Nothing like a little landscaping to rid your front step of skinks.

Its a proven fact that I am horrible at blogging about our house projects, as I nearly always forget to take a before picture.  So let me paint you a word picture of what this area in the front of our basement window looked like, for those of you who haven't been over for cookies yet.  It was a giant rock garden.  Oh, so many rocks.  Some that were quite large and heavy, all the way down to gajillions of little pebbles filling in all the little spaces.  So, so many rocks.  And then there were some really nice, old wagon wheels.  And then this metal silhouette thingy of maybe a cowboy and a horse?  I can't even remember.  We threw it away really quickly.

So over the last couple of weeks, Brad, Willa, Mom and I removed alllllll the rocks.  And pulled all the grass that was growing in the rocks.  And then dug up the weird brick border thing that was buried halfway underground.  Then we put down some of that black fabricy stuff to hopefully prevent the grass from growing again and planted 2 very pretty azalea bushes, threw on about  7 bags of wood chips, and made a nice border out of some edging stones.  It looks so much better now and as an added bonus - the weird family of legged snake creatures has moved out of the area now that there aren't all those rocky crevices to hide in!  Granted, we weren't aware of the creatures until we started the project and disturbed them.  But its nice to know that they are gone:)  During the project, Willa also discovered a love for worms.

Men who can pull off tank tops. Few and far between.

I'm pretty sure I have mentioned him before, but I just so happen to have an imaginary, gay-man, best friend who has a blog and whose life I would like to live for a few weeks.  Maybe months.  I guess he isn't technically imaginary since he is a real life person but he seems imaginary since he lives in a magical sounding place called Hollywood and he has a magical job, which is being Emily Henderson's assistant.  Nonetheless, he is real.  I usually catch up on his blog every few weeks or so, and I just did and was especially impressed with what my best friend had been up to since the last time we "talked".  The most important post was the one on treehouses.  I read this, and it made complete sense to me that Orlando and I befriended one another.  Then I saw this picture that he snapped at the pool, with our other friends, where there is Red Stripe and pink H&M sunglasses and I got really sad that we live so far away from each other.

Don't be scared for me.  I have always had an over-active imagination.  And don't be scared for Orlando.  I can't afford to stalk him.  But for love of my eyes in the summer, someone go to H&M and buy me those sunglasses.  I'll get you my mailing address.