Nice weekends

I previously touched on the visit on the Saturday before Easter by our friends from Denmark. They have a son the same age as our daughter. We met them at a playground in San Diego, and we both moved back to this area around the same time, and we try to get together about once per month.

It's been a while since they've been to our place, so I was especially glad that we had good weather and beautiful spring flowers for their visit. Since I was having my exhibit, I didn't want to leave the gallery for long, so I stayed behind when my husband took them around to see some of the local artists. In between our few visitors that afternoon, I made chili for dinner and hid Easter eggs for the kids. They didn't seem to have as much fun looking for the eggs as I had hoped. They seemed very competitive and obsessed about who had found more eggs, so we had to pool all the eggs and divide the loot evenly between them. After that, tensions eased and they played well for the rest of the evening.

The following weekend we spent working in the garden. Our main project was to clean up where my husband had taken down a clump of ash trees last year. I liked the trees, but he thought they blocked the view and dropped leaves on the house, clogging the rain gutters.

He cut down the trees with the chainsaw last summer, and we cleaned up the branches and most of the wood, but several large pieces remained all summer. A few months ago, he took the back hoe to the stump and removed most of it leaving a big hole and an unsightly mess. This time he continued with the back hoe, breaking up the rest of the stump then leveling the dirt. Unfortunately, previous occupants of this house had used that section of the stone wall as a trash pile, so when he spread the dirt around over low spots in the lawn, it glittered with broken glass and other debris. We cleaned up all the debris from this undertaking and rebuilt the stone wall, then I spent the rest of my weekend picking glass and such from the dirt. I got a lot, but I worry that I didn't get all of it. We'll have to be very careful when going barefoot in this part of the lawn--something that we don't usually do because of the nettles and thistles.