The Yard

Wow. Where to start...

...perhaps the best place is with my/our massive underestimation of the time, expense and good humor our landscaping would require. Admittedly, I know nothing of these things, but I now foolishly remember saying things like, "yeah, Tai will get the sprinklers laid in a couple of days, then we'll get the sod in right after. It shouldn't take us more than a few weekends."

HA.

With the first tease of spring in mid March we started planning and talking logistics. I think we made our first trip to the Sprinkler Supply Company in early April for a system design. And even though we are a teensy bit broke after building a house, sprinklers were something we wanted to spend the money on this year, knowing that this was really our only chance to do it well. Once we got a system designed and saw how much trenching this was going to take, we followed the company's suggestion and hired a trencher. Along the way, you realize that you really need another, different tool or you need five more of that one thing or it would be so much simpler if you had that other thing and all of a sudden all the charges on your account point to Lowe's. So it goes.

Then, the dirt. Oh, the dirt. If we were mud flats before the trenching, we became mud topographies after -- trenches, vales, swales, sinks, mounds, and plains all made it look as though an army of burrowing rodents invaded Lincoln Street. It wouldn't have been so bad if not for the relentlessly precipitative weather this spring. It's hard to lay sprinkler pipe when the trench is under two inches of water.

Anybody remember this incident? I remember the trauma of being 800 miles away and getting his text: "what's our insurance number?" During this sprinkler process I lived in fear (FEAR!) of getting a similar text or worse. Tai did nothing to assuage this fear.

The first night he worked on installation I walked up to the front yard to ask him a question in time to watch a 3-foot length of pipe explode from our water supply line with a terrifying WHOP, rocket 30 feet into the air, drop onto the sidewalk across the street in front of two alarmed pedestrians, and give way to a six-foot geyser. The next night's performance featured the end cap of that same pipe exploding off into Tai's face -- without, thankfully, injury to anything other than his manly pride. The following night involved several iterations of "hey, babe, do you think you might want a little professional help?" conversations.

But, dear readers, Tai is a total champ. These were not setbacks!, he claimed, these were learning experiences! He soldiered on in the face of my sideline skepticism. And, then, four weeks later, we had a functioning sprinkler system. Well, four weeks, many blisters, an incident involving pipe primer and eyeballs, and A LOT of bending-over back cleavage later.

This is what we see now:


And life is good.