Gardening and Grilling

It's been a while since I've posted. I've had a busy couple weeks. Last week I attended the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association yearly conference. I received a scholarship to attend one day of the conference through a new organization that I just joined, New England Women in Energy and the Environment. I met tons of successful women at the group's launch and went to three great sessions of the conference. I won't bore you with the nerdy stuff that I learned, I already bored Rick! I was all pumped up after the conference. It's so great to see the advances that our region of the U.S. is making when it comes to energy efficiency and our carbon cap and trade program.

I've also taken on a few more tutoring students. Algebra 2 is kicking my butt! I forgot that word problems about gravity and trajectory using the quadratic equation are hard. My 8th grade student is reading To Kill A Mockingbird. I've been saying for years that I should really reread the book. Since I am responsible for discussing the plot and concepts of it with him, I picked up the book from the library yesterday. I've become a bit of a book junkie during my unemployment. I've even dipped my toe into a couple self-help books. Not like "I'm crazy" self-help books but "working on my career strengths" type of stuff. And a little Suze Orman, I've got to have a plan for the money I'll start raking in one of these days when I get a full time job.

We purchased a grill Tuesday night from the Sears a couple miles from our house. We were very excited to get it home and put it together as soon as possible since we had heard the weekend was going to be nice. The sales person who helped us thought it would fit in our car, mind you we drive a Toyota Corolla. Not a chance. He suggested that I come back the next day, since it was almost closing, and take the pieces out of the box and load them into the car. So Wednesday afternoon I went back to Sears. Two of the guys in the pick up area took the very large pieces out of the box. Still no chance. Arrrggg. It's a problem when you live somewhere were you don't know anyone who drives a truck or SUV. I had to go next door to Lowe's and rent one of their trucks. When I was filling out the paperwork to rent the truck, the sales associated informed me that I had to transport a Lowe's purchase in order to rent the truck. I batted a few eyelashes and he told me I could buy a bottle of water and then I technically would be transporting the water. Nice. Off to Sears where the guys loaded it onto the truck. Luckily, the neighbor and his son were home when I got to our house and they carried it up our gazzillion steps to our deck. Wonderful! I returned the truck and was thrilled I had accomplished the mission at hand. Rick was pleased that we had a grill at our house when he got home.

Here are a couple pics of us putting it together...

So we thought we were pretty smart. We left the side burner and the other side off until we moved the grill outside to install.
Saturday was sunny and beautiful outside. Rick and I picked up some steaks from Costco and accomplished purchasing a propane tank and propane. We worked in the yard a bit and the attempted to put the rest of the grill together. The instructions told us to loosen a screw, slide on the side, and then retighten the screw. Sounds easy, right? Not if the screw is completely stuck into the side of the grill. Three calls to Sears later and no one had an answer for us.
We called it a day and made our way down to the Omni Parker House for a cocktail with some of our friends who were in town. We then went to dinner at one of Rick's co-worker's who had made a traditional New England Boiled Dinner in honor of St. Patrick's Day. It was delicious! Sunday was gorgeous again, near 65. We were determined that we would grill steaks for dinner come hell or high water. I decided if we wanted to get this grill situation taken care of we had to go to Sears ourselves. They can't hang up on you or transfer you to an answering machine if you are standing right in front of them. The manager on duty was great and got us a replacement screw from a model. Rick had to get handy when we got home and drilled out the stuck screw. A few more steps in the assembly and a few broken drill bits and we were done!
We knew we were inheriting quite a few gardens with the house but we really had no clue how much was planted out there. We didn't do any yard work besides bag some leaves this past fall. We had been busy painting and unpacking. Last week we began noticing little green shoots poking through the soil and the masses of dead plants from last season. Sunday we bagged leaves and tore up old plants and pruned. Here are a couple pics of what's coming up around our yard:

Even Phoebe enjoyed the day!

We also made a new friend:

The weekend ended just as we had planned...