this and that

Saturday was a bit of a hodge-podge day for us, but a nice one nonetheless.  H hopped on his road bike by 9 a.m., planning to ride up through Emigration Canyon and back for a nice fifty mile jaunt, and promising to be back by noon.  B and I enjoyed our iced coffee, took a way around one of the city parks near our house, and then worked on removing the vegetation (by which I mean "weeds") from the no-man's-land portion of the north lawn.  I didn't seem to make much progress, despite working for two hours: it's an 820 s.f. area we're looking to transform from lost-cause lawn to xeriscaped-stonework.

After H had gotten back and we stood around and frowned at the sprinklers on the north side of the house for a while(the north side is often neglected as we never, ever go there and rarely even look at it; also, we're beginning to understand why sprinkler maintenance seems to be a full-time weekend hobby for so many suburban Utahns), we went over to Arrow Rock & Stone - which is where we got the two tons of fiesta rock to subdue the backyard last spring - to check out our options.  Because it's such a large area, and because you pay by the ton and smaller rocks cover more square footage per ton than larger rocks, we ended up ordering 7+ tons of local crushed gravel to be delivered, and loaded the truck up with 500 lbs. of "stacker" stones to use as borders.  Rock is actually pretty reasonable and although we would have liked to go with slightly larger, slightly more colorful stone, I think this will look fine once it's broken up with some native, drought-resistant plants.  It's certainly going to look better than the scorched weeds we've got going on now.  We're not going to have the gravel delivered for a while so as to give ourselves time to prep (kill the vegetation and lay down weed-block fabric), so stay tuned.

We'd brought B with us to the rock shop (where she bravely barked at everyone from the front seat of the truck), so when we were done there we headed to Millcreek Canyon for a walk.  The upper portion of the road is still closed to motorized traffic, so we only had to dodge cyclists, pedestrians and other dogs.  We walked for about an hour all told, pausing occasionally so B could wade into the stream.  She didn't like to drink out of Mill Creek, however - I guess the rush of the water was just too unusual for her (city dog!).  When we got back to the truck, she got some water (out of a water bottle, from our kitchen faucet) and we each got a PBR.  She totally crashed on the drive back home: yard work, rock shopping and hiking is a lot for an old dog.