What a great weekend this was! On Friday night, JimO and Kat came out for dinner, and we had so much fun. Paul and I spent Thursday night madly cooking and cleaning our hairball-infested house. Everything, including the cats, got vacuumed (no kidding: Brody likes being vacuumed).

The patio was complete enough to host, but our guests were treated to lovely views of piles of rubble and half-emptied crates of bluestone. We did our best to make up for the mess by plying them with food and drink, which appeared to work: Jim liked the cold peanut noodle well enough that he actually licked the tongs clean. The first of the Alaskan Salmon booty hit the grill, and we ate ourselves stupid, culminating in strawberry shortcake with backyard berries, Good Eats biscuits, and real whipped cream. YUM!

After dinner, we played a few rounds of bocce in the park across the street, and Jim and Kat totally, completely schooled us. We've really got to get a bocce set so that we can practice up! What a good time. The weather was perfect, the company was wonderful. We also got visits from pretty much every neighbor in the neighborhood, which was also (mostly) cool.

Saturday was good -- Farmer's market had the first tart cherries of the season, so I hauled out the food dehydrator I bought last winter at the thrift store and made three quarts' worth of dried cherries. The first attempt at "sun-dried" tomatoes was a little off, though -- they came out more like "tomato chips". Darn tasty, though. We crumbled them into omelets and on salads. mmmm. Saturday evening we went down to Island Fest with Becky and Tom, where we ran into Kenjji and Kito. This is Kenjji's last week teaching at CCS, and after that they're both permanently in Kalamazoo. We're thrilled to have such a talented comics artist here in town, and Paul and I are looking into setting up a Comics Night similar to the one held weekly by Matt Feazell and the rest of the Hamtramck gang.

Sunday was a calm, slow day in which I got a metric butt-ton of comics work done. I've got a big two-page spread on my desk and got nearly the whole thing toned. Another 3-4 hours of polish and it'll be done. That makes 4 pages in about 3 weeks, which is okay, but not fantastic. I need to get faster; believe me, I know. That's another reason I'm looking forward to the possibility of a Comics Night; it'll help keep me motivated, especially through the winter.

I also, on sheer coincidence, checked eBay this weekend for a steam juicer, and what did I find? The exact same antique Mehu Maija juicer my Gram had. It's even got the box it came in, and the instruction book! Best part? I got it for $40, instead of the $200 I had saved up for the new one. WOOHOO! Cherry juice here I come. SO HAPPY!

The other thing that happened this weekend is that Katya, the incredibly talented woman who's doing our backyard landscaping, almost finished the waterfall. It's actually a lot bigger than I thought it would be, and takes up the whole rounded corner away from the house. It was unusable dirt before, and now it's a big, mountain-looking pile of rocks with lots of little pockets to put plants and sculpture in. It's amazing -- a sculpture unto itself. Katya terraced the rest of the yard as well, using up the extra rocks and dirt she had left over. It's a two-tier design, and she even recycled the old concrete from the patio slab by putting it between the terrace and the fence so that the fence doesn't rot from being in contact with the dirt. Tonight she's coming over to test the pump, and then the waterfall will be done. There's still a bit of landscaping left to be done, and she's going to lay the extra bluestone in the sideyard as stepping stones. Gonna be gorgeous, it is.

I do still have occasional pangs of guilt about it, though. As stunning as it is, it was a pretty expensive job to have done, and was entirely optional. I'm still not used to being able to spend money on optional stuff -- it kinda freaks me out a little. Part of me feels like we should have banked that money, even though we have emergency savings all set just in case. Still, we might as well do it while we're both still employed; that's liable to change at a moment's notice. And it is wonderful and beautiful and will totally raise the value of the house, so I guess it is an investment of sorts.

So. Great weekend, lots of fun, lots of progress.