While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand. We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn. We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up. Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round. The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.
Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website…. and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected. It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts. The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess… were gathered in a lawn with no trees. Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.
The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom. This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading. This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work. I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area. I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.
This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me. I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile. I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.
While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity. We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of. We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.
I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly. The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem… if we actually used that back deck. It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it. So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.
A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year. I can already tell that we need to find two things this year… firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off. Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off. Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink. So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening. All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.