7.05.2014

Happy 4th of July!

We're pretty cute for 6:45am
on a holiday!
Busy day yesterday! And a nice calm one today, so finally getting some quality blogging time in. Ahh... Happy to get to visit some of my blogging buddies! Hello :)

Yesterday started with my second time participating in our town's Downhill Mile race, but this year my totally awesome friend Katie (@katieschmalzel) joined me!

Then Katie helped with some yardwork, which I am SO very happy to have finally gotten around to. You know that feeling of having a Thing To Do that irks you every time you think of it? But then you finally get it taken care of and it is the BEST feeling ever?? Yeah. This chore was like that.

The previous owners of our house did all the 'landscaping' in our backyard with piles of rocks that they used as borders around beds. I think they put in landscaping cloth to keep the grass from growing in the beds, but if so it was forever ago and the cloth is non-existent at this point. I tried last year to re-mulch, but it was not sufficient to keep the grass from growing, and I had given up on keeping things dealt with this year so the beds around our trees in back ended up looking like this:
I swear there's a bed under there, somewhere!
After about an hour of work digging the rocks back out of the dirt into which they had sunk, adding topsoil, new landscaping cloth and mulch and re-placing the stones, the beds now look like this:

Ahh... much better..
Strawberry rhubarb
and mint chocolate chip! Yum.
I'm very pleased :)

After all that work, we headed to the town Pancake Breakfast (as many free pancakes as you can eat! and adorable booths from local businesses!). After running and then doing manual labor, we'd definitely earned breakfast and made short work of some nice stacks of cakes. So yummy. :) Then we walked home and showered before heading to Boulder for some delicious cupcakes from Tee and Cakes.

By the time we got home we had about an hour to relax before folks came over for a BBQ, so we played with some SunPrint paper, and sprawled on the living room floor to rest. There might have been a little bit of a sugar crash in this part of the day. Yup.

The rest of the day was slightly more typical for the 4th - BBQ, movie to fill the time a bit, and then fireworks. All in all, pretty epic!

What did you do for the 4th? 

7.02.2014

IWSG - July

This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group, a bloghop dedicated to writers supporting one another through this crazy thing called 'being a writer'. 

So... Haven't blogged since last month's IWSG.. Yeah.. C'est la vie en ete. 

My little IWSG contribution is a moment of being glad for things like IWSG and Blog Blitz, and WRiTE CLUB (click on newer posts to read the first couple bouts! Good stuff!) because they help me feel like I'm still connected to the writing community even when I don't have the time or energy to be actively working on my current WsIP (is that the correct pluralization of WIP? help me out folks!). 

Most of my writing activity during the last month has been about reading. I read a LOT during the summer and I figure that devouring books is a good way to work on my skillz, right? Right.

How about y'all? How are your summer writing/reading projects going?