I woke up this morning with a sore back, stiff legs, and raw, bruised, and blistered hands after spending all day yesterday attacking a landscaping problem in our backyard. A while back I chopped down two medium-sized evergreen trees near our oak with the intention of eventually digging out enough of the root systems to be able to put a border around the oak and seed the remaining area. This process of extricating a tangled knot of mature roots and laying brick took the better part of ten hours (though things picked up considerably when we went out and bought an ax part way through the process – as opposed to using a handsaw and shovel).

This first picture is a look at the project part way through the process. It’s a little fuzzy, but you should be able to see the ridiculous number of roots I ended up fighting with. The next two pictures are me blasting away with an ax at the pine stump and at the partially buried roots. The dogs weren’t much help as they kept wandering over to plop down on the fresh dirt. A few more action shots on Flickr if you’re interested.

And finally, here’s a look at the nearly finished product (wood chips to be added) and a look at our cheery sky later in the evening. I have more digging and earth moving to do today, but I think I’m going to make it way less intense than yesterday (Frisbee break at 4 pm!)

It’s been hot the past few days. Not crazy Southwest US hot mind you, but we were hovering right around high temps of 100 degrees. Really, we’ve been coping just fine though. I got out of work on Thursday after sitting in full blast air conditioning all day and almost savored the way the heat swallowed me up as I drove home with the windows down. You know that feeling in the winter when you sit on a forced air heat vent and the hot air billows up inside your shirt? It felt something like that.

We’ve also found that keeping the windows in our house open all night (temps right around 60) and by selectively closing windows and blinds as the day progresses that the house stays relatively cool until early afternoon. By mid to late afternoon it starts to cook a little, but as soon as dusk approaches the winds seem to pick up and the cool returns.

This evening was exceptionally pleasant. I spent much of the day doing yard work (tearing out some of our in-ground sprinkling and starting to prep the area around our oak tree for some landscaping) and took a much needed break in the breeze around 6:30. Mary made Chinese food and we sat on the deck eating this and drinking Hefeweizen. Not too shabby.

Went out hiking this afternoon off of Highway 12 with a friend I’ve hiked with a couple of other times out here. We tried to go in a different direction by fording this river (Tieton River I think) which ended up being a bit of a dicey proposition, particularly in bare feet, though I was able to snap the self portrait you see below while thigh deep in rapids. Unfortunately after another ten minutes of hiking we hit barbed wire and private property signs and, after a bit more lateral movement, were forced to retrace our steps.

So we headed up the rock in the other direction and ended up having a really fun afternoon of scrambling around on crumbly slopes in a gorgeous area. I always look at my pictures after getting home and they never quite do justice to the scenery. It was a very vertical area, lots of places to feel precarious, rock spires, rock stairways, even found a couple of holes to crawl through (you should be able to see one behind me in the bottom left picture).

Another bedroom painted. Mary did most of the work on this one. The walls are Cornflower Blue (Valspar from Lowes) and I’m digging ’em. We like to keep things reasonably colorful when we can without going too crazy. Nora appears a bit strung out from the paint fumes though.

This past Tuesday was a field trip day at work for me. We rode up to Snoqualmie Pass to tour some of the future project work sites. The first four pictures below are all from around the Gold Creek area. Bottom left is looking at Lake Keechulus and bottom right is Lake Easton.

The more I learn about this project, the more I realize what an interesting project it is to be a part of. Heck, some environmental scientists are busy working on clean-up projects in the middle of some asphalt parking lot.

Other than that, we’ve continued with our weekly Frisbee games (which are now being played three times weekly – we played for thee hours on Tuesday night which was a solid end to a fun day) and are currently resuming painting of the few remaining rooms left to be painted in the house.