Discovering and Creating Our Yard

Bunch of projects lately.

Today I finally got all the seedlings and most of the seeds planted (click on any small image for a bigger picture):



Also planted today: sunflowers (just on the other side of the fence on the right of that picture) and cilantro and basil (in an empty-ish spot in one of our backyard flowerbeds).

Our backyard pond has been mightily cloudy:



You'd never know it from that picture, but there are a bunch of fish in there, and the pond is only perhaps a foot deep.

I did two things to try to remedy the problem. First, I used a "pond clarifier," which pulls all the gunk together into clumps that you can remove easily. Second, I added plants (which I'd been wanting to do anyway):





Look, fish!

Our front yard is getting really nice; almost none of that is due to our work but we take credit anyway:







Still to come: some annuals, some more seeds, maybe some grass in the spots that used to house playground equipment. Hooray for it almost sort of being spring!

Everytime I Say...Really, You Wrote That Song?

So we went to Alison Krauss last week at the Mullins Center. The Gazette had done a big piece about how the Mullins is making a push to be a major concert venue, and part of that is reconfiguring the space for different shows. For this show, they split it lengthwise and had seating for perhaps 3,500 or so. It worked remarkably well; I barely recognized it as the same place we'd seen the Pixies (in a traditional arena-show configuration).

The show itself was really good as well, though it certainly veered into pure cheese from time to time. And I was terribly disappointed to learn that she wrote that awful, awful song "When You Say Nothing At All," which would be perfectly in place in a really bad action movie's love sequence -- a movie called something like Top Force or Action Five. But a great deal of it was incredibly good -- great musicians playing terrific songs. And Jerry Douglas is indeed amazing on the dobro, though I admit to having little to compare to.

Tonight: Rilo Kiley. Two shows in a week -- must be crazy. Or done with the semester.