Busy Day...

I have two children.  Our oldest is 14 years old.  I had almost forgotten what it was like before we had children.  Today I got a reminder.  Our oldest child had a tennis tournament to attend and our youngest was invited by a friend to go to the local park to play.  From 10:15 am the house was childless.  That is when my wife and I got busy.

No no no, not THAT!  Get your mind out of the gutter, man!

After breakfast, I had to run some errands for work and for home.  The work errand is work so I won't talk about it now, but the home errand was more of a mission.  In our neighborhood there are a lot of cats, stray and owned.  They roam wherever they please.  We hate it because when they come into our yard, they leave smelly gifts for us to clean up.  I HATE IT!  By Japanese standards, we have a large yard and we have most of it protected from feline incursions... or so we thought.  One day my wife caught a cat jumping into our yard from the roof of the house behind us.  Another time she caught another cat climbing a neighbors fence and crawling under our fence to get into our yard.  The reason why they like our yard so much is that our yard is actual dirt so it is like a huge litter box for them.  So my mission today was to devise a plan to keep the fence climbers and roof jumpers OUT!. 

So, I purchased some 3m X 3m netting with 10cm openings.  And with some garden brace poles, I created a net wall that should effectively block the cat from jumping into our yard. YEAH!!!  We'll see if my wall works.  I also got some leftover siding and blocked the fence climber.  Hope everything works out!

Over the next few hours, I cut our grass (actually weeds).  The yard was in dire need of a cut because the rains that fell the two weeks prior to today really allowed the weeds to shoot up.  Some of the big ones were almost as tall as me.  I also raked everything, bagged all the cuttings and got them ready for trash day which, by the way, is tomorrow. 

Then we had to sweep up all the ash, bag it and bring it to the ash pick up location on the corner of our block.  We also cleaned out the water drains that were about 1/3 full of ash as well.  We ended up with about 10 bags of ash.  By that time, our youngest came home.  So we played soccer in the newly mowed yard.  Fun!!!  If the kids were home today, we probably wouldn't have been able to get half of that done.  Oh, and I eventually ate lunch at about 4pm.