160 s.f.

Here's the thing about the end of ski season: the yard work can no longer be avoided.  We'd intended to spend the day putting together our "72-hour kit," the emergency stash of supplies that every good Utahn who lives along the Wasatch Front fault is supposed to have.  But we made the mistake of turning out sprinklers on for the first time this year.  Most of them work but not three on the park strip along the front of the house - one of them was a gusher, in fact, as we'd forgotten the sprinkler head had snapped right off.

So while H made two trips to Home Depot for sprinkler supplies, I weeded all the backyard garden beds, cleaned last year's morning glory vines off the trellis (they've self-seeded and some new sprigs have sprouted already, so that's fun, although cleaning up the old dead vines is a pain and I think I may have to find some perennial vines instead - will hops grow here, do you suppose?) and then moved on to weeding one of the front flower beds and sweeping the front entry/patio and the garage.

Mowing is easier than weeding

I was pointedly ignoring the flower bed that runs along the front of the house - it's large and very weedy.  When H gave up with the sprinkler heads (still not working right), he came over to where I was standing, staring balefully at the weeds, took a look and said, "Sod it!"  He wasn't being English; his point was that if we dug it out and sodded over it, it wouldn't be so high maintenance.  So that's what we did, twenty 2x4 pieces of sod later.  It was kind of fun, actually, fitting the sods together like a jigsaw puzzle.  I'm not sure it looks great but it absolutely looks better than the junky flower bed that was there before.  And that's 160 square feet I'll never have to weed again.