By my reckoning , almost kinda sorta halfway there

So here it is , Saturday afternoon of Labor Day Weekend and I have been out of work / retired now for about six weeks. Getting used to it. Doing fairly well keeping up with the laundry and planning menus , making Twila a meal every now and then , cleaning up the kitchen , loading and unloading the dishwasher . Not yet a full-blown domestic god but kinda sorta edging into it . I've also been working on unemployment , Social Security , and I just got a letter that says I'm now signed up for Medicare A AND B - so it would appear that I now have a permanent seat on the government ride. Yay me.

Twila is still working for the school district and school has already started here for this year. Even though she said she was looking forward to a relaxing , 3 day holiday weekend , she graciously agreed to help me with planting some more cacti and succulents in the front yard work-in-progress. We compromised on a number of locations for plants to be put in the ground and she decided to take some pix of me working up a sweat. I'm starting to believe this is actually going to look pretty good when we decide it's more or less complete.

Anybody looking at the dates of these posts or comparing the various states of progress ( some more apparent than others ) might be prone to note that this is slow going. True. But I am an old guy with an arthritic condition and it is very hot and humid here in August and I am in no hurry to be done . Slow but steady wins the race but I am not in competition here in any way , shape , or form and it will be done when it's done . Y'all can get behind that , right ?

The stone edging is still only half done , there are a number of plants still to be put in place ( my wife vetoed my idea of leaving some in decorative pots and planters because there would then be a need for a much more aggressive watering scheme than what we were trying to achieve ) and let's not forget the concrete centerpiece which is still waiting to be completed , plus there will need to be about 20 or so more bags of marble chips to be spread around over the newspaper we spread to try to keep weeds down. Whee doggies but aint we having some fun now ?

In the last picture above you can see ( somewhat ) the smaller flower bed on the other side of the sidewalk in front of the house. That may or may not be the next project - it's most likely to be either that or the back yard ( I am SO wanting to get started on filling the new back yard fencing with all of my ideas. Like - that plywood Texas silhouette currently sitting in the rubber edging form in the center of the yard ? It's going up on the fence somewhere after being painted or varnished or flame-washed and varnished . Also plan to stand it up against the fence and overspray it to create a paint outline of the state . We got this Texas thing going on.

Got to organize my thoughts about getting some DONORA and STEELERS stuff going on too. Twila is talking about a TEXANS logo but I am a black and gold boy and think THAT should come first. A quick story. When I first moved to Texas , my first REAL job ( not counting the 6 months as a Wendy's manager) was with a company that made downhole oil well tools. The stuff made there , when completed , was painted Columbia Blue , which happened to be the team color for the then Houston Oilers. I had been working there for about a year when I went back to my hometown of Donora, Pa. for a weeks vacation. At the time ,my mother-in-law worked at a HALLMARK store there and when I went to see her there to say hello I picked up just over a dozen refrigerator magnets and small pencil sharpeners in the shape and black and gold colors of the PITTSBURGH STEELERS complete with their logo. When I returned to work I went in early on the first morning back and put either a magnet or sharpener on the desk of every co-worker in my wing of the building. One of my duties every morning was to make the rounds of the plant ,collecting reports of work progress for all the different departments , then making copies of all those reports and distributing them to my co-workers. As I was making my rounds I was paged to report to first one  shop and then another , and then another . This sometimes happened as they updated the reports of work in progress so I thought nothing of it - until I got back to my desk. Where I found every single one of my " gifts " lined up on my desk, And they had all been painted Columbia Blue.