Pink eye is really a great contagious infection to get if you simply must go and get sick. With Justin under doctor's orders not to go to work for two days and the two big kids also infected, we had a nice extra long weekend.

On Monday it rained, which wasn't so lovely, but with Justin at home, I got to go to the grocery store all by myself, which is really almost a luxury these days. Tuesday was an absolutely beautiful day. We spent almost the entire day outdoors. Justin planted a few things and moved stuff around in our attempt to "dogscape" the backyard and gently encourage our pooch not to run through the flower beds. This included a bit of lightweight green fencing, some rocks, some big planters and a few stepping stones where he is allowed to go. So far he seems to be following those boundries. Now we just need to establish some other boundries in other parts of the garden to keep him out. I'm thinking about a garden bench and perhaps another pot or a piece of statuary.

While Justin was fighting the dog, I weeded -- I'm waging my annual winning war against wild onions and my annual futile war against clover, violets and dandelions. The dandelions have been eliminated more or less from the front yard, but I fear there is no hope for the back yard. And if I took out the weeds there wouldn't be any yard any way. I also worked on painting an arbor that we plan to put on the side of our house this summer. Currently, we have chain link everywhere but the stretch across the front. Eventually we'd like to replace it all with picket. For now, we just want to replace one short section on the side of our house where we currently have a gate to the backyard. The gate is placed all the way to one side and I want to center it on the space and put the arbor behind it. We'll also be building a path down that side of the house, as I've mentioned before. It's just a big mud slide right now, because not much can survive constant dog romping.

Anyway, the arbor arrived last week and although cedar is quite lovely on its own, our picket fence is white and I want the arbor to match. So we bought some Olympic solid stain, which is what we used on our front porch and front steps and I am currently painting the arbor. I got the second coat on most of the pieces yesterday. The whole gate/arbor/pathway thing won't be happening all that soon, probably because we have a lot of other things coming up, but I'll be glad to get one small piece finished.

And so, we got a lot done and Justin didn't have to spend a glorious spring day in his office looking at the building across the alley from his out of his window. We can't really say that pink eye has been all that bad really.