Drains, Gardens, Grass Seed, Wii Fit and Darth Vader

Ok, so time for some updates:

About 2 weeks ago I got my CPAP mask, and boy is it uncomfortable. I feel like it does help, but I wake up in the middle of the night with a small panic attack that this thing is on my face and end up taking it off. The idea is it’ll keep me breathing properly all night which means better sleep -> more energy -> easier to lose weight, etc. I have noticed I have more energy, but that might just be placebo.

For mother’s day I got Jackie a Wii Fit, and have been using it steadily for the past few weeks- as a matter of fact, yesterday was the first day I missed. I’ve been doing some of the stuff in there to help with my balance and posture, which are totally screwed up because I’m a lazy SOB.

I’m also slowly getting into this whole home ownership thing- last night I spent 3 hours snaking the utility sink drain so the basement wouldn’t flood when jackie did laundry. She’s out of town for a few days so I had the opportunity last night to do some stuff that I couldn’t do with Ian around. If I had to guess, it looked like bits of candy wrapper or something from a pocket made it’s way out of the washer and into the pipes, where it caused clogs and was unaffected by the small fortune in draino I tried. Now the floordrain is draining like a champ. Hurray.

Also started patching the lawn- tried laying down grass seed in a couple places, but most of it washed away. Where it did come in it looked great (I’m using the el cheapo meijer grass seed in the white and green bag), so I tried again, but the soil quality was just crap. Fortunately meijer had super cheap bags of potting soil as well (more on this later) so I grabbed a couple and dumped nice black soil on the bare spots- grass popped through within a week- AWESOME.

So I did the entire back yard like that. All the damage that was done last year with the weed-b-gone/roundup mixup should be mostly fixed within the next month. I’ve also overseeded the whole backyard and frontyard with this seed because it was so good. $50 worth of grass seed and $15 worth of dirt went a looong way towards making the yard look nice; even then I have 2/3rds of a bag of seed left- I’ll save that for another month or so.

So, back to the soil- why was I looking at soil? because we decided to tear out the ugly landscaping behind the house and put in a small garden- chives, cillantro, hot peppers, jalapenos, watermellons, pumpkins, carrots- even a few stalks of corn. This was our trial run, so I’m not expecting much- mainly just trying to figure out what we can grow back there. I used a garden weasel type thing to tear up the ground, extended it out so it was relatively even for the length of the garden, then put in a little white fence to keep Ianasaurus rex from stomping everything flat (which almost works) I also dumped some potting soil on top of the garden, but too little too late I suspect- hence I’m making sure to put plenty of miracle gro on it to see if I can get stuff to grow.

While getting more soil I saw some asparagus roots and raspberries that looked pretty cool, so I decided to expand a bit- also picked up a cherry tomato plant. This time around I turned the rich, black potting soil into the ground before I planted, and another bag on top of the asparagus for good measure. On our way out Ian wanted a cantaloupe, so we ended up saving the seeds and planting that as well. I’ll try and get some pictures of it when Jackie gets back with the camera.

Oh, and while I was gardening, I knelt on a rock and tore up my knee and had to wear a kneebrace. Good times. I was supposed to get a ‘just in case’ x-ray this weekend but ended up having to go to a housewarming in Grand Rapids- by the time we got back, the pain was almost gone so we skipped it.

OH, and I got a weedwhacker with my refund money- hurray!