor grass filled jungle. It took about 2 hours and 6 55 gallon garbage bags full for grass later and we were finished. We put our new little mower into action and now amazingly enough, we have a yard. There are all these little stalks where the tall grass was, but I'm hoping that those either just die and wither away or they get scaled down and grow little grasslings. We'll see.
This weekend, Friday night to be exact, Laura and I went up to my parents house (Sans parents) and hung out up there. After much debate we decided to go camping in the infamous "Brad & Mike's Camping Spot". Always a good time and we've yet to have any problems going up there...even if there are Posted signs up all over those woods.
Anyway... so we go camping up there, bring the usual assortment of goodies...S'More Stuff, hot dogs, a lighter, news paper and other odds and ends, but more importantly we brought the one necessary item for when you are in the woods in mid-summer... Bug Spray.
Or so we thought.
Turns out that the bottle that I grabbed was actually 9 year old Skin So Soft that I think actually ATTRACTED mosquitoes more than it repelled them. So after setting up and getting the fire up and going the little bastards were kept at bay from the smoke, but after the fire went out...round 1:00am, Laura and I turned into sweet sweet mosquito treats. Not a good thing. So we tired to sleep but it was useless, there was no way it was going to happen. So not only did we have little crawly bugs all over the forest floor on us (oh yeah,.. we don't ever use a tent) but we also had those blasted mosquitoes buzzing in our ears. So...we decided that a nights sleep was pretty important to us, so we were going to walk back to the car. Sounds like an easy task, but as it turned out it wasn't. One of the OTHER essential things that we forgot to bring was a flashlight. So... I used the next best thing.. my cell phone.
My cell phone has an amazingly bright screen...for a cell phone. It's a rather lousy flashlight, but it did the trick... or at least till it died 1/2 way through the mile trip back to the car.
Something you have to understand about this whole situation is that we're in the middle of the woods. There's a very steep drop off right next to the main trail that we're heading to, so we are being super cautious about that, but the REAL problem is that there is no moon out, so it is TOTALLY dark in there. Literally you could not see your hand in front of your face it was THAT dark.
So anyway, we also brought along with us one of those handy-dandy lighters that's really long so that you don't burn your fingers. The problem with those as a "torch" is that they blow out every time you start to walk with them. Anyway, long story short we finally made it back to the car.
Moving on... Laura got stung by a Yellowjacket...twice..she had a spined looking little bug bite her and she broke out in hives, then later on found a deer tick on her, so now she's convinced she's got Lyme Disease. Unfortunately, that is a possibility as unlikely as it may be. We'll hope that she's just worried over nothing.
Anyway, so last night we had a BBQ and all that for the typical 4th of July celebration. There were a few people, but nothing crazy.
So last night we decided that we were going to the roof to watch the fireworks. Of course the person next door to us has a 4 story house instead of a 3 that we have, so they were really really blocking our view of the fireworks. So we did what anyone else would do, we brought out ladder up and got on his roof. Well, somewhere in between the drunken rankings of our guests, the jumping up and down and just general misbehavior an elderly Italian man comes walking up the fire escape and proceeds to yell at us in Italian. Don't even know if he understood us, but whatever. I'm just hoping that this doesn't amount to anything. We weren't damaging anything, but whatever. Crazy Italians aside, it was a nice place to watch the fireworks.
So when we moved in, the landlord decided to put up a fence for us (very nice one) and it happens that they had to do some concrete work to get the fence in and they left this huge like 5'x 10' board in our yard that's covered in a thin layer of concrete. Not that big a deal, but Laura couldn't lift it with me so we just never got rid of it. Anyway, so last night we finally put it into good use. It's currently set up as a beer pong table in our back yard. Good times.
I have some pictures of Laura tending to the Jungle that I will post when I get home so that you all can see the massiveness of our weed situation.
P.S. Fantasy Football season is coming. If you haven't signed up for the league let me know, and I'll give you the info.