working weekend

And by working, I mean manual labor. Here are some pictures of the work we did saturday and sunday on the yard. By the time we stopped working tonight (sunday), it was too dark to get a picture of our progress, so I guess you'll just have to be surprised by that some other day.

Here is my cutie taking a quick break to give me a smile.

This is mid-day on Saturday. The dirt hasn't been properly distributed across the yard yet, and the incline needs to be made slightly more obtuse.

Here is the progress by end of the day Saturday. Dirt has been distributed and smoothed over.

This morning, I made David sit down with me and draw out a plan of sorts so I could start to visualize what the yard with a bunch of plants would look like. Here is what we ended up with. Not all of this will happen right away, but some of it will. The thing shaded at the bottom is our house.
When we finally returned from the nursery, we put everything we bought together, and boy--it sure is alot.
Dwarf cypress in front, New Zealand Flax (spikey stuff) flanking it. On the left is some ornamental cabbage, and there is more behind this stuff ---see next picture.
Here we have some flaming red sea grasses (bright green groundcover in front of the sea grass), 3 little juniper bushes, and I forget the name of the things to the right. Oh well. We are going to try to plant them tomorrow and maybe a few other nights this week.

And tonight we hauled (okay David did most of the hauling), some big rocks and installed them at the bottom the slope to help stop erosion and run-off.

I'll post more pictures later. Our new camera is pretty fun!