Yard work, back pain and shovels

Some of you may recall, when I bought my little palace, the area behind the driveway was a hot mess. I can't find a picture that shows how utterly horrid it was in the beginning, but covered in bramble etc it was. I wasn't certain of what I was going to do with this particular part of my job.  Fairly quickly I realized that I have no cell reception in this house. So, I decided that I wanted to have a place to sit and talk on the phone. 

As I might have mentioned, I have been working like the very devil in the yard. This means that I have gotten disgustingly dirty multiple days in a row, multiple times a day. I would take a picture of my shower, but it is so gross I couldn't bear it. Trust me when I tell you that I am sweating like a pig multiple times a day. (Another side note, my house has a layer of dirt courtesy of all of this work, but I haven't done a single thing to clean up. I'm going with the theory that it is better to just get all the work done, THEN clean the place up.

I usually come in after a couple of hours, clean up, rest and then head back out again.
My socks? They are always that disgusting, and I usually can only do the hard sharp shooter work in the morning because by the afternoon I am too exhausted to dig. Sad, really. As you can tell, I am not the only one exhausted from all of this work and labor in the hot, hot sun. Buddy can barely get through the day. Poor thing.

I'm also funding most of Home Depots stock dividends.

 I managed to clean up the area (note that includes digging up the volunteer trees that keep popping up all over the place. You can barely see the orange cord courtesy of DISH network in the second picture, I'm working to cover that up too. I originally wanted to plant stuff that would grow tall and hide the neighbors, but apparently this year I'm just going for pretty.

I've mulched around the flowers and set up my glider, so it is on its way to looking beautiful. A lovely place to sit and chat, since I can't actually do that in my home. So annoying.

In fact, I'm working so hard that I broke one of my shovels...while digging up one of 5 dead bushes before I then planted some in their place. I broke a shovel. I am pretty sure if nothing else, that alone makes me a bad ass, and I'll not be thinking any differently any time soon!!

Although I have to confess, I'm pretty certain my chronic back pain and utter misery is probably courtesy of manual labor which I am currently doing. Because the dirt, the dirt that I need to get to fill in the area so it is as high as the driveway because I want people to be able to pack there, I can't afford to buy that much dirt, so I'm getting it from the holes I'm digging, and all of the dirt I'm digging up from around the house where the ivy was, and the front planter which I am emptying out but haven't figured out what I'm doing with it net.

I have to say the backyard looks really good from this angle. I hope the bushes planted to replace the bad ones are happy and content and choose to grow tall and strong cause the idea of having to dig anything else up makes me want to weep. Mind you, I have an incredible amount of work still to go, but I am finally starting to see progress being made!  (Oh, and as a side note, I'm on a lovely regiment of hydrocodone (for the pain), Benadryl (for the allergy to the hydrocodone), and Trazadone (so I can sleep through the itchy and weird feelings from the hydrocodone.))