How you can tell I live in the city

How do you know that I live in the city?
I cut my lawn with a weedwacker.

Our backyard has been pretty shoddy in the past. When I moved in last fall, weeds were everywhere. Seth took all of them out before winter, and we just had boring dirt at the start of spring. We wanted to make our backyard more hospitable, so we tilled the soil, planted grass, and have faithfully been watering it. The grass grew slowly but surely, and I noticed a huge difference from when I went home for Maria's graduation to when I returned. Our grass had grown! But so had a bunch of weeds with it. (Biblical parallels, anyone?!?)

This afternoon I went to work on it, ripping out as many weeds as I could grab, then weedwacking the rest down to a managable size. Here are some pictures for a better picture of the progress.

This is a picture my dad took when I moved in at the end of August:


Here's a picture of the view out my bedroom window (Sarah took it; you can see me watering the grass and talking with Dan Carter on my cell phone). This was about a month ago


This is the backyard after I finished it today:



Isn't it great to see progress?!? I was pretty excited about it today. Seth was too, even though he left before he could see the finished product. His excuse was pretty good: he had to drive to New York City to be the main photographer at a wedding in Manhatton in the Four Seasons!

In other news today, Seth bought us a new trash can, as pictured below. We came home and immediately celebrated by picking up some trash on the street and using it! Also, some helpful people had cleaverly disguised some garbage as an advertisement at a local pizza place and put it in our door. This marketing happens several times a week, unfortunately, but this time we joyfully threw it away in our new can.

I also bought a new air conditioner. I had purchased on in the bitter cold of January this year for $40. The 7amps it requires to run blew our circuits, so I had to find a smaller one. As it turns out, the one I had was way too powerful for my room's size. I put it up for sale on Craigslist if any of you are interested! The cheapest retail price I could find online is $240 new. We'll see if I can turn a profit on the whole deal.