Sometimes I think it would be nice to stay in Utah for awhile and raise a family here. Other times, I seriously question myself and wonder if it could be the worst thing in the world. When do I start having these episodes of doubt and fear? When I look outside and know that I am actively loosing 5-10 years off of my life. Seeing as we sit down in a valley, surrounded by mountains on every side, it seems the air does not know how to escape our cities. When we go for a stretch of time with no storms, the air just gets darker and darker and darker. We are in the middle of this right now. Some people define it as an 'inversion' because they say the wind blows the opposite direction than normal so it picks up all the dust. Some news people are just calling it fog. I happen to know a few things about fog: fog is NOT brown, and fog does NOT smell bad. Both of these characteristics are here with our inverted, polluted air. We live extremely close to the base of the mountains, yet I can't even see them because the air is so gross. You know it's bad when you hear a news reporter say "Betcha thought the air wouldn't get any worse! Well...it did." Yeah, they actually said that. We've had red-air alerts all week. Stay inside! Don't BREATHE. Also, the news decided to be helpful and list what the current visibility was for all the cities, some were 8, some 5 (miles)...Provo? ZERO. You can't get less than zero with visibility, it's not like the temperature where you can have negative numbers. No negatives for visibility, which means we are the worst you can possibly be. How comforting. We're even worse than Salt Lake City!! How is that?!?! Gross, gross, gross. That's how I feel.
This post is to document the journey our outside of our house has been on over the last few years. A lot of these projects I took on this summer, and a few I did earlier. I am so happy with where we are currently at, but still have some plans before it's finished. So, here is what it looked like the day we bought the house. Seven years ago. Don't let the "grass" fool you. It's just weeds. And the ugly brown window trims paired with the ridiculously old glass in the windows and the green brick with maroon grout. Not too pretty. We have since painted the door, trim, and replaced the windows. Also replaced the porch light and house numbers. This spring we also had a new concrete half circle driveway installed. We live on a busy street and our front yard is useless and our driveway is tiny. So now we have much more functionality, less weeds, and overall happiness. After the driveway was installed, I also ripped out the rest of the grass and installed some decorative...
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No, that's not what I said!