Yesterday was my official last day of work before starting my sabbatical. It was funny cause everyone pretty much kicked me out of the office a half hour before I was scheduled to leave :P They were all very happy for me and I'm excited as well! I've created a big list of things to do while I'm on sabbatical and I plan to keep everyone updated on my progress via this blog. Ramin knew I wanted to do a lot of projects as well so we had planned to make a trip to Lowes to gather all of our supplies. He is such a good planner because he was able to get a Lowes credit card before our trip and we won't have any interest for 12 months. We also had a $25 coupon as well. We ended up spending A LOT of money but it's for things we've been wanting to do for a LONG time.
I've included pictures of almost everything we got. First, we got 21 bags of mulch! You heard and see it correctly - 21 bags! Here's the reason. Our house faces South. There's nothing in front of our house for miles...just open fields...so there is nothing blocking the Southerly winds when they blow...and they do blow hard during the winter and spring. Sooo, that means almost all of our mulch we had laid down, has blown away! In fact, it's mostly all blown around the grass...it's horrible. So why would we buy more mulch if it didn't work the first time? Well, Ramin has a theory that if we plant more shrubs then it will help protect the mulch, plus he doesn't think we had enough on there the first time, it wasn't heavy enough.
So we move to the plants! We bought quite a few shrubs, all for the front yard of course. We bought a small spruce tree, it only grows to 5 feet. We bought some English Boxwoods (love those!) and some Burning Bushes (love these too, especially in the fall!) and I included some Lilac bushes for some color. We also bought these really cool red grass type plants, we figured they'd be some contrast amongst all of the green plants. So we plan to plant all of these along the side of the house, where we have all of the problems. We would have started planting today, except for the fact that it's been raining and cold all day. We hope to be able to do some tomorrow or early this week.
As you can see from the pictures, we also bought some paint. We bought a small can of very light green paint for the office (future baby room) and a 5 gallon bucket of paint called Almond Paste...it cost $90!! We were kinda shocked but it is the premium paint from Olympic so it better be good. I plan to paint both of the bathrooms upstairs as well as much of the wall in the great room. I will do that after my dad visits us for my graduation.
You can also see the annuals I bought as well. I'm going to re-pot all of my contains and fill them with petunias and some mums. I love watching how the petunias can fill out over the summer, they really grow great here!
So the gardening and the painting are my main projects, of course I've got a lot more to do! Today I already started working on my scrapbooking but that I've been neglecting for a while. I also plan to do tons of exercising and being outdoors. I also want to get myself really organized again and I'm even going to go to my mom's house and help her get her stuff organized as well.
It will be a busy month but I'd rather be busy doing these fun things I like rather than sitting at home relaxing the whole time, at least I'll have something to show for it all! What a great sabbatical this will be!
BTW - this coming week is my last week of school....and then I graduate on May 8th! YAY!
Jill and I love going out and taking pictures. This year though, we wanted to do some different kind of pictures. We usually opt for the traditional park with flowers everywhere, but we wanted to get a bit more rustic this time! I knew of some ruins I had seen on trips past Tooele so we decided to head out that way! It was a long day of driving but we ended up finding a few different places to take pictures and had fun along the way!
We took a detour to Mercur Cemetery, it was quite a hike for the kiddies but they had fun up there looking at all of the graves marked with rocks and such. They got kinda spooked but it was all in good fun!
This is Jill's daughter Aireonna on some old barrel we found at one of our locations, it was near Eagle Mountain somewhere.
Aireonna and Jill being cute in a lavender field!
We also stopped at Thanksgiving Point during the day as well. They have a ton of awesome spring time flowers and they have great places to take pictures!
Jill and Elijah having a mother-son moment.
At the start of the trip we stopped off at the Great Salt Lake lookout point.
Near some of the scary ruins there was also this railroad track. We managed to get some pictures before a railroad guy drove up and told us to be careful :P It was kinda funny.
Aireonna is turning into a good photographer finally! She took this one of us at Thanksgiving Point.
Jill at the scary ruins
Some pics of me at Thanksgiving Point.
And this was my favorite. An old horse corral near Eagle Mountain, the lavender field is in the background.
I've included pictures of almost everything we got. First, we got 21 bags of mulch! You heard and see it correctly - 21 bags! Here's the reason. Our house faces South. There's nothing in front of our house for miles...just open fields...so there is nothing blocking the Southerly winds when they blow...and they do blow hard during the winter and spring. Sooo, that means almost all of our mulch we had laid down, has blown away! In fact, it's mostly all blown around the grass...it's horrible. So why would we buy more mulch if it didn't work the first time? Well, Ramin has a theory that if we plant more shrubs then it will help protect the mulch, plus he doesn't think we had enough on there the first time, it wasn't heavy enough.
As you can see from the pictures, we also bought some paint. We bought a small can of very light green paint for the office (future baby room) and a 5 gallon bucket of paint called Almond Paste...it cost $90!! We were kinda shocked but it is the premium paint from Olympic so it better be good. I plan to paint both of the bathrooms upstairs as well as much of the wall in the great room. I will do that after my dad visits us for my graduation.
I'm down to the final stretch! 2 weeks of work left and 3 weeks of school. Yesterday I finally wrote and finished the biggest paper this semester - for my Drugs and Justice class. It ended up being 13 pages total, which Work Cited and a cover page....so about 10 pages of actual text. I also created a power point to go with it! Now all I have left to do for school is to write a paper for my philosophy seminar and then give an oral exam for my Aristotle class. I'm not too worried about either of those!
