To catch up:

The grass sod was put down last Friday (plus a bit more on Saturday). The sprinklers are in, and watering the sod three times a day to get the roots established. Right now it looks a bit ‘stripey’, but a lot better than the weeds that were there a back in June. The border areas are still dirt. No trees yet, since you don’t want to plant the trees when the grass is getting so much water. The trees are scheduled for a few weeks from now, when they will hopefully be on sale. The first frost around here is usually in the middle of October, so they should be able to get a bit established before going dormant. My landscaper knows what he is doing, though, since he has lived in this area his whole life.

I’ve reserved an area for a garden, although it it too late to plant anything around here in Utah. I was planning on some raised boxes to use up some of the extra dirt that is left over. I went to Lowe’s today to get some lumber, but didn’t find enough good 2 x 10 x 8′ planks. Then I saw a book on “Square Foot Gardening”, which uses raised beds and sort of a high-density growing technique, rather than the traditional ‘row’ gardening. I’d heard about this before, and it looked interesting, so I bought the book (same title, by Mel Bartholomew, Cool Springs Press) instead of going to a different home store for the wood. I did pick up a wheelbarrow, though.

Since I won’t be able to plant anything until spring, I have some time to get together the materials for the boxes. The Square Foot Gardening technique looks quite interesting. Minimal weeding (almost none), easy planting and maintenance, and other things make this technique appealing. You can find details about it at their web site (www.squarefootgardening.com ). It looks interesting.

No progress on the ‘get a job’ front. Haven’t heard from the last company (the work at home gig), even though they were quite positive during and after the sit-down interview lunch. I did send them a “just curious” note last week, but no response. Oh well. Still looking.

In the meantime, I’m working on a site redesign for an old friend. It’s a bit of simple Content Management System (CMS) for the variable content. The plan is to allow the site owners to FTP an ‘article’ to a specific folder with a specific name, and then convert the text (no html code needed) to get it displayed on the page. A bit of PHP does that task. Some other tricks are used to provide a common look to all pages: the content fits in a CSS box on the main page, and a URL parameter is used to display the page template and the content. Not ready for prime time yet, but it is interesting to do, and is helping me gain some PHP experience.

The houses next door and across the street are both at the ‘finished the foundation’ phase. The next step is to pour the basement floor, I think. I don’t suppose they would appreciate some ‘concrete angels’ in the wet cement.