What Now!?

Yesterday I finally got the power sprayer that we had been needing to clean the back porch. Now we knew the porch was bad. Heck, you’d have to be a moron not to realize that lot’s of rain plus three dogs equals very dirty porch but sometimes you don’t realize just how bad.
After about 15 minutes of work just to see how well the power sprayer worked (the real cleanup is tomorrow), Ruthanna and I both were shocked!

Needless to say, tomorrow can’t get here quick enough for us! This mess must go!

Well, another day of rain and from past posts, I think we know what that brings. Yep, the steam cleaner!
Here’s what met us at the backdoor today.

Boy, will I be glad when all the spring rain is done!

The pups have been cooped up a bit with all the rain we’ve had the last few days. Well Ursa had had enough of that!

Here is what met us at the back door when she went out to do her thing.

Upon further inspection…

Good thing she cleans up easy!!

Oh man, has this past week and weekend been a pain in the rear! After 3 and a half days of rain and another day of cloudy, wet yuck, the sun finally came out.

Now normally I would have been doing a tap dance about the good fortune of having multiple days of rain and being able to turn off the automatic sprinkler systembut not now. With 5 bad weather days, over 2-1/2 inces of rain and three puppys, our back yard looks like a picture of disaster zone in a third world country that you would see on TV.

This picture doesn’t even begin to capture how bad the backyard really is right now. It’s amazing how the poop piles and torn up items can become hidden in a picture…even without editing.

Oh, and I won’t even go into how bad the house looks after having three pups go in and out in the rain for multiple days.

Thank goodness for both our sanity and the pups lives, the sun has come back out so they can get out and burn off some steam!

As you might be aware from a previous post, we’ve had an ongoing battle between the pups and the flower gardens…with the pups winning, so far.

And from that post, you could see that in one garden we now had nothing but a potential mud bog every time it rains or we water. Well,  Ruthanna and I finally decided that something had to be done about that and soon. We finally came upon a plan! We would just fill in the holes and then cover the whole area with gravel. Then this spring we could buy / build planters to place throughout the garden area to get it back to our garden oasis.

Of course, once we got started, we realized we needed to not only fill in gravel in that garden area but to also take it all down the side of the porch since grass wasn’t growing there and something needed to be there other than dirt. This required MANY more 50lb bags of gravel than we had originally planned but that was ok as it needed to be done. Or at least we thought it would be alright. Now that our backs are not quite so sore, we are again feeling that this was a pretty good idea.

Seriously though, believe it or not, it really turned out looking pretty darn good and we actually surprised ourselves on this decision! We figured that this spring once the planters were in place, this will again look like a garden oasis! Hahahaha, foolish humans! Never underestimate the power of pups!

Now I wish we had remembered to take a picture of how nice it looked when we finished but I can tell you that at that time, my back was telling me of other things to do than take a picture. So I will try to get a picture soon and add it to this post.

Almost immediately after finishing the project, Sadie quickly decided that we were the absolutely the best parents in the whole wide world! How could we possibly have known that at the top of her list to Santa had been a private up-close-to-the-door bathroom! Now she didn’t have to go way out into the yard to poop! We were absolutely the best in her mind. No more going way out back if it was cold, night time, rainy, or near dinner time. She could jump out, poop and get back in quick so as not miss any of the action inside! "You guys are the best!"

Ursa on the other hand, obviously had a different idea about the whole situation. Her thoughts were clearly, "you think that’s going to keep me from digging? Ha, I’ll show you!"

And of course as always, Fargo’s thoughts were "Zzzzzzzzzz, huh, a new place to sleep, ok, maybe later, Zzzzzzzzz."

So as always, we’ve just ended up trading one thing for another, we now have to pickup poop everyday from the gravel area so it won’t stink and we still are having to deal with holes but at least we are not dealing with muddy dogs. Which for now, works for me!