Hiring Help

So my brother James was able to come stay and hang out with me for a week and a half before we needed to head out to Idaho for our sister's wedding. James was actually at BYU-Idaho but he had no where to go since it was too expensive and silly to fly all the way home to Maryland since he'd have to go back to Idaho for the wedding. And at last minute Luke went out of town to Albequerque for work for a few weeks and so I would be all alone anyway and so it worked out that James could fly to Denver and hang out with me and then help me make the drive out to Idaho too.
Anyway, we figured since he'd be here for a little while, we might as well put him to work so that he wouldn't get bored. We've struggled with our yard this year- we never got our sprinklers going so all our grass died fast, and it's been difficult for me to find time to work in the garden expecially when it's soo hot outside and Jacob gets bored outside quickly. And the sides of our house, including our boat storage area has been covered in weeds knee-high or higher!
This picture was after we pulled most the weeds, but it still just looked awful! So we decided that we'd lay down a weed tarp and then put rocks over the top.

After measuring everything the lady at the store told us we needed about 7 tons of rocks! When we got it, we were almost worried it wouldn't be enough, but we ended up with plenty extra!

So several days later, after plenty of shoveling, wheelbarrowing, raking and smoothing out rocks, we finally finished! I was much more pleased with the way it looked, it was at least a lot better than before, but definetly more work than you would expect!

So with all of our extra rock it was actually nice to be able to smooth out more rock in the backyard where we already had some rocks, and along and behind our shed.

We had also had a cactus here in the entrance of this walkway along our shed. And why someone had put in a cactus in a backyard I will never understand. So James helped me destroy it but in the process we got pricked several times- and let me warn you- getting pricked by a cactus reaaally hurts! Especially since there are all these tiny little splinters too and those all kept getting through our gloves, so it was a very annoying process! But I was very grateful for James' help, and I'm sure getting paid for his work was hopefully somewhat worth it, even though he swears he will never touch rocks again. And Luke is happy that it's all done and taken care of, and he didn't have to do anything! So it has made our yard a smidge better, but we will definetly have to take better care of our grass and gardens next year! A little at a time I guess- who knew having a yard would be so much work?