What's this?!

I was out in the yard for a few minutes just looking at the flower beds thinking, "I am so freaking lazy, I still have all the dead crap from last year lying dead in the flower beds!" when I noticed a little something. A little yellow something. So I pulled back the dead crusty mess and discovered this...

Oh yes. This makes me happy. It's February, and the Crocus are out in full bloom! How beautiful is that?! That means Spring is right around the corner, and hopefully this dang cold weather will be gone soon. I know we still have a couple of months, and I can't plant the garden until mid-May, but I am getting excited!

I absolutely love to see flowers in my yard. It is one of the most rewarding things to me. Beautiful color splashed across the yard after months of nothing but brown ugliness. Sometimes white beauty, but mostly brown ugly.

Here's to Spring!

They're Ba-ack!

Already destroying my garden, the infamous grasshoppers are back and have begun their attack! I noticed them about 2 weeks ago when they were about 1/8 inch long and they are growing VERY rapidly! I got the yard sprayed and hopefully they are all going to be dead here in a few days. They better not destroy my garden this year, or else I'm gonna, uh, be really mad again, I guess. What can you do? Killing them one at a time by burning them, watching Dallas attack and eat them, sending the kids out to catch them, although very rewarding, is not too effective. Die grasshoppers, DIE!!!

That's just nasty!

I am not a big fan of spiders or bugs. As you know, we have had a grasshopper infestation this summer so I am already avoiding my yard...and it shows. Then Andy found this in the garage!

I am sure glad we haven't spent too much time hanging around out front lately, Kayman is usually in and out of the garage playing with whatever he can find. He probably would have found this Black Widow and tried to pick it up. These things give me the creeps.

They eat them in other countries! EWWWW!

We have had a terrible time in the yard this summer. I started out really motivated to keep it looking great, but then it got out of control before I knew it. We had vacations and the weeds took over. I finally got that back under control, but then the infestation came. We have thousands of grasshoppers invading our yard! It's disgusting! Take a loot at the damage they have caused to my plants.

These are the raspberries I was SO looking forward to eating! They beat me to it.

This is the bark on one of my trees. I am not positive they did this, but I haven't seen any other critters I can blame at this point.

My garden pretty much sucks, this is what most of my vegetables look like.

I don't think the broccolli is going to work out this year.

My hollyhocks have nothing but stems left. Look how big those suckers are! Those ones are about 2 inches long.

We had a fire the other night and Andy started catching what he could and roasted them up. Even though there are probably thousands of them, he still felt better watching a few of them burn. Dallas ate a few for us as well. He has a good time catching them.

Here is a roasting grasshopper. We got so many that the yard started to smell pretty bad. Sorry to any of you neighbors who may have smelled something strange Friday night. KILL THE GRASSHOPPERS!