Ooh La La

My husband is an interesting combination of a dreamer and a do-er. My head almost immediately hits whatever hard surface is around when he utters the words, "I have an idea."

Well, my head introduced itself to a door frame last week when David explained how we would solve the problem with our backyard gutters. Our back gutter can't keep up with major rain water and turns our porch into Lake Cohen. Initially we had planned to hire someone to build what's called a french drain. (For those of you who aren't up on your construction vocabulary, a french drain is basically a long tube with holes in it attached to the gutter on one end, buried underground for about 25 feet, and ending in a big pile of rocks which is also buried underground.) But last week we had a long conversation about money and decided we just didn't have enough for someone to build us one. So Dave decided he would build one himself.
And I ran to find a hard surface.
On a Saturday morning, David bought a truck load of rocks and a bunch of big black tubes. I never thought he would actually go through with it. I locked myself in the office and pretended I didn't hear the clanging or the cursing outside. You can imagine my surprise when I walked outside around lunchtime to find this:HARD SURFACE, HARD SURFACE, HARD SURFACE.

I looked at him with the "wife-look" I swore would never take over my face, to which David quickly repeated, "This is going to save us so much money. This is going to save us so much money." The yard appeared to have been blown up by terrorists, after which they placed my innocent, shirtless husband in the middle of the war zone with a target on his head.

So I did something I've never done before in my life: I picked up a shovel. That's right. I shoveled. I'm a shoveler. We worked all afternoon digging and moving rock and filling in the big holes. The dogs helped by burying themselves in dirt and barking at bushes. In case you weren't aware, I'm not exactly known for my heavy lifting. But suddenly, my husband and I became a construction team with two little furry helpers, and digging a 30 foot trench in the backyard felt perfectly normal.
We don't know if the french drain actually works yet as through some freak of nature it hasn't rained in 4 days. And the yard looks pretty terrible; it will probably take a while for the grass to grow back through the dirt and for the ground to level out. But by goodness, my husband built us a big french drain and I helped. And Charlie looked like this...



...which makes the whole thing totally adorable.





Good job, husband. You saved us so much money. :)