September 29, 2013

Miss Sheri's Backyard Project


Miss Sheri's Backyard Project

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for September 29, 2013


I have been blogging since 1999. I started my site www.shortarmguy.com as a way to share photos of my kids with my friends, along with the crazy emails and videos I was getting each week. Since people always stare at me because of my funny arms, I thought I would give people what they wanted and show them a photo of me with my arms held high in the air for the world to see in an interesting new place every week. If you do the math, that means I've done this nearly 700 times since I started my website! And probably many more times than that since each week I take multiple shots to get one that I like. As can be seen in this video. This week was a very boring week at the Shortarmguy house. We went shopping for some patio furniture last night at Hom Furniture and Sears. We tried to take some pictures in interesting places. For some reason, my camera recorded a little bit of video before each photo. The result made Miss Sheri and I laugh out loud. We hope you enjoy it as well.


We had a very mellow week.  Miss Sheri is no longer working at the school and instead has spent her time being a full time mom again and working on our house.  We're prepping for a big project we're doing in our backyard and I promised my sister I'd shoot some "Before Pictures" and send them to her.  So while I was at it, I figured I could share them with all of my friends as well.


We've lived in our house for 12 years now and have never had very good luck with the grass in the areas of our yard which are covered with large trees.  I always used the excuse that we were raising children and not raising grass, but that excuse is getting a little old now that my kids are in high school.  So we figured we'd better invest in some new dirt which is on the way.  I figure for old times sake, we'll roll the kids around in the dirt before planting the shady seeds.


We decided the old swingset needed to go when Avery climbed on one of the steps and it broke beneath his foot because he was too big for it.  So Miss Sheri put an ad on Craigslist and some nice men came over, took it apart, and hauled it away.  Now it's just a bunch of gravel, a leftover pile of sand, and a bunch of memories of the days our kids were still little enough to love playing on a swingset.


We had some fun fires in the old brick firepit, but now it's just a pile of ashes.  It reminds me of a song from my youth.  Dust in the wind.  All we are is dust in the wind.  I guess I didn't realize how depressing this backyard project was going to end up being.


I guess we had a lot of bricks in that firepit.  Some of these were also from different areas in the backyard as well, but when I saw how many of them were here, I thought "That's a lot."  I also thought "I'm sure glad Miss Sheri likes doing this kind of stuff because that looks like an awful lot of work."


Speaking of a lot of work, she also got a wild hair to cut down this big tree that we hated since we moved here.  A couple of the neighbor men helped her cut it down and chop it up, but they both later told me that they were amazed at how good Sheri was at hauling the wood to the truck and throwing it into the trailer.  


She also tried to remove another tree stump we had along the side of our house by wrapping a chain around it and connecting it to the family mini-van to yank it out of the ground.  Fortunately for the stump, it proved to be much stronger than our Saturn Relay so it will live to fight another day.  But if I know Miss Sheri, that stump may have won the battle, but I'll still place my money on her to win the war!


On Saturday night, I took Miss Sheri and Grandma Linda out to dinner to tell my wife how much I appreciate all her hard work.  I may not be good at hauling bricks and tree parts, but I do know how to pick out a good steak restaurant!!  Outback here we come!

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