morrowlife

Here are a few of the fountains at Longwood Gardens.  Great Art taken last summer courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Statue series.  Seriously, I’m sure there’s a statue in there somewhere.

Speaking of beautiful botanic gardens, we went to the Springs Preserve over the weekend to check out their more desert-related landscaping there.  Not quite the spectacle that Longwood Gardens is, but it’s nice.  We bought a membership and plan to go back several times.  There are hiking trails, sample desert gardens, and lots of classes on how to make your yard here beautiful.  Recommended.

Speaking of which.  The big news: we’ve ordered the backyard landscaping!  Also the backyard hot tub!  It’s going to be great!  They start work in a week or two.  We’re getting pavers, rocks (regular and river!), trees (including the lemon tree I wanted and the palo verde tree LRN4 wanted!), bushes, cacti (including a fencepost AND a few barrels!), walls, lights (up-facing AND down-facing!), raised beds, a watering system, and … wait for it … four (count ’em – four!) boulders!

We already submitted our proposal to the HOA and Gabriel the Landscaping Guy is ordering stuff.  Also, we ordered the hot tub today.  Yea for us!  Come hang out in our backyard in a few weeks, Loyal Readers!

Actually, I’m not quite sure how we’re going to fit all that cool stuff into our teeny tiny yard.  But if anyone can do it, Gabriel can.  I’m pretty sure of that.  Oh, and we only went about 20% over our total house fixing-up budget.  Which is pretty good when you get right down to it.  So I don’t feel bad about that at all.

On the negative side, my Beloved Pickup is in the truck hospital.  We went to get it smogged to get Nevada plates on it, and it picked that time to turn on its Check Engine light.  Sigh.  So my non-loyal-reader brother-in-law gave me the name of his shop.  I called them and they said to come right over, seeing as how it was a Beloved Pickup Emergency.  Haven’t heard back from them yet.  Cross your fingers for my Beloved Pickup, Loyal Readers.  Also for my checking account.

On the positive side, LRN4 and I now have Nevada Driver’s licenses, my car now has Nevada license plates, and I now have both Nevada and Clark County business licenses.  My business can now officially do business!  More to the point, my business can now make money!  Now to actually do it…

I’m making a tiny bit of progress along those lines too.  I’ve decided to take a stab at creating a few little Windows programs, for which I’m busily educating myself.  It’ll take a little while longer before I’m completely comfortable with Visual Studio, but I’m getting there.  It’s looking like it’ll be a reasonable transition from Objective C and Xcode to C++ and Visual Studio.

In the meantime, my existing plans to work on iOS and Android software are also moving forward.  In the good news part of that equation, my little Morse Trainer app finally seems to be catching some people’s attention.  In the bad news part of that equation, the app is free.  Still, there ought to be a way to build on that little bit of momentum and find a way to monetize my participation in the morse code community while still contributing valuable free content.  Just need to work on that a bit.

The best news of the day is that LRN4’s nasty case of strep throat appears to be marginally better.  On the bad side, she’s been taking the penicillin since Saturday and she’s not as improved as we expected.  So we’re only cautiously optimistic at best.  She’s really had a tough time of it.  Get well soon, LRN4!

We’re less than a month away from our cruise to Hawaii!  I’m looking forward to being at sea again and to seeing our friends Doug and Connie from California.  Can’t wait for the fun to start!

Made a few exotic purchases at Amazon today.  Check out these [amazon asin=B009OWLPM2&text=sporting goods]!  And these fantastic [amazon asin=B001F4TVD2&text=home furnishing accessories]! What a glamorous life I lead.

And it’s just about bedtime, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: gingerbread house arson!

See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 at 11:23 pm and is filed under statue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.