4th of July 'Holiday' Weekend

Normally, long holiday weekends are associate with relaxation, travel, and family time. And quite often (more often than not), that is the case for Eric and I. But this past holiday weekend, it was the furthest thing from that. We were in the trenches of yardwork. Literally.

We've been talking about doing 'one last big project' in our backyard for awhile now... the goal? Installing 4" conduit for an underground power feed to our house. The hurdle? Installing 4" conduit for an underground power feed. Yes... the goal and the hurdle were one in the same. With the garage in place now, we had to rent slightly smaller equipment to fit in our yard - just a mini-excavator this time. But it still tore up our entire yard with the dirt pile and trying to turn the thing this in was on treads. So we were left with just one small patch of decent grass left. And we were just getting our backyard to look nice.

So Project #1 (the conduit installation) took all day Friday. Nearly from sun-up to sun-down. We were literally returning the excavator to Home Depot at 10pm. Gotta love those long summer days... lots of daylight to do things like dig up your backyard. We didn't quite get everything we wanted done - two particular area were left open for some additional tie-ins with the conduit, so those hole would be filled in later, by hand. Which would turn out to be easier said than done. And Project #1 would lead to the necessity of another project... redoing the backyard. Again, easier said than done.

Saturday was spent taking care of the trench along the property line next to our neighbor's, so as to not leave a huge hole for them to fall into. The dirt turned out to be a very sticky, heavy clay that was anything BUT easy to shovel into the hole. So we took a break and ran out for supplies that we deemed necessary for the upcoming Project #2. We were both so worn out from the first day and were just moving at a slower pace Saturday. I guess we should've planned for that... but we did manage to get most of the trench filled in and even managed to freshen up and join the neighbors to actually watch the fireworks. It was the only social time we really gave ourselves all weekend.

Sunday was spent on Project #2 - trying to get the backyard to look, well, like a backyard again. We bought mulch, topsoil, grass seed and matting on Saturday to try to get to that point. The first half of the day was spent just finishing the sideyard next to (and in) the neighbor's - the mini excavator tore up their area more than we thought it would. Then, with what little energy we had left, we attempted to re-grade out the backyard so it was a little smoother, and put down grass seed. Again, we were wrapping up around 10pm. The yard still didn't look like much, and still wasn't done (we ran out of energy and matting to put over the seed). But hopefully the seed will take soon enough.

I have muscles in my body that haven't ached since I was doing my Insanity workouts. And I have more scrapes, bruises, and bug bites than I can count. Oh... and the kicker? On Friday, Eric snagged our cable conduit. It didn't break the line, that we could tell, but it pulled from the junction box, we're thinking - we've been without phone, cable, or internet since Friday afternoon. We'll know more when AT&T makes it out. Thank goodness we both have our cell phones. At least the weather cooperated all weekend - never got overly hot and never rained on us. Didn't stop the sweat from pouring our of both of us... but hopefully, it'll all be worth it when we have a nice backyard to chill in... next year.