Sam-K.net

Cary recently bought a book called The Sneaky Chef, which contains lots of recipes that feature healthy ingredients. Most of the recipes involve adding different types of purees, usually made from vegetables. There’s an orange puree(sweet potato and carrots), green puree (broccoli and spinach), and many others.

This weekend, Cary made cookies:

Peanut Butter cookies with chocolate chips, and Chocolate Peanut Butter cookies. Both cookies were made with the sweet potato & carrot puree, and each cookie is about 65 calories. While they aren’t as decadent as regular cookies — and they have a cake consistency — they definitely satisfy my cookie needs, and they go great with milk. More importantly, the vegetables inside are undetectable.

Today, we spent about 8 gaskillion calories on starting a garden. Cary had already planted some vegetables in temporary pots — squash, tomatoes and sweet bell peppers — so they had a head start.

As it turns out, a couple of the squash plants were already sprouting squash in the temporary planter, so Cary left them there for now:

This morning, we rented a light duty tiller and spent an hour or so breaking up the soil. Turns out there are a lot of rocks in that dirt, but I think it’ll work out ok. We waited until later in the afternoon to finish up, adding some fertilizer and garden soil and clearing out as many rocks and buried tree trunks as possible.

The vegetables are all planted and watered, so now we rest.

We still need to make a better border around the garden, but for now, the small landscaping ties will do.

I think the sun and the transplanting was a bit hard on the plants, so they wilted a bit. Hopefully, a night in bed and some fresh water will perk them up again.

Our house has a rather small back deck. Here’s what it looked like just before we bought it:

Today, Cary and I rented a powerwasher from Home Depot, and after 2 hours of work, our back deck now looks like this:

The bright sun makes the deck look slightly more new than it actually is, but it’s still a world of difference. Here’s an in-progress picture that really shows the difference:

The previous owners of our house, who lived there for two years, did very little yard work.

Those ValPak mailers are ubiquitous.

Originally, I wasn’t sure if he ran for the bushes when I was outside simply because it was the closest safe place, or because he actually lived there.

But now I’m pretty confident that the bushes are his home.

This little fella lives in the bushes in front of our house. I’m not sure if he(she?) is a small adult, or a baby, but it doesn’t seem to have any family. We see him around the bushes when we come home from work. For a few weeks, I wasn’t sure what kind of animal it was, because I would only see a blur of fur as it bolted for shelter when it saw me. Cary knew that it was a rabbit before I did. I guess I make more noise than she does.