Progress of a sort is being made in our latest attempt to spend every cent we earn (no I’m not bitter, really). The backyard is still a big pile of dirt, which Mia is certainly enjoying. She has undertaken digging to China, to all appearances, and in pursuit of this goal has three pretty sizable holes in the corner of the yard dug. We see her out here, industriously hurling dirt every which way, occasionally poking her head out to shake off the dust. She is taking on a slightly ashen color for her efforts, and I have officially given up all attempts to keep her groomed. It’s easy to find her, though – just follow the paw prints.

I, on the other hand, am not enjoying have a big dirtpile for a backyard. It’s been this way for almost two months and if we don’t hustle, the rains may turn the dirtpile into our own personal mud bath. Unfortunately, I doubt our mud bath would have any recuperative powers. Anyway, we have been looking high and low for a contractor who does concrete. As we live in the heart of home improvement heaven, we’ve been canvassing the area for homes where we can see work is ongoing, and then hitting up the contractors for their business cards. Some call back, some don’t. One guy came by and gave us as estimate of $8,000. After we recovered consciousness, we decided to keep looking. That was almost a month ago. $8,000 isn’t looking so bad anymore. Tomorrow another guy is coming over, and he seems our sort of fellow. First off, he has a ponytail and wears surfer shorts – you gotta love that. And he actually has ideas about things we could do and ways we could do them, which shows he’s thinking (a good sign, IMHO). He smokes, but as long as he doesn’t do it in the house, we can live with that. We haven’t heard his quote, but we’re betting it will be less than $8,000.

We also decided NOT to go with the gawd-awful expensive pebble-style tile and found a much more reasonable tile that will look quite nice and not bankrupt us. I figure the backyard had better be nice, as once it’s done we won’t be able to afford any exotic trips for a while, and hanging out in the backyard will be about as far as we’ll be traveling.

Chuck has been having a grand time, having at the remaining tree roots and digging deeper holes in search of sprinkler pipes and the like. Today he tackled the voracious ivy that was growing on our back fence. It’s not our ivy: it’s our neighbors’ but they ivy had literally grown through the fence and crawled all over the fence. So he hacked it back, and discovered that several boards in the fence had been eaten away and corroded by the ivy. One more thing to add to the never-ending List of Money Pit To Do Items.

What, me bitter? Naah…