Water is very expensive in Colorado and to make matters worse, this summer you're only allowed to water your lawn 2 days a week. So rather than deal with brown grass, we signed up for the Water-Wise Landscape Program. The city will pay you up to $4,000 to rip out your grass and install low-water plants. So Bruce and I have spent the last couple weeks working on this project. First we planted some Weeping White Spruce trees - 1 in the front and 2 in the back. These are the kind that will grow tall and skinny. I think it makes the yard look more like Colorado, plus these trees require very little water and they will be surrounded by rock.
The landscape program requires that you have a hardscape feature, so we chose the dry creek bed. We laid out an old hose to get a rough idea of the line
and then we cut out the sod, rock, and bushes that were in the way. OMG was that ever back-breaking work. But that was probably the "easy" part, because the next step is to lay down 2 tons of river rock (they dump it in the street and we have to carry it up into the yard).
It's been so long since we had a few nice days that we couldn't spend them all digging in the dirt. The bike club went on a breakfast ride to the Heritage Cafe. It was the first time we all got to wear our new club shirts - Hill's Angels ("Hill," because our neighborhood is called Hilltop). The waitress said we all looked like a bunch of yellow markers.
Even Bruce decided to ride along on this event since it was only just down the road.
Janet and I have almost reached the end of the Colorado Trail (thank goodness). She's been setting a grueling pace and it's hard to keep up. As soon as I finish this trail, I'm starting the High Line Canal Trail. It starts in the same place as the Colorado Trail (Waterton Canyon), but it runs northeast rather than southwest. Being an urban trail, I plan to bike most of it (it's mostly concrete or crushed rock). But I should finish a lot faster, since it's only 71 miles long.
And a happy birthday to Hazel. Hazel's birthday is exactly one month before mine. Normally I think that's kind of neat, but this year it was "Yikes! Only 1 month left until I pass out of the 60's." Jamie took his family to Sunday Funday at the Royals. I think those ice cream treats he got would help me feel better about getting older... or put me into a sugar coma!
