Surgeon in the Making

I have successfully completed my first splinter-removal on myself involving going deep enough to draw blood. I've dug splinters out of me before, but never ones that got pushed this deep and I've never had to use only a safety pin, blunt nail clippers, and a pair of flat-nose jewelry pliers to extract the foreign object. Good times...

But I don't intend to be a surgeon. At all. I intend to do what I've been doing this past week that got me the splinter in the first place.

I got to completely redesign a 30'x90' courtyard and help do the rebuilding too!

The courtyard is level on the long sides for about 15-20 feet into it, but then the rest is a fairly steep hill (we're talking like 20º-25º incline). A wooden stage at the bottom, wood bleachers on the hills, and a porch/platform thing at the top take up the middle 30 feet. On one side, there's a huge buckeye tree that shades the whole area and I'm turning that into a little forest ecosystem with forest flowers and shrubs native to the Ohio region. The other side has only a small dogwood tree, and so is very sunny. It gets a pond and waterfall at the bottom (that will most definitely not have water hyacinths, one of the most invasive alien plant species to invade North America, but the pond retailers still sell them) that will filter and treat itself naturally given the proper ratio of critters-to-plants. The rest of the hill will have native wildflower seed sown that will cover it in dense waist-high flowers of varied and beautiful colors, scents, and structures that will attract all sorts of bugs (including like 10 kinds of butterflies and who knows how many varieties of bees and wasps!) and birds (among those will be finches, hummingbirds, and orioles). The top level part of the courtyard is already divided into three parts by the bleachers and the porch thingy. One part will be a tree and bulb nursery, another part a cottage-style garden, and the third a perennial garden.

So far we've dug the pond, killed all the weeds covering the entire area, cut down somewhere between 20 and 30 bushes (which made me sad because some of them were gorgeous, but they were in stupid places and had to go), and put annual flowers in the top flowerbeds for an immediately noticeable effect. Unfortunately none of it will survive, but we can't start sowing seed and planting bulbs for perennial plants until fall or spring and the school wants to see something other than topsoil when they look at it (although it's very nice, rich topsoil that feels delightful under your feet).

I've gotten to spend the last three days getting streaked with mud and all sorts of stuff to do wildlife conservation and landscape designing all at once! I'm overjoyed by that because I want to do one of those two things for a living (The designing and conserving, not the sweating and getting mud-covered. As much as I love mud between my toes and fingers, I don't think I could make a living walking around in mud nor would I want to). That first part may not sound fun, but it's not bad except for the sweat part. It could've been a couple degrees cooler. But I don't mind doing heavy work outside and getting nice and dirty. Even though you feel tired and sometimes somewhat irritable after several hours of moving rock, dirt, plants, etc. you feel like you've accomplished something and like your time has been very well spent. And plus there's the long shower afterward to look forward to. On the whole, it's a gratifying experience.