The Not Great, but Getting Better Outdoors

We've been trying to improve our house. We've gotten some help on a couple minor carpentry projects from the fabulous Corporal Cromar. He has tools and skills.
I, like my father before me, do not possess many tools or skills, so I, like my father before me, tend to gravitate toward outdoor projects that require less accuracy and more back-braking manual labor.
For instance:

Not all of our backyard receives copious amounts of sunlight. The grass does not grow well under the trees, so the area where we set up the swing-set would often become an unpleasant, muddy mess, much like the Bog of Despair. Becky felt like covering the ground with plastic and wood chips and lining the place with landscaping timbers. It only smelled like a gerbil cage for a couple days.

The next muddy pit was the one that we created by pulling our car off to the side of our driveway so that the other car could pass. I swear I could hear Artax whinnying one night. I took the bricks that had been in a pile behind the shed for the last 3 years and arranged them in a semi-pleasing pattern thus.


We've been counseled by our church leaders to grow food. We don't feel like we have the time or patience to start a whole big garden, so the flower bed out front got couple tomato intruders.


Next on the docket:
Remember those bricks behind the shed? There's a also a biome and a war-torn eastern European country to remove.


This is a flower bed that doesn't grow flowers due to the aforementioned tree cover. Becky wants it gone. Like my vas deferens she wants it gone.
Here are our girls.

Here is the boy that lives two doors down who has become a regular playmate for Samantha. At first, he objected to dressing in drag. Now he requests it. Maybe Sam has a future shopping friend.