House work and another new plant

So after going to the dog park today we decided to tackle the cleaning of the metal siding on the house. We went to Menards (it's like Home Depot, just cheaper and has different things. We really only go here if we can't find what we want at HD cuz this place has lower quality stuff (kinda like the WalMart of the home improvement shopping)).


Anyway we finally found this siding cleaner we had been looking for so we tried it out... nothing, so we scrubbed it with the brush, rinsed... no difference, then we got a bigger sponge out and scrubbed it, eh it looked a little better... then it dried and NOTHING. So we gave up, there was no sense of putting all that work into cleaning the siding if it wasn't even going to look different.

There is this white chalk-y stuff on there that if we wipe it with our hands it comes off, but when we were using the power washing, scrubbing and this house cleaner stuff it wasn't making any difference, so we decided to give up and put that job behind us. So we took the other bottle of house cleaner back, got a sprinkler since ours was pitiful, watered the yard and also got a tomato plant for the back deck.

This is called a Patio Tomato Bush Beefsteak:

Minnehaha Dog Park

We took Harpo to the Minnehaha OffLeash Dog Park today, it's the same one we went to last fall. It is so fun! The opening gate is up near Minnehaha park and then you walk down through the woods and come out along the Mississippi River. Harpo L-O-V-E-D it! It's like his Disney World! Here are some pictures of him having a great time. He's smiling in every picture! Here he is by the river:

Then here he is on the wooded trail:

This is after he went through a mud puddle:

And here he is in the car on the drive home, I picked up a stick for him to play with on the ride home:

He is so funny in that dog park, he'll run way ahead of us then either stop and wait for us or come sprinting back to us just to run ahead of us again. Once along the river he had lost us and went to a few other couples sniffing them and we could tell he was getting confused and scared but we had our eye on him the whole time then we both yelled "Harpo, Harpo come here" and I have seriously never seen him run so fast in his life! He came dashing back to us and literally ran into me, it was pretty funny.

Chocolate Chip Brownie Cake

My newest invention!!!
It might not look the greatest... but it sure does taste good!!!!

Hydrangeas

I planted two new hydrangeas today!!! (they are on the back side of the garage which faces the house, I'm standing on the deck when I took the second picture) Hopefully they get enough sun, but not too much. This spot starts getting sun about Noon... I'm going to pay attention today and see when the shade starts covering it so I have an idea of the amount of direct sunlight it gets.

It is an Endless Summer Hydrangea: the tag says macrophylla 'Bailmer', whatever that means. The tag says it has pink blooms in alkaline soils and blue blooms in acidic soils. I can't wait to see them!!

Oh and you can see how our sod isn't doing so great in the pictures, that's a little disappointing. You can kinda see where we pulled up the dead parts -we laid grass seed in those areas, last week.

Oh and the tulips/lilacs on the left side of where the hydrangeas are were actually planted before us, it was a nice surprise to see them come up so we laid our leftover mulch in the area, in the fall I'll plant some more bulbs and maybe get a lot in that area so I can have some nice flowers to cut and keep in the house next spring :-)

Cake!!

I made my first double layer round cake with my NEW cake pans and put it on my NEW cake stand/dome :)

Yeah I know I'm a goober... I'm actually baking brownies right now. Now if I can only fine someone to eat all this :-) Kyle can only have so much in one day, and my sweet tooth isn't as big as my desire to MAKE things, hee hee.

Sunday May 10th: St. Paul Saints - Dog Day

I meant to post this sooner, but anyway here it is =)

We went to a St. Paul Saints game last Sunday (they are the minor league team here). It was dog day so Harpo got to go with us!!! Here you can see (if you look close) all the dogs in the stands.

Harpo actually did pretty good, although once we were seating he got rather territorial like he does and barked if anyone walked too close to him. Oh yeah we got free hats too! Now we own four Saints hats :-)

Here he is just watching the game:

This was interesting to know: 2,687 people there that day and 367 dogs, hee hee

Harpo didn't really like wearing the hat, lol.

After the game they usually let the children run the bases... I think they finally gave in cuz they were announcing "don't forget kids get to run the bases" until about the 6 or 7th inning they said "kids and DOGS get to run the bases after the game" Except they kept shouting "keep the dogs off the grass!!" lol, it was still fun here we are running round second to third base.

We made it!

One thing Harpo loves about riding in the car is sticking his head out the window!!! Isn't he cute?

So glad it didn't rain

WoW!!! We got so much yard work done today!!!! We woke up to a phone call from the guy coming to fix our garage. (in case you didn't know the opener came detached from the door and a guy came yesterday... but didn't fix it cuz he thought something might be wrong with the actually door - the opener was fine, just came un screwed (which the screw ended up in Kyle's tire - okay different story)). Anyway he came and fixed our garage. I picked up poop in the back yard and finished mowing.

Off to the front yard which was our priority to help better the 'lovely' curb appeal of our house. I raked up some dead leaves while Kyle started (well finished up last falls project) on the front flower bed.

We had about half done that we did last fall of the flower bed, I'll show a before and after picture at the end. Anyway so we wanted to get rid of the rock so we were sifting the soil out of it and added the rocks to our gravel pile we will be getting rid of soon. Last fall we were actually separating the rocks - these blue ones we were thinking of putting back in and then normal gravel. This spring we decided just to get rid of it all cuz we just wanted to use mulch.

Okay Kyle is working on that, I finish raking and get the leaves out of the side bed where there are some nice hastas coming up! A bunny had gotten a hold of one or two of the leaves... but we fixed that later.

Oh at some point, Kyle fertilized the front yard while I took down the little clips that were left on the gutter from our Christmas lights and cleaned out the gutters. We cleaned them out last year but this year all the darn little buds from our neighbors trees filled them up. Then I watered the yard after Kyle had the fertilizer on it.

Then I joined Kyle in the fun flower bed project.

AHHH time for a break - we go to lunch and run by Home Depot to get some things we were needing: grass seed, mulch, a gas can for the weed eater and oil for it too, spray fence stuff to keep the bunnies away from the plants, fertilizer for the plants, stuff to get rid of the ants that are on the front walk way, a thing to keep our hose rolled up, and two new bushes for our flower bed, it's called: "Perennial Hardy Ageratum 'Chocolate' "

Alright so we got all that, came home and moved some of our tulips that were up in the flower bed and planted our new bushes and added the mulch. I sprayed that invisible fence stuff on the hastas and BOY DOES IT STINK! PE--uwe it is smelly!! Then fertilized the front bed and we figured that was good for one day. We also trimmed Harpo - nice and short!! It's his summer do :-) Now we're off to Sam's for a little grocery shopping and DINNER!!!

Here is what our bed looked like at the end of last fall you can see we got about half of it done... then I have a picture of our beautiful flower bed NOW!!!!

oH there are two little ceramic mushrooms I stuck in it... the blue one and the yellow one they are just for fun =) You can see I only have one tulip bloom left cuz of the darn bunnies!!!