Thank you Craigslist!

First off, I just watched a show on FoodNetwork about making goat cheese and it brought to light a particular grievance I have. I am opposed to giving pets names that should belong only to humans. It is weird to have a goats named Jolene, Kathy and Sheila, but mainly everyone knows someone who has an animal named Abbey and it's pretty bothersome to me. You have no idea how often I get to cringe because I tell people my name and they say "Oh! I love that name! My Grandma's sister has a doberman named Abbey!".... Oh good, it's a good name!... No, no it's not. I'm lying. It's a human's name. They are pets, give them pet names. Good substitute choices include Muffin, Cinder, Mischief or Button-apply as appropriate to your particular pet.

So Ben and I moved into a brand new house in Nov, which means it has zero landscaping. Landscaping costs a lot and there's always other things to pay for (like C-Sections and 4.5 days in the hospital), so it goes ignored. Until we noticed that the gate keepers of hell also known as feral cats in our neighborhood have been using our back corner as a flippin litter box, we were content to wait for a while, but alas that gross realization has pulled the wool from our eyes-and something needs to be done. So being low on large amounts of cash, we improvised. We saw at Schnepf Farms which is close to our house, this awesome "junk sidewalk". They have all manner of pavers and bricks and car parts cemeted into a sidewalk, and the lightbulb went on and off we went. Thanks to Craigslist, generous wealthy brothers of an ex-in law and generous friends, we'll be able to hardscape our entire back- and side-yards with a junk sidewalk, fire pit, and brick wall-all for the low low price of around $100! We have bricks, pavers, and some great handmade adobe bricks. We're also going to do a junk tiled patio, which currently will incude leftover tiles from our house, leftover tiles from a friends house, a whole bunch of authentic Mexican saltillo tiles, and added yesterday-some fab granite tiles. So not only will we have a super eclectic hardscaped yard (grass & trees will come later this year), it'll have cost us about 1/16 of the cost had we bought everything new. I call that a victory.

The bricks in the back corner of the yard are only about 1/3 of what we'll eventually have-loading and unloading 1500 bricks takes a dang long time.