Busy Days and Restless Nights

I feel like I've had completely FULL days, if you know what I mean.  Days where from the time I get up and get going to the time I change for bed I'm running at 110% to get everything done and when I'm not moving I'm mentally tallying everything I got done and everything that I still need to do.  None of it is bad stuff, it's just... stuff... all the things that make up one's life.  We have wedding stuff going on (and will until the actual wedding ceremony so that's not a new thing!) and we have house stuff happening which will probably continue for the next year or two until we get thing the way we want them and then I have work stuff going on.  I'm happy to say that I like where I am in all of these areas even if everything isn't perfect because I have a purpose.  Who knows what I would do with myself if I had no "to do" list (probably  be in amazing shape... or 500 lbs, who knows). 


Anyway,  you would think that I'd be sleeping like a baby, and usually I do, but the last few weeks have been challenging.  My allergies are difficult to handle right now and it seems that even though I'm keeping up with my medications and my prevention routines I'm still suffering some unpleasant symptoms that sometimes keep me from sleeping soundly through the night.  I've frequently woken up in the middle of the night with a nose gushing all sorts of unpleasantness onto my face or such itchy eyes that I have to get up and take a benadryl and eye drops in order to get back to sleep.  I've also noticed that my allergy meds make me super thirsty which means I've been drinking even more water than usual and that has lead to frequent nighttime bathroom trips.  My new approach has been to take a benadryl if I'm already having a bad allergy day as I go to bed and that way I don't wake up with icky symptoms at 2am... the meds usually last until about 5am and we wake up at 5:30 or so, so I'm not losing that much sleep.  


Aside from the allergy issues, BF has had a few restless nights where he has tossed and turned, therefore waking me up each time he wakes up.  Yesterday it was my intention to run after dinner, but as soon as I sat on the couch to let my food settle before the run I was out!  I guess sometimes sleep has to trump exercise.  


In other news, I finally measured our backyard so we could start planning out what exactly we are going to do there when we get it all cleaned up.  I took some pictures as well, so you can see what we are working with:

Looking from the patio out to the yard... but you can't see the whole yard.  I think they ran out of money and bought the cheap building bricks instead of paving stones to finish the walk way.  Also I wouldn't recommend walking on this "walk way" as it is not even and the moss makes it pretty slick in spots.

Further out into the yard... where most of the destruction/demolition has taken place.

The view of the largest part of the yard.

The pit of DESTRUCTION!!! that used to be a "water feature"...

Part of the paving stone patio that was next to the "water feature", along with our completely full bin of yard debris and pretty good pile of debris next to it.  Oh yeah, and the janky old trunk that was left for us to clean up.

More of the yard, but facing the house.

The view from the far back fence toward the house.  We have a completely unusable corner on the left side of the photo... we may be building a tiny shed to hold  yard tools for that corner.  Who knows.

Anyhow, so that is what we are working with and what we've been up to.  I wish I had an aerial photo of the yard so I could mark all of the areas where we dug up dead or dying plants.  The rose bush you see above by our window is literally the ONLY bush we left since it seems to be pretty hardy and just in need of a good pruning.  

As I mentioned yesterday, we are planning on getting all of the junk out of the yard on Saturday afternoon so I will take a few more pictures of the "clean" yard and then progressives as we do more work this spring and summer.

And on a completely unrelated note, a squirrel followed me in the parking lot at work today.  It was SO WEIRD.  At first I thought it was just hopping along doing squirrel stuff, but then I realized that it was actually following ME.  I stopped and it would get close to me, but not too close, and wait.  And I would walk and it would walk.  I would walk and stop a few times, just to be sure it was, indeed, doing what I thought it was and I was correct.  A guy walking behind me stopeed and said, "Hey!  I think that squirrel is following you... did you feed it?".  Of course I hadn't, but I DID take a picture because I'm pretty sure it was a baby squirrel.  I debated taking it with me into the office because it seemed sad and like it needed a human friend but then I got all paranoid that maybe it had rabies and thats why it was acting all weird and following people OR maybe it was a domesticated squirrel that was abandoned, like maybe that squirrel on the news that can waterski. I struggled with it for several minutes before I entered the building and then again when I got to my desk and decided that if it was still out there when I went out again I was taking it to the vet and possibly keeping it as a pet (providing that it didn't have the rabies).

I haven't left work yet, but you will know tomorrow if I have a new squirrel pet named Sunny.  It just seemed like the correct name to give him/her PLUS its unisex.  Also, I've never brought a pet home to BF unannounced so I wonder how that would go.  I feel like it would go much better than it used to when I lived with my parents... who, I should mention, now own 2 cats because I brought them home unannounced as well.  What can I say, cute animals are hard to leave.  This is also why we have 2 dogs.  I don't know if I've ever told that story, but when we got Nora we were just planning on going to SEE the puppies, not take one home.... hahaha.