Progress Photos -- September 10, 2014

Update on our Front/Side Yard Project:  We've killed the front lawn pretty dead.  Here's the before (not that the lawn was that great even then, but hey).

 

Here it is after one week.  And with no water, too.

 

One afternoon I came out and there were little flags and strips of paint denoting all the utilities.  I had been upstairs quilting, and thought how busy everyone in the world had been while I was enjoying myself even though I, too, was working hard.

 

Then yesterday, Bruno, the spray guy, came out and squirted more RoundUp to really kill the grass.  We'd had an amazing storm a couple of days before that and he said "Good.  Then the grass that shot up will get it again."  Greg, the guy I talk to at the landscape company said maybe next week they'd start tearing out the junipers in front.  Can't wait.  We also got two bids on the 27 feet of fence we need to enclose the side yards.  We put in new fences, sharing the costs with three different neighbors in March of 2010.  Today we felt like this small amount of fence cost as much as the whole yard four years ago.  We ARE getting older.

Okay, so about that storm.  It was the leading edge of the remnants of a hurricane from Baja California and above is a shot as it moved over our neighboring city to the north.  As you can see, some parts got soaked and other parts got nothing.

And here's a picture DURING the deluge, when we figured it dropped numerous inches in about an hour.  This is showing the water streaming off our neighbor's yard into our back yard, up onto the cement slab at our back garage door.  It went there, then through the garage.  What a mess.  (The hoses are coiled up there in the corner because we moved them from the front and side yards so they would not get Rounded Up.)

The following photos (and the above) are some of the damage we saw as we took our morning walk, just in our neighborhood.

The photos above and below are from the neighborhood park where we sometimes drive to walk. The deluge carved out the shoulder of the road (above) and broke up the concrete on the drainage basin (below).

 

The next morning, we saw more trees down that we hadn't seen the day before.  This one was broken off right at the surface of the grass.  As for our yard, just that flooding through the garage and one tiny branch off a tree at the back of the yard.  We feel pretty lucky.