Yard work

Yep, life is pretty exciting these days, I am blogging about yard work.

While I rather dreaded the task- I knew there was some yard work looming for me to do. You can see the above picture ( I may have posted on this blog before) is my lovely home in Hamakita ward, Hamamatsu city. This picture was taken soon after our house was finished and we had our initial land work done on the place. You can see on the left side is big hunk of dirt and, though it is tough to tell in this picture, a parking spot for me. On the left is Ritsy's now departed Suzuki Wagon R. A little while after this above picture, we had received a number of bushy- tree things from the city of Hamamatsu as a gift (well we had to apply for it and photo-document that we used them...). Ritsy took great pleasure in planting the trees at that time much to my pleasant surprise.

Well, I started having some classes at our home last year, and unlike Canada- not having parking spaces can be a bit of a problem. There is really no community parking or street-side parking here. And we had my students borrow a neighboring business' parking or Ritsy would go to her family's house while I had class. Needless to say it needed to be addressed. I really hated the idea of spending the money so close to having the baby, but we had some money parked in our house account we were going to make an extra payment with ( in 3 years when the contract expires) so we hired Cainz home to come again and make some more parking spots.
You can see the visible addition of more parking on the left side here. Well, we paid them for everything except replanting the trees. So, for 3 weeks the trees were all planted in a big clump together in our yard. So that was my duty today, beautifully arranging the trees around the yard area. Also the worker had left us a little extra dirt at Ritsy's request, a lovely light brown colored dirt that looks a little nicer (at least now).
The truth of the matter is that I actually enjoyed doing the work in the end. It really creates a tighter bond with the house and the land putting a little work into it. Though sore, and unhappy to sacrifice my first day off in 2 weeks to house work, I actually do feel a bit invigorated by the job, especially now that it is done.
We also added some solar powered garden lights, that are pretty powerless, but should make parking at night a little easier.