A Little Less Jungle, Please

I'll be home two weeks before leaving for a short trip to Colorado, and I've decided to use the time to clear out the "circle garden" (in the middle of our circular driveway) before we go.  Over the years it has become overgrown with wisteria, vines, little trees, and all kinds of other things that I never intended to grow there.

What I intended was beautiful flowers ringed by an edge of glorious hostas, and I was well on the way to fulfilling this vision when our dogs died.  The surprising effect of being dog-less was that the deer began to come closer to our house.  Once they determined that there were no more dogs to chase and harass them, they made themselves at home munching on the flowers and devouring the hostas.   It was discouraging to say the least.

Last year I cleared out part of the shady side of the garden and planted some ferns to see if the deer would eat them.  So far they haven't and I've also found some good web site listing other "deer resistant" shrubs, like oak leaf hydrangeas, that I'm willing to try.  My new vision is of low maintenance ferns and bushes which the deer will ignore and I will like looking at.

But first I have to clear out all the area, and this morning I got off to a good start.

Before.....

During...

After...

 An hour of this each morning and I might be done by the end of the week. 

Fetcher kept me company.  In the course of about five minutes he pounced on a bug, leaped in the air to catch a cricket (which he then ate; yuck), and raced up the branch of the dogwood tree, balanced on the end for an exciting minute while he tried to right himself, and raced back down again.  Whew!

I had a useful session with my "One on One" Apple trainer yesterday and made a cool slide show about our trip to France, complete with maps showing where we went.  The idea was to add the slide show to my blog, but at 900+ photos, it was way too big to post or email anyone!  Clearly some judicious editing is needed; I'll see if I can get to that today.   I initially thought about just loading our photos up in Picasa but really wanted the ability to group them by labeled location.  Seems like I got a message from Picasa recently saying it had some new features; maybe I can explore those and see if they'll help.

I'm throwing in all these "maybes" because the big event is Paul's twelfth birthday tomorrow.  It's planned to be a low-key day with an afternoon "friends" get-together swimming, playing video games, and shooting off rockets, but still, there are things that must get done.