I used to get haircuts and new clothes.  Now I buy chandeliers and replant the yard.  That might backfire when my clothes are 20 years out of date, but it’s working out well for now.

The current improvement plans are for my poor yard, which has turned into one of the scragglier yards on the block in the seven short months that I’ve owned the house.  My neighbors just have dormant grass and shrubs for the most part, but their dormant grass is more manicured than mine.

So here’s the game plan: nix the current shrubs (which is convenient, since one is already dead), double the size of the flower bed, and then eventually take over the whole yard with garden.  It would certainly solve the problem of keeping grass alive if I found drought-resistant plants to thrive instead.  That’s where the ideas end.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  No matter what the water/light/soil requirements, I’m going to be planting snapdragons.

Snapdragons have been my favorite flower since I was about three years old.  They’re actually one of my first memories.  A babysitter in Michigan taught me how to snap the flowers open to make it look like they’re talking, and it was all over.  Who doesn’t love a flower that you can play with?!  It’s like biology and Sesame Street got together and made a perfect living organism.  It was really God, not Big Bird, but that’s beside the point.

That means that my grand garden plan is based around one relatively small plant.  I guess the good thing about that is that I’m going for a loose, undesigned look in the garden (while I’ll be secretly planning it within an inch of its life).  It might just work out.

The irony of this post and this life step is that I used to make fun of my mom for turning our yard into one giant garden wherever we moved.  She created these enormous gardens all over Texas and even in almost solid rock in Colorado, and none of us in the family ever wanted to spend our Saturdays helping to keep the plants alive and the weeds dead.  It wasn’t an appealing prospect.  But now that I have my very own tenth of an acre, what am I doing?  The same thing.  You can laugh at me now, Mom.