KVC Double Down Sandwich

The worst sandwich ever. The KVC Double Down Sandwich.

Five executives sitting around a table thinking of the next best thing in fast food.  One guy says, Let's replace the bread in a sandwich.


Yea - great idea but . . hmmmmmm what shall we replace it with  hmmmmmm

 Silence . . . .tick. . . tick. . .tick

WITH BREADED DEEP FRIED CHICKEN BREASTS!! 


Silence . . . .tick. . . tick. . .tick - BRILLIANT.  They all stand up and give high fives to each other.  

It only has 540 calories which is no big deal!   Hardee's Monster burger has 1,300 calories and Wendy's Triple Baconator as 1,350. According to FiveThirtyEight even a Big Mac has 540 calories! It's all the other bad bad stuff, salt, fat and so forth like 145 milligrams of cholesterol (more then two Big Macs)

However - I do see a trend starting. and not the "replace the bread" wars will start!  How about Burger King making a hamburger,   WRAPPED IN A HAMBURGER!!  OR - A cheeseburger and replace the bread WITH MORE CHEESE!!

The possibilities are endless!

Did you know the first Boston Marathon was on this day 113 years ago?   15 runners started and 10 finished. Woman were not allowed to run until 1972 but in 1966 the first woman DID run! 
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Is there a chiropractor in the house?   Our job this weekend was to stain the deck as it never had anything on it and had now turned a lovely shade of gray!  When the house was built we were told to NOT stain it for at least a year. This seemed like a wonderful idea.  So we waited a year and then waited another year and then thought about it for another year but never really got around to it.

Well, the grayness was getting to us so we decided to Sarah Palin it and pull the trigger. 

This is what it looked like Saturday at 10:00am

So my buddy comes over and the three of us are going to crank it out and finish the job in one day.  However - Elweed had found some Periwinkle in some garbage when he was walking home from work (he saw the comet) and was now the proud father to 2 square feet or Periwinkle (which is going beneath our deck.  

So while DJ and I are working on staining the 148 FREAKING posts he is planting Periwinkle and taking breaks and his back hurts and so forth.

So we didn't get quite the maximum effort out of him but we did get 3 hours of work.

We all agreed that for each of us the 1st hour was sort of just getting techniques down.  Those posts really a bitch an the best way is to use a rag, skip the paint brush.  Also, get GOOD paint brush's don't cheap out on the brush.

I figure total man hours will be in the 20 hour range when it's all done.  We ran out of stain.  We were told 2 gallons and we had 1 gallon on reserve IN CASE and that ran out. We have the stairs and the floor of one deck to do yet (two 10x10 decks put together with stairs in between).

Here is how it looks this morning.

I kid about Elweed but I tell ya, the guy is good at plants and landscaping.  He is living his dream yard through us.  It's like it took him until he was 50 to figure out what he wanted to be in life.

I wish there was some company that really wanted someone who was bright and freakishly enthusiastic about plants!   He finds a particular plant and obsesses over it learning every thing there is. The guy has a million ideas and when we finally do something he takes credit for it because at SOMETIME in the last 4 years he has said to do it.   He should be a boulder wall expert it's his forte.

These next few images are for documentation of our boulder wall. Boulder walls are very hard to make pretty with plants as there is no dirt in the wall normally and plants really grow better in dirt.

You will see very very few boulder walls that look vibrant with plants.  So while we are working on mine Elweed has found a building with a bare boulder wall (they are everywhere now) and has adopted it as his own.  He's like Johnny Appleseed spreading perennial beauty where he can.

This is some phlox that we bought from the farmers market for $1 last fall and something below it S 

 This guy below we call Big Wooly  We're not sure what it is but it LOVES the area.  He was doing ok but when we lifted it up and started to put better dirt and sort of "made it's bed" it REALLY has taken off.  It'll have flowers and the porcupines will fallow the sun. 

The funny thing is that it has emotions.  Some days you see he is sad and others it's happy and reaching for the sky.  It's not fond of wind so on windy days it huddles a little. He has tripled in size since the middle of last summer.

We tend to buy plants on sale and just stick them somewhere until there is a good place to put them. Below are the triplets that have been "inserted (as Elweed says) at 3 different times.

I'm hoping Brian knows the names of all of these (I'm sure he knows the common AND Latin names) 

 
We were about to move the middle one over but then a castoff was doing great on another wall that did not get much light so we rescued it.  I don't have a photo because it was looking worn out from the move and is about to flower - perhaps tomorrow.


Here is the entire canvas.

And the view from the top looking down. That is Sweet William I believe working it's way around the rock. They were perhaps three one square inch plants of those last fall. 

Near the very bottom center of the photo you can see the garbagewinkles that were planted. 

A photo from the side to get perspective.

THEN - DJ and I purchased a crap load of new plants.  Two HoneySuckles, another Red Chokeberry (love those plants) two Hydrangea's and another Summer NineBark which I had never heard of before 2 years ago but are fantastic plants.


You better get used to looking at gardens on this blog as our home begins to take shape.  From nothing but dirt we have been working every year bit by bit to make our yard a lush, green environment bird and butterflies and we're going to mail order some squirrels soon LOL  
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And totally Off Topic - our neighbors were having ONE of their 7 family reunions next door and while we were underneath the deck drinking beer and planting garbagewinkles they were doing some photos. Shirley came over and asked if I could help out and take a photo. WELL YEA!!!

So here is the Castleberg family in all their glory!  I hope they like it.  I also sent them a "normal" photo but . . .I like this one better.

How often can you get 20 people all smiling at once (well , , the kid is sticking his tongue out which is perfect!!)

Have a great day
Rod