Photos of my hardscaping projects

Today started very early, as my neighbors and I were jolted awake by my concrete team, all of their trucks, and a huge cement mixer truck -- at 6 am! The men worked and worked till they had my project finished. They are going to return in a couple of days to clean the splashes off of my paint.

Here are some photos of the project before we got started:
Here, the men are beginning to do the forms for the concrete.

And here it is with the concrete poured and the forms removed:


I got many wonderful holiday gifts! This is the gift that came from Dave and Mrs. Beasley's!

Mrs. Beasley's stuff is all delicious. The first thing that disappeared from this package is those 3 little cakes.

A package came for me today -- 3 in fact! One was Chocolate Bing Cherries from Angie and George. Two was my mail from Bloomington, sent with love (and some gifts tucked inside) by Suzanne.

And the third was orange-candied pecans, which Katherine made and sent to me! These got my attention first, and I ate a third of them before I could stop. YUMMY! Katherine, I will definitely use this recipe, though I won't have fresh Florida oranges for the zest.

Katherine, you asked whether these were less "orangey" because of the fresh orange zest. This is right. Commercial orange zest is dried, and therefore, will be much more concentrated. You need four times as much volume if you use fresh zest, rather than dried. And you can get about 2T of fresh zest from one large orange. I might be tempted to add some orange extract, too. But, in any event, these are so good!

I was so nervous while the men were doing my concrete work, that I rearranged my furniture in my cottage. (I always get that way, when people are working around me.) There are not many choices for where to put things, but I changed the chair and couch around and ... I like it! I think that it improves my cottage's feng shui.