Camera-happy summerlike day

The last two days have been great.

At work: The controller told me I did a great job on the quarter-end packages, and this is not a man to hand out "atta-girl"s on a regular basis. I got all of my "prepared by client" materials together for the first quarter audit. I scheduled a meeting to work out why our SRA list does not tie to our inventory list for evaluation units. I get to run a meeting! Woo hoo for me!

At home: The weather has been fantastic. It is 76 in my house right now, and it is only April! The apple trees are blooming (at left). My creeping myrtle (below) and rosemary are also blooming, and the back yard smells fantastic. I mowed my lawn again, and it is now at a decent depth of 2", but I'll have to mow it next week because I know it will grow two inches over the week. I re-barked the landscaping on the east end of the house. I actually did some landscaping on the west end of the house (that's the picture above), which used to have nothing but grass, moss and the fence, and I'm feeling rather proud of myself for doing something original rather than just perpetuating what previous owners of my house had done. I ripped up all of the turf in a swoopy, curvy line from the property line where the fences meet over to the side of the house, and all of the way up the side of the house to the corner. I planted some cute, colorful shrubberies, and barked the bejesus out of it. It looks pretty good (considering a total amateur did it), particularly when the sun shines on it. Tearing up the turf wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It was mostly moss, which came up after just running my hand over it. Underneath was nothing but worm castings, apparently. I've never seen so many earthworms in one place that were not for sale as bait. Digging the holes for the shrubs was as difficult as I thought it would be. The ground here is nothing but rocks with dirt filling in the gaps between them. See the rocks in that picture? Those are just some of the rocks I dug up to make room for the shrubs. I took the rest of the rocks elsewhere to use as a drain spout for my rain gutters. My yard is gonna be so nice when all of my little trees and shrubs grow up! I'm amazed at how fast the back yard shrubs are growing. I should have blooming lilacs next year, and my blue holly and variegated holly already get berries each winter. If I ever have to sell, the landscaping alone should help me get a decent price.

I decided that since (1) the weather was perfect and (2) my car is black but looked grey that today would be a good day to wash the car. I whipped the garden hose out of my Mexican hose pot and was startled by a very large, fast-moving spider. I was expecting a much smaller crop of spiders, but certainly nothing this large. I threw a quarter into the pot to give a vague idea of the size of the thing. I have no idea what kind of spider this is, but I see them outside pretty frequently. This isn't even the biggest one I've seen. I'm going to send the picture to this guy who runs a website from the UW to see if he can identify it, or at least give me an idea of what it might be.

I also baked chocolate chip cookies and ate about six of them for dinner. How much better can a day actually get without winning a lottery?