……At least that is what it felt like. 

A little background…I had finally removed all the stumps and the vast majority of rocks from the area by the garage then I painted that side of the garage.  It was now time to landscape.  Given that area that needed plants was fairly large (30′ X 6′) it was going to be fairly expensive to purchase the plants.  Given the current economic maelstrom I was not to excited to spend a bunch of money on plants.

Fortunately the neighbor across the street has an overabundance of plants around his house and he has been up north since last night with no plans to return until Monday.  They sprayed some WD-40 (so it wouldn’t squeak) on the old red wagon, grabbed a shovel and some work gloves, and marched across the street. 

The plantings in his yard were overgrown and in bad need of some attention.  They split several hostas and placed them in the wagon.  The hostas were quickly replanted on our side of the street.  Another trip produced a bunch of lily of valley in my front yard. 

In all four trips were made, each time more and more greenery was added to the previously empty dirt in my yard.  As of right now the greenery is looking rather limp but with a bit of water over the next several days we are hopeful that the plants will survive and even thrive.  Meanwhile across the street you would never know that a bunch of plants were removed.

Ohhh…and by the way, the neighbor did give us permission to raid his plants.  But I’m curious to find out what the other neighbors thought was going on.

Day one was Monday.  We had an off site training with lunch provided.  It was a bit unusual as the lunch was a baked potato bar with soup.  The soup was excellent and the potato was pretty good. 

On day two the company had outside contractors doing some training.  The company provided pizza to the group but overordered so I was able to acquire three slices.

On day three I participated in the training so was provided Subway subs. 

Day four I was able to acquire tacos from the training feast.  Pretty good week for for food.

Ok maybe food is a stretch.  More like treats.  Lots and lots of treats.  Two birthdays at work this week so that means two days of cake.  Plus pumpkin pie with whipped cream [I love the whipped cream ].  Not sure why the pumpkin pie was there but I took some anyway.

Now there are donut holes!  And apple cider! Wow! what a week for treats!

With me eating the treats at work it means that I can spend less on food.  I know, I know it is not the healthiest stuff to eat but it is free.  I’ll take all the free stuff I can get.  Such is the life of a beach bum.

Seeing that I needed to do something about the bees living in my front yard I logged into my Homepages Friends account and searched for ways to eradicate the bee infestation.

Side note about Homepages Friends: This is a way to earn money by doing searches that you would probably do anyway.  I have been signed up for a week or so and have earned £1.33 [it is a British company] on 79 searches.  At today’s exchange rate that is $2.45.  Of course there is a referral program, so if you are interested in joining please follow one of my links so I can get credit for referring you.  As of today I have 2 referrals that have earned £.02 for me.  I receive 10% of my first tier referrals so I presume that they have earned £.20 for themselves.  HomePages Friends pays out when you reach £20.00 to either a PayPal account or a British bank account.  The search results come from Yahoo UK so they are a little skewed toward British domains…just an FYI.

Back to the Bees.

According to one website I should make a torch by wrapping canvas around a long stick and douse it in gasoline.  The next step was to light it and hold it over the hole in the ground at night.  The light from the torch is suppose to draw the bees out and in doing so will fry them like Joan of Arc as the exit the hole. WHAT??? I question the effectivness of this idea. This approach seems a bit dangerous to the extent that I may get stung again.

Further reading on that website brought your typical pour gasoline down the hole and light it.  Given the explosive nature of gasoline I kept reading.  Pouring bleach seemed like another popular idea but I question the environmental impact as well as the quantity needed to accomplish the task.

Near the bottom of the page I found a possible approach that I am trying.  This idea consists of finding a bucket for each entrance and spraying them with bee killer.  Then after dark when they have returned to the hive place the buckets over the holes and place a stone on top.  The theory goes that the bees will come into contact with the poison and then return to the hive to die taking the poison with them.  I’ll post an update after I know how well this works.

Last night I had a slew of blogs that for what ever reason wanted to advertise on this blog.  Cool, so I decided to seach Entrecard’s most expense ad spots and discovered that today mine is the fourth most expensive.  I’m not sure how many Entrecard credits I’ll actually earn because these other blogs piled on overnight so I didn’t approve them one by one.  I’m thinking that I will receive the price that was set before the first one bought for all of them.

Oh well.   At least I’m more popular than John Chow .

Now is the perfect opportunity to do a little advertising with me using those EC’s that you’ve been hording before the price gets way out of reach.  Of course you could always refinance your house in order to buy some EC’s directly from Entrecard in order to get placed on my widget.

There are other alternatives.  Contact me via a comment for a direct ad sale.  Or wait for me to get a Project Wonderful ad box up and running.

Surfin’ Sid is offering an opportunity in the form of a contest on CentSports.   He is giving away all of his July net winnings to the crony [referral] who holds the highest balance on July 31st.