Lint Llamas & Backyard Adventures

Last week I had fun in our backyard. I love that I got a backyard to garden in and play around with and hang bird feeders in out of this marriage deal. I trimmed our tree so now you don’t have to duck at any place when you walk under it (although if you watch me walk around it for the next few weeks or so you’ll probably be able to tell where you had to duck because I’ll still be ducking). Honestly, I only meant to cut off the dead branches.

I borrowed a leaf blower from a friend and blew the yard for the first time in 5+ years. OH MY GOODNESS!! There were a lot of little teeny tiny leaves in our yard – an inch of so thick across the entire patio when I got it to that point. (The tree I trimmed has little teeny tiny leaves). Apparently you should blow your yard more than once every 5 years. There were enough leaves to completely fill our trash can. I have to wait till garbage day before I can do the front yard. Maybe Brett will get me a leaf blower for my birthday because that was honestly a lot of fun. Thank goodness for the ear plugs I thought to get or I’d still be getting dust out of my ears.

This week we’re playing around inside the house – cleaning carpets and playing musical beds. (We also painted a bedroom the last two weeks, but more on that later).

When we got married Brett had a twin bed and I had a queen. We moved the queen into the master bedroom and the twin into bedroom #2. Bedroom #1 was used for storage. Last month I cleaned out bedroom #1 (it was all my stuff being stored in there). On Saturday we borrowed a carpet cleaner from another friend and cleaned the carpet in bedroom #1. That evening after it dried we moved the twin into there.

Friday night we went and bought a king-sized bed. Bed shopping is actually a rather fun married person date. We spent over an hour laying on different beds and talking. We started feeling a bit like Goldilocks trying to find the one that was “just right” and started wondering if the sales lady wasn’t just messing with us and they were all the exact same. It was a lot like when you go to the eye doctor for glasses and they put that thing up to your face and ask you which is better, one or two, one or two, one or three, one or three, three or four, three or four, until you are pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about any more and are afraid you’re going to end up with the wrong prescription because you can’t tell the difference!!

Anyway. We bought a bed. And it was delivered this morning. We got up super early this morning and moved the queen into the family room (for now) so we could get the carpets in our room cleaned before the new bed got here. The queen will eventually be moved into bedroom #2 but we have to clean that one out and clean that carpet first.

Moving all this seldom moved furniture, combined with the fact that the last time we cleaned the carpets was in September 2009, we’ve come across a lot of dust, and the carpets have produced a lot of lint. We definitely have more than dust bunnies going on here. I was trying to think of a larger fluffy animal to illustrate to Brett how much dust/lint there was and llamas came to mind. So we have dust/lint llamas in our house. Maybe you’re supposed to clean the carpets more than every 3.5+ years too.

This is apparently what a person does after finishing a dissertation.

And here’s a photo of a hummingbird taking flight from a branch of our tree and a swarm of bees that took up residence in our yard last Monday before moving on, just for fun. It’s always an adventure in our back yard.