The most interesting project we started has to be the growing of the tomatoes upside down. My daughter-in-law Carrie sent me a website that told about doing that and it fascinated me. So, this year I initiated the experiment. Bill worked his brain over and came up with the ingenious idea to make a simple support structure and wedge it up against the house. When I've planted tomatoes down below the deck, some critter or two has munched on them so I thought hanging them up like that would stop that nonsense. We shall see. If you'd like to see where I got the idea, follow this link.

Early May. As soon as it's warm enough to sit outside, Bill erects the dining tent on the deck. There's not a whole lot of bugs out yet and I enjoy not feeling closed in by any walls, not even tent walls. But he likes to get an early start on the bug thwarting. So, up goes the dining tent.

As the days got warmer, the ideas flew faster. One weekend, a couple of weeks ago, I thought he was going to flop over from overdoing it. He put the fountain back up on the deck, he helped a neighbor paint their fence (the fence was only half a yard long but still), he cleaned the floor of the cat enclosure and that led to him cleaning the patio chairs and blowing all the detritis off the floor under the deck, and he cut the grass. The weekend previous he fashioned some new wooden steps for the side entrance that weren't as steep so that I could maneuver them with greater ease for my arthritic-ridden knees.

The biggest project, in terms of size, was putting the pool up. It's not really a hard project but it's such a big pool that he had to wrestle with the big, bulky lining to get it straightened out on the ground so it can be filled with water. And it has to be cleaned out before he can put the water in it. All the supports have to be erected and it's usually a hot sunny day that he does it so he's out there standing in the midday sun. Then there was the chore of shoring the supports up so that it's fairly level. Every year he ends up filling the pool twice because on the first go-around the unlevelness is too apparent. He got lucky this year, or maybe more skilled, because the pool only had to be filled up once. Although a week later, one of the hoses to the pump gave way and 1/3 of the pool drained out before we discovered it. Speaking of water, it came out of the hose brown. It's been two weeks now and the water has turned a light green. Ugh, and to think that we drink that water! We keep hoping that with all the chlorine that circulates in there it will finally turn that pretty blue it's supposed to be.