getting to be the season

It's that time of year. The Outside Times have begun. We're striking preemptively this year, though. Yesterday we met with a very nice landscape guy. In addition to lawn service -- cheaper than both of last year's people, no less -- he also provided us with a quote to do pretty much everything that needs to be done in both the front and back yards to finally wrest control of our landscape back from the jungle. He'll be tearing out half-dead shrubs, removing chain link fence, filling in the hole from the pool (hallelujah!), clearing out vines, gigantic weeds that have turned into trees, and random rubble, and he'll be scraping and re-seeding pretty much the entire backyard. By the end of it, we'll have a very large expanse of grass, and nothing else. Which is exactly what we want, for now.

I just emailed him and accepted his quote, and we're talking timeframes now. Don wants to tear out the rusty aluminum shed in the middle of the yard and jackhammer up the concrete pad it's resting on before the landscape crew starts work. So we've got to figure out when we're going to do that, and how much notice we need to give the crew, and how long the work is going to take, and all the other stuff. The tedious administrative details (and hefty chunk of money) can't dampen the sheer glee I'm feeling over the thought of having a real backyard by summer, though. Backyard barbeques! Crab feasts! Touch football! Picnics! You're all invited.