Yardwork? What the heck kind of sailing blog is this? I was just re-reading some of my first entries, where we were freezing cold and dealing with leaks around the mast. Never would I have imagined that almost 3 years later we’d be in 95-degree heat in southwest Arkansas, 5 hours from the nearest saltwater, dealing with thorns in the landscaping!

No trips to the boat right now, no breaks in Jamie’s schedule, so unless a tropical storm threatens we’ll be dealing with house issues for the rest of this month. And I seem to have taken to yardwork. I never had a lot of time or patience for it in my former land life, but now that I am retired and the boat is out of reach to do boatwork, I’m finding it a nice break from Adler watching. I’ve spent the last two weekends weeding, edging beds, removing overgrown beds, etc. Hint: never, never, never use small stones as mulch. They don’t work and you might break your medium duty 15-year warranty rake trying to hack them back out of the soil and weeds.

Not having the boat around I still managed to get in my share of electrical work. I replaced the extension cord running out to the pool filter with outdoor wire in a waterproof conduit hooked to a waterproof outlet box. With my experience in boatwork I was undaunted when the large ground-fault protected plug from the filter didn’t quite fit in the box. I just enlarged the plug opening with a file and replaced the rubber “wasp-guard” that I destroyed in the process with duct tape. The difference between that job and doing a similar thing on the boat is that it cost me less than $100 and it worked first try!

Bud has been doing his share of yardwork, too. He decided to lift, regrade, and reset the cement pavers under the pergola in the backyard to get the swayback out of the patio. He also did a lot of the beds and yesterday had a run in with ornamental grasses. Bud came out the winner, the grass plants are trimmed, but Bud’s arms look like he was in a cat- fight.

Once all the beds were done I thought the front of the house looked too blah. The former owners had taken their fountain and potted flowers. So about noon, when I was finally done with all the yardwork that I could find, I set off to get some accent plants. Being Sunday in Texarkana, all the locally owned nurseries were closed (like every other locally owned business in town, including the restaurants). So I ended up at Home Depot where I bought two hydrangea bushes and a gardenia bush. The picture shows the hydrangeas newly planted in the front yard in front of the garage. I admit, they don’t add much color yet, but I have hopes. I put a picture of the little gardenia bush in the gallery.

Also in the gallery are a couple of pictures of hummingbirds. I put up a hummingbird feeder and we started getting visits the next day. At least 4 birds now come by on a regular basis. The last picture I added is a wasp, digging out his hole under Bud’s newly laid patio. He’s a cicada killer and is about a third the length of the hummingbirds. The hole he’s working on is the diameter of a quarter. Nasty looking thing, but they are not supposed to be aggressive. Let’s hope!