Well, we have had 90 plus temperatures for the past 8-9 days, and a summer cold front is moving in, promising to drop our temperatures by 20 degrees tomorrow, with lots of rain, wind, lightning. Its starting already. This may compromise our plans for painting and planting tomorrow!
Directly after we moved in, and got visible damage removed from our grounds, and the physical structure repaired(!) (roof, windows, etc.), I contacted a landscape architect who lives around the corner, and whose kids went to school with our kids.
A good find! He seems to be of the same ilk as Paul and I, wanting a natural landscape for our surroundings. But boy, do we have a lot of work to do! It will be worth it, in the long run. And our long run is here!
I'm planting things I never planted before (being from the East Coast, you never think of things like Pawnee Buttes and lots of juniper!) But its fun and different. And speaking of different and being from Massachusetts, I never, ever thought I would be adding drip lines to plantings. (Water issues, I don't think so!) Thanks to my landscaper, who did a ton of work (all of the rock, rototilling and plantings of big bushes and trees, and laying the foundation for the drip lines), I'm not finding it that hard. But we are talking about 20-30-40 plantings total for the front yard, my shoulder is a-aching!!!!
I actually had to take a few days off to get the final plantings for one section of the front yard done. Arrgh! (By the way, ice packs work better than ibuprofen.)
One planting is an Allegheny Viburnum, meant to eventually block a really open area of our front yard:
I like it already. It seems happy and its supposed to grow really big. Time will tell.
One of my most favorite things about this property is technically called a "ditch," again, after 26 years living in Colorado, you'd think I would know about these things. But, no. It's basically a little stream that runs through some properties (not a lot, I don't think) that people can buy water rights from to water their properties. (That will be for another year!) Well, everyone here calls it a ditch. I'm calling it a stream. When we first moved in, it was low water, no sound, nothing. I opted to build it up with rocks, and a mini-waterfall so I could have the beautiful sound of running water in my front yard:
It's thundering outside, now. Happy Fourth of July!
Okay! On to what Kate was doing while Paul was painting this evening. Of course, I had the foresight in this heat (102 yesterday) to turn the hot tub into a cold tub - turned it on to sleep mode, 80 degrees. I soaked in a medium-cold tub, emailed peops, basically took care of my own personal business while watching Paul on the roof, painting. 
On to the Christmas cactus. She is alive, and struggling. The back story, I will save for my next post. But she seems to be happy, given her tumultuous life. Really tumultuous. Again, next post will be about my struggler.
Moving in here early August last year (in the aftermath of the tornado), we immediately noticed that all manner of trucks (really big trucks!), roofers, handicapped vans, landscapers, basically everything you can think of, turned around in our driveway. Why, you ask? Because its a huge driveway, right on the corner (kind of a dog-leg, if you will) on the street. Coming from a major thoroughfare. Basically, they turn around in our driveway once they realize they have taken a wrong turn. Our concern, other than the noise and ugliness of it, was the pavement and, you see that grate that covers our little stream? - we are responsible for maintaining and/or replacing it if it breaks. 
