It's Saturday morning, everybody! What are you doing today? Things are busy at my house. It must have been the change in the weather or something, but Darryl and I decided to majorly clean our house. I mean, it's pretty clean to begin with, but we cleared out the basement, and the storage space on the second floor, some closets and bookshelves - all those places you put stuff in and then rarely take stuff out of. The results are mostly excellent, because the whole place feels more open and spacious; however, our back porch is just FULL of trash to go out, and our trash day isn't until Friday!! Today I'm going to do the regular chores (you know, laundry, scrubbing out the bathroom, etc.) and work on next week's lesson plans for school. You can't believe how much fun the kids in my classes are. I told Chrissy some of my stories when I saw her on Friday, and she thought they were a riot, which was nice, because Darryl mostly does not find my stories funny AT ALL. Anyway, the fact that the kids are so great makes lesson planning more fun, because I can just imagine their reactions to the things I have planned! Darryl is out renting a roto-tiller right now despite the overcast sky. He says the forecast is not calling for any more rain today, but I don't know.. it's pretty gray. His plan is to roto-till (is that a word?) the back yard of the rental house and part of our back yard today, then plant grass seed tomorrow. Last weekend he chopped down everything that was growing back there, then sprayed with herbacide, and now everything looks really dead! I hope it actually IS dead, and that the yard doesn't sprout 1 million weeds along with the grass. The big problem with that back yard this year has been trying to control the weeds. We have the craziest weeds growing back there because it was just left wild for the better part of 20 years. We had (have) this one weed which Darryl always called bamboo, because that's just what it looks like: it grows fast, it's tall and thin, it has rings every so often along the "trunk" that divide the "trunk" into segments, etc. We couldn't find any way to kill it, or even slow it's growth, so I started looking it up online. It's called japanese knotweed. Here's a picture I found on some county's Noxious Weeds webpage. :) Anyway, as it turns out, Round Up and other herbacides seem to damage it, but MAN, the stuff is so hard to get rid of. All summer I've been trying different things, and I STILL have some sprouts back there. I read that some department in ohio declared it an ecological hazard, which has not exactly made me feel confident about being able to completely eliminate it. Hopefully mowing the baby sprouts along with the new grass will put an end to it. I think that's about all that's going on at my house. What are you doing this weekend?