Dad helped get it up into my yard – he pulled it with the tractor. He was able to pull the whole thing into the yard, but once it got on the softer ground it needed to be cut in 3 pieces before he could get it to where I needed it so I could cut it up, split and stack it.

Becky and I worked on that for a little while last night after I got home. I haven’t done much manual labor over the Winter – I’m not used to it at all! Maybe after I work on firewood for a few weeks I’ll get into a little bit better shape.

I’m about to make an admission now about something stupid I’ve done, and have learned a lesson the hard (and expensive!) way. Last year, I neglected to check/change the oil in my riding mower. Some of you already see where this is going. Yep, it finally caught up with me and the motor seized on me. I added some oil back in and had to force the motor by hand to turn some so I could work the oil back in and get it started again.

I mowed the yard a couple of times without incident after that. But that 3rd time it really caught up with me. I’m not a motor-head, so I don’t know technically what happened, but I can say all the insides started making a racket and something let go. There’s a hole in the side of the motor about the size of a golf ball.

We only needed to mow one more time after that, so we borrowed Mom & Dad’s riding mower. Wouldn’t you know, one of the belts broke. So we gave up on mowing the rest of the yard and decided to make another go of it this Spring.

When I ruined the motor in my mower, I looked online to see how much it was going to hurt my wallet to replace it. All of the prices I found were pushing $1,000 by the time I paid shipping & taxes. Once I noticed the weather was warming up, I remembered I needed to do something about our yard. I looked online again and found a motor for roughly $630 shipped. It’s on its way to my house now. Hopefully I can get it changed this weekend and actually get my yard mowed.

So yes, I’ve learned a lesson. I’m learning overall to be more disciplined about different things, whether it be finances, maintenance or whatever. I’m finding it to be less stressful and less expensive.

We bought Braden an RC boat, and he was dying to take it out to the pond to try it out. He was pretty excited.

It’s always fun to get to spend some time together with family. It made for a relaxing evening, even though the bugs were out like crazy. Oh, and it was hot and humid.

The first thing I did was get the tiller and run it through the whole garden. It was beginning to look like part of the yard with all the grass..er..weeds growing in it. That by itself cleaned things up nicely.

I had 14 healthy tomato plants, plus one more that was really thirsty. I got those in the ground. We’re not planting quite as many things this year, so I had some extra room for tomatoes. I left extra space between the plants so it would be easier to get around them all once they start bearing.

I also got 4 each of some bell pepper and jalapeño pepper plants. Those all looked good except for one..it was a little thirsty as well.

I had wanted to plant some gourds, but never got any seeds from them last year. Well, where they were growing last year, some more started to come up. So I moved some of those plants to another part of the garden.

The same thing happened with cucumbers. We bought some seeds this year, but some of them didn’t come up very well. Some of the old cucumbers from last year started growing again, so I moved those plants to the cucumber row.

I planted some beans that a family in our church gave us – Turkey Craw. Everybody seems to like them pretty well, so we thought we’d give them a try.

I also had to replant the okra. I saved some seeds from a few pods last year, but those never came up.

It was a nice evening to work, and a great time to get it finished. We got some good rain last night, and the thirsty tomato and pepper plants revived and looked strong.

You can’t see much yet, but here is the garden as of this morning. (Click to enlarge)

Monday evening when I came home from work, Becky and I set to work in the garden. First, one little bit of something funny. We let the garden go last year. We didn’t get near as much out of it as we should have. It got all grown up with weeds so that we couldn’t do anything at all toward the end of the growing season. Onions are hearty little plants. Before anything else started doing anything, whether it was grass, flowers, trees – you name it – we had onions in our garden from last year. We have two perfect rows already. Sweet! One less thing to have to worry about planting this year!

So I got the tiller out on Monday and worked up the ground a little more where we’d be planting. We put out okra, corn, cucumbers, carrots, squash and watermelon. We still need to put out some green beans, peppers and tomatoes.

Now I’ll be outside every day checking to see which seeds have sprouted first. Then we get to work hard to keep weeds out of it this year. I’m determined not to lose it this time!

Hopefully today when I get home from work I’ll get outside and cut down another tree to use for firewood. I’ve been needing to do that all Spring, and Spring has gotten away from me. I really want to try to have enough this coming Winter to last us all Winter long so we don’t have to run our electric heat any more than we have to.

There’s always work to be done in the garden. I’m actually kind of proud of it this year. Becky and I have been able to get out and keep it pretty clean from weeds and everything this year, so it looks much nicer than it did last year. We’re already getting some squash and zucchini out of it, and Becky has eaten a few cucumbers that have come in. Soon we’re going to be covered up by a lot of this stuff and we’ll be scrambling to get it canned and/or frozen.

Yard work never ends either. It seems like the yard was just mowed yesterday, and it needs it again. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take care of that this weekend sometime as well.

Yep, we’re staying busy. I mostly enjoy it though. I don’t enjoy being worn out from it, but I do enjoy the good sleep I get as a result.

The faster time flies, the more things need to get done, and the less time you have to do it. Do you see a pattern here?

I suppose that the biggest reason I haven’t been able to get a lot accomplished lately is because it seems like it has rained non-stop. My garden is loving it, but I can’t give it any attention because if I try to walk through it, I’m up to my knees in mud.

My yard desperately needs to be mowed. I can’t, however, because, you guessed it – it’s raining! And the more rain it gets, the more (and faster) it grows.

Overall, I’m thankful for the rain. The last couple years were a little dry and the garden needed to be watered by hand. So far, there’s no need at all for that!

I’m looking forward to things drying out, though, so I can get back outside and take care of some work that really needs to be done.

Things have been picking up at work, first of all. We have 9 servers that need to be rebuilt and reconfigured. These servers are what our virtual infrastructure runs on. “What’s that?” you may ask. I’m so glad you asked! In a nutshell, a virtual infrastructure is a set of servers and network configurations that run on other servers. This is a good thing, because on these 9 servers, we have over 100 virtual servers running. So rather than having over 100 physical, real servers sitting in our datacenter, we only have 9. But we still get the benefit of the power these 100 servers offer us.

At home, well, the weather is changing. Spring is here and grass is growing. Along with weeds. Flowers too. This means mowing, weed-eating (Gotta get that weed eater fixed!) and gardening. I’m honestly excited to start the garden again this year. It just needs to dry out long enough to be plowed and tilled really well so that I can get some seeds in the ground. Spring means it’s also time to start working on getting firewood for next Winter. I’ve blogged about that in the recent past, so I won’t say much other than that I’ve gotten a pretty good start, but there’s a lot more to do.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we’ve been busy at church. Becky and I are, as most of you already know, teaching the teenage Sunday School class. I’m also in charge of the youth choir. We’re also working towards getting a teen visitation program going, as well as other youth ministries. I’m not sure I knew exactly what I was in for when I became the Youth Director, but the Lord had it in His plan, and Becky and I have been reaping blessings from it already. We’re thankful the Lord is using us, and praying that He will continue to do so, doing our best to stay in His will. These youth are a great bunch to work with. Our prayer is that they’ll have such a desire for God that we’ll be the ones trying to keep up with them!

In my last post I talked about how hard I worked for about 3 hours cutting and splitting firewood. Well, yesterday I did some more work with firewood. How exciting.

First of all, I woke up feeling like garbage. I really felt worthless, no joke. I was sick at my stomach, my head was all clogged up and I was still sore from the work I’d done on Saturday. Ashamedly I stayed in bed until 12:30 yesterday afternoon.

So once I woke up and got a little something to eat, I got a little strength and decided to do something useful. Last year I built a little shed on the end of the house to keep a decent amount of firewood closer to the house so we wouldn’t have to go halfway through the back yard to bring another load of it inside in freezing temperatures. I finally got the shingles put on it yesterday. I still need to trim the edges, but at least the rain won’t leak through the roof on it now.

I did a few other small things around the house after that, but nothing major until the evening. I used my dull chainsaw to cut down a very big oak tree to be cut up for firewood. It fell across the road, which was the plan, but it also tore up my yard in the process. It shouldn’t be too bad to fix up.

We (my dad and I) had to cut the tree in half for his tractor to be able to pull it on up into my yard. My goal this evening is to get my chainsaw sharpened and at least get started on cutting the tree up – I’ll probably focus on the top half for now so that I can avoid splitting more for now. Maybe this weekend I can do some more of that if it stays dry enough outside.

So yes, I’ve been taking advantage of this warm weather. It’s supposed to turn cool again this week, but at least it won’t be freezing outside the whole time. I’m ready for Spring to announce itself boldly and get things rolling.