I went out this morning to work on ye olde retaininge walle. I’ve been meaning to work on it for awhile, but it seems like every time I finally have some time to work on the yard, the grass is getting long and I have to cut it. Plus it’s freaking hot. I went out about 8:00 this morning so hopefully it wouldn’ t be quite so hot, but it still was pretty hot.

Here’s a picture of what it looked like the last time I took a picture of it, which was back when we had the garage sale, and may be the last time I worked on it.

I used up all of my blocks, and now here’s what it looks like:

In the back you can see our monstrous tomato plants. We got some from our neighbor and we have reaped quite the harvest. So far we have harvested 111 tomatoes, and we’re averaging 20-30 a day. 29 yesterday and 24 today.

It’s hard to see exactly what I did this morning on the wall, but I put a couple of rows on the middle row. This is layers 2, 3 and a few blocks of 4, counting 1 as the bottom layer. Eventually the front row (NE corner of the wall) will be 2 high, and the middle row will be 4 high, and the back row will be 6 high. If I planned things right, the back row will also line up with the steps going up to the front door, though I think that I did not plan it right enough. As you might imagine, it was a bit difficult to plan just where I needed to dig and put the bottom row so that 6 blocks higher would line up with something that was 4-5 feet away.

I thought I was going to run out of sand and have to go to Annoyo’s Hardware this morning, but I had just enough. I did run out of blocks though and we went to Home Depot and picked up 30 more as well as 2 more bags of sand. I suspect that that will get me pretty close to done, though I bet I’ll have to make one more trip to get more blocks, though we shall see.

I plan on putting some more blocks on this evening once it cools down. I think I probably have enough places to put them that I could probably use just about all 30 of the blocks I bought today without having to dig any more and lay sand (which is the most time consuming part, given that it entails making sure everything is all level and such). If I do, maybe I’ll take some pictures of how it looks after I do so.