startwin

As is typical for a long weekend, the weather changed and it's raining. But as we're spending most of it inside hockey arenas - both grandsons are in tournaments - it really doesn't matter. In between rain and games, however, I hope to get a bit of gardening done. Boring life, but I enjoy it!

rwin

Well, my wife is a Girl Guide leader so she out out camping with the patrol this weekend. Along with our kids who are Girl Guides.

I need to cut the lawn, plant a few hedge plants, pull some weeds.

Why do the weeds grow like - well - weeds but the plants you want always die. Maybe I need to find some half decent looking weeds and grow those.

Madmac

Yes, we had a Cottage flat in the centre of the Whirlies. I often polished the stainless steel golfballs on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Alberta_Rose

Dandilions are quite pretty (I keep telling my OH), but they do tend to take over the lawn!

rwin

Good idea! I've already got quite a head start

Biiiiink

The Detroit metro area's a funny place - bits of it make Wpg North End look posh, yet you also find some of the wealthiest suburbs in the whole US there too!

It's all about personal preference, isn't it? Without slamming Winnipeg, I can't wait to be able to travel again without hundreds of connections and a bank loan And if you could bring some clients to view this place and make us a silly offer I'll be doubly happy

Souvenir

I noticed that last year. Some really grim bits and then places like Troy that are awash with cash.

zalaben

packing packing and more packing! might make some time to take the kids to see Shrek The Third today though before they kill each other. Pissed with rain here yesterday so time to get out the house me thinks . 10 sleeps to go before the movers come....

Steve_P

Yesterday had company over for supper (dinner, tea, whatever) after they left as we were cleaning up I went down to the basement to put something away and found half an inch of water in one corner.

It had be chucking it down since about seven in the evening.

So it was out with the wet vac and try to mop that up.

It turns out the neighbor has set up a rain barrel at the corner of her house and the pipes have more turns in them than a pretzel. They have plugged with debris and it was dumping water right next to the foundation the ground was/is absolutely sodden it's like a bog between the houses and I guess some found its way into our basement.:curse:

Oh well the company makes up for all that it was a great evening up to that point.

Up early this morning to check and it's mostly dry again thank goodness but it's now snowing.

Oh well life in Calgary, it's never dull weather wise.

Alberta_Rose

I'm SO pleased we went with Mandi and family for a picnic yesterday, even if the weather didn't look promising, we had a lovely sunny lunch by the Elbow Falls.....

Right now we have about 3/4 inch of snow outside!!!!! (and it's still snowing hard)

or4ngecrush

working boooooooo

Piff Poff

Well we have got back from our 1st trip in our motorhome. We had a great time. As planned we went off to Drumeller and struggled to find a spot to camp in...NO we didn't book ahead Whilst BBQ'ing a fairly late supper the heavens opend and we were challenged with the task of opening up our awning, with the help of some campground staff (thankfully). We found out that the awning mechanism has some parts missing Bit some planks of wood helped propped it all up until the rain passed. After visiting the Hoodoo's and getting bitten to death by the mossies we headed down to Strathmore and camped out there overnight. The rain put our fire out, so an early night for us all. Drove back via Ikea Calgary through heavy rain and snow. Back in one piece and now we know what we forgot So we know to try not to forget it next time and hopefully we can figure out how to light the hot water boiler and get the awning fixed before out next trip....

Souvenir

Saturday. A nice day so we did a trial run on Souvette's idea of cycling to work. It's do-able. About 13km each way, if a bit hilly. Neither of us had been on a bike for a year so we were both walking a little funny when we had a stroll around the Byward market. That, combined with our padded cycle shorts, probably gave people the impression that we had just crapped ourselves. Got back home to find most of our neighbours sitting in their cars in their driveways. Power cut during the Sens/Sabres game. Great timing.

Sunday. Pi$$ed down. Blah day.

Monday. Nice day. Souvette decided to was the deck with her Mother's Day present. She eventually worked out that you do it with the spray, not the needle jet. Still, the intricate carving is quite pretty. I spent the day attempting to fit two 18"x80" doors into a 40"x84" parallelogram with no studs. I learned the art of extreme shimming and the neighbours learned some new Anglo-Saxon phrases. I'm still not sure what we'll do with the 4" gap at the top of the door.

Atlantic Xpat

We had a weekend of extreme gardening Newfoundland style.....

The Rock is basically, well, rock or bog. When houses are built on bog, they scoop a metre or so of bog away and backfill with a couple of metres of rock/shale/rubble/sand/treeroots etc etc. This makes digging any kind of hole a challenging experience. We wanted to dig out a couple of beds, plants some trees, oh yes and spread out 4 truckloads of soil to fill in the missing piece of of lawn. Given that we wanted to do this in a weekend, mechanical assitance was neccessary so I got to hire a mini 'JCB' for the weekend.

Saturday was lawn construction time. Spreading out the soil with judicious use of the loader and quite a lot of manually raking stuff. Hmm, and filling in the dirty great ruts left by the soil trucks. Saturday was also hazy, windy but as it turns out with a very high UV factor. I'm burnt. Very burnt in fact.

Sunday was digging a bed in the front garden, planting 5 trees and moving another truck load of topsoil to complete. It took all friggin' day even with the machine. By my estimation it would have taken a month without.

Monday was digging out another bed (probably will be a veggie patch), carting away the spoil to another part of the yard & dumping the remaining truckload of topsoil into aforesaid veggie patch. Plus digging out all the holes for trees were ever going to need in the next couple of years whilst we had the machine.

All of this was done in warm, windy and above all dry conditions, much to our (& the weather mans) surprise. (Today we're back to our normal +4C) A certain amount of manual labour was also required in the shovelling, raking and lifting department. Today I am mostly walking like a cripple & am glad to have come back to work for a rest!

Anyway, for your delectation & especially for dbd33 here is some excavator porn. It's part of our Canadian experience btw as living in the UK with a 14 x60ft garden never really justified the hire of heavy equipment for the weekend.

dbd33

A lovely bit of machinery it is too.

We had salt beef dinner last night, we were perhaps the only non-Newfies in Ontario eating it but the bucket was just the right size for mixing beet pulp and, having bought it, we had to eat the beef.

On the blog the OH describes the neighbour's providing a round "pen". What she doesn't describe is the fiasco I made of mowing it. It's 60' in diameter and made of rope strung between posts I pounded into the ground. After putting the ropes up I thought this would be a good chance to try a "rotary flail mower" that was lying around. The mower is a bit wider than the tractor, maybe 6' and the tractor had the bucket on making it a very long machine making a lot of noise and requiring a close watch on front and back. Under the watchful eye of the neighbour, the OH, and two horrified horses, I demonstrated how easy it is to lose track of one end while watching the other. I missed one post but all the rest needed setting up and pounding in to new holes.

Other than that we did lots of horse stuff, lots of trudging around trails that we'll ride in due course and we went to a barbecue with lots of dogs at which ours disgraced himself by paying no attention to the other dogs until he got it in his head to hump one, after which he wouldn't think of anything else. The OH said he was behaving Englishly.