Time Delays!

So, yes, I know I've been gone a very long time. *bad me!* BUT! I'm back to write again. *I'm such a terrible blogger these days!*

Things over the past couple of weeks has been pretty hectic. I decided that I want to put a porch on the front of the house. One of the houses up the street has on, and it looks very nice, so, Sam and I decided that hopefully by next spring we will be able to afford to put a nice porch on the front of the house, following the peak of the roof. It won't be an overly large porch, just enough for a swing and maybe a little bit more, but, it will help keep the living room cooler, which will lower our energy bill, thus it's a good investment and in time will pay for itself! We also want to rip out the horrendous horrible stinky not so pleasant shrubs that are currently in the front of the house and replace them with some Lilac trees. Both Sam and I grew up with Lilac trees all around, and LOVE the smell (Current candles on the dinning room table: Yankee Candle Lilac Blossoms and Yankee Candle Sweet Honeysuckle) of them and when we were first married Sam promised me that when we bought a house that we would put a Lilac tree outside of our bedroom window so when it bloomed we could have the smell in our room. It's one of the only things that Sam has ever promised me. I also dug up about a 3 foot circle around the Crepe Myrtle and planted some flowers around that as well. Let me tell you! That was an all day project! It started at around 9, I worked for half an hour, went to the dentist, came home, had lunch while my mouth was still numb (I'll save that story for a different day....) and went back to work. I finally finished and got the plants in the ground about 4:30pm. I even broke the hoe trying to loosen the dirt!

On the flip side of the house, I would like to redo the fence and put in a 6' privacy fence. Not so much because we need the privacy, but because the neighbors have a dog that they don't do a very good job of containing, and the neighborhood kids are always running by, and we have 3 dogs. One of those dogs likes to bark at anything that moves, one of the others likes to bark just because the first one is barking at times, and  the other just looks at them all like they've got a screw loose, but will bark at a few things now and again. We also have a pear tree and 2 apple trees that are currently on the other side of our chain link fence that only covers the property immediately behind the house. I would like to try and protect them a bit from all of said neighborhood kids that wander through our yard so we can at least have some of the fruit! Also, I want to knock out the wall to the kitchen and add a sun room of sorts that would serve as our dinning room. The dinning room we have would be turned into a den/office for Sam with a section for books and also my crafts. If course, I think the sun room idea might also generate more heat, which would negate the cost savings that the porch would save us, but, at least we would add more square footage to the house!

The new tank is looking very good! We have some live plants in there that are doing really well that we got when we bought the 1.5 gallon. One of my friends and I were at WalMart and she was getting some of these really neat GloFish, (They glow in a black light!) and I spotted this poor little ivory snail in a little tub. There was no food or anything, and Lord knows how long it had been stuck on the bottom shelf amongst all of the Betta fish! I felt really bad for it, and so my friend bought it for me as a Thank You for helping her set up her tank and pick out her fish. Her name is Lucky. So now we have Blueberry (Betta), Gary (blue-green snail), Squidward (blue snail), and Lucky (ivory snail) in the big tank, and Spongebob in the little 1.5 gallon tank. The only reason he's in the small tank is because I found out that he can breed himself! :-O I don't need a huge infestation of these tiny pest snails in my tank, so he can't go in there.

On that note, I need to go get my car inspected! *sigh* Sometimes this state is SO backwards!!