apparently my house came with a gardener

I have a gardener! He comes while I am at work or away on business and adjust my sprinklers and their watering cycle, mows my lawn, fills in the holes my dogs have dug, stakes up the cacti when they get top heavy, and offers advice of how to make pulling crab grass a little easier.

To top it all off ... he is so handsome and is always smiling. Normally, I think Sean might get jealous, but Sean can't really deny his charm or contagious smile. Here's a picture of him.

This is our next-door neighbor, Gene. He is the sweetest thing in the world and any time life gets little crazy and he sees that Sean and I don't have the time we wish we had to keep up with everything in the yard. We come home and find that Gene had taken it upon himself to help us out.

This week alone I came home last Saturday night to find that he had taken the weed-wacker to the lawn that I had mowed, but not gotten an opportunity to trim, he also filled in some uneven spots in our yard with"some extra dirt" he claimed to have in his yard. Tuesday, I found him in the side yard trimming up the weeds that had come up in the cracks along side the drive way. And yesterday evening, I came home from work and found him mowing the front yard that I had planned to come home and do that same evening.

He's a nut and I can't get him to stay out of our yard. It makes me feel like such a slouch. I wonder what the neighbors must think when they see the sweet old man work in those young kids' yard. There's no harm in it really. It makes him happy and I am truly so appreciative for his little acts of love. I just will never be able to live with myself if he hurts himself doing my yardwork.

I love my gardener! I just wish he would stay out my yard, so this guilty knot would leave my stomach.

Playing catch up ... again!

So I got playfully scolded the other day for slacking on my blog. I've been out of it ... consumed ... overwhelmed ... so many things that I feel like if I stop and breathe and get into the place in my heart and my head that I write from that I might just start crying uncontrollably. This phase in life is hard. It is. It's plain and simply hard ... so hard! I am Bonnie; I haven't lost the sunshiney outlook on life that I have developed over the past few years, but I am tired and the days are hard. I have been having moments where taking the high road and being graceful and restraining myself from yelling at the top of my lungs with frustration has grown increasingly unappealing, but they are fleeting moments. I just married my best friend and I come from an amazing family. I have phenomenal friends and I am so proud of all that I have accomplished in my 29 years, so those weak, frustrated moments are few and fleeting, but I would be lying if I said they weren't here. It's just a miss my husband and once you learn the magic of sharing your everyday with your partner, all of life's challenges begin to seem more daunting when your partner isn't by my side. So please forgive me for slacking on the blog as I find strength in the numbness from disconnect at times. I know that's a cowards way out, so I have been trying to reconnect and be more myself ... more honest with myself and the world about my blessings and disappointments. So I am trying ... thank you for the patience.

With that said, February all in all has been good. Work is picking up we are really BUSY again. My team is phenomenal at the office, the difficulty there comes from just not having enough time to get everything done at the office I want to and then with Matt's recent life commitments, he has decreased time and uninterrupted focus in the office. He's trying though ... he amazes me by how much he is to so many people, but I will be really glad when this phase of his life is over to and he can reconnect with the office. Again though, I am blessed that he gives me so much trust and power and respect in the office and let's me run the company as it were my own.

My parents came to visit me for my Dad's birthday .. which was so lovely. My family is great! It was my Dad's birthday and they drove all the way out here to see me. So I took my parents up to Jerome for some site-seeing and haunted hamburgers overlooking Sedona. We got in some fun shopping and some backyard steak-grilling which equals an all around fantastic weekend.

The next weekend, I went to go visit my handsome and loving husband. I flew into Tulsa so that we could spend some time with his grandfather ans so that I could meet his father and his father''s family. It was really nice to meet them and put faces with all the names and stories. And as an added bonus, I got to see the full picture of what Sean will look like as we grow old together.

Seriously, the resemblance is astounding!

While I was visiting Sean, he surprised me with tickets to the Tulsa Opera. It was really nice to have a date night out on the town, when we get to see each other so seldom these days.

I headed home on Tuesday night and had a few short days in the office before Sean's little sister, Taylor flew out to spend the weekend with me. It was a hard weekend ... since it was Sean's birthday and he wasn't here and I wasn't there with him. All in all, Taylor and I had a very fun weekend. She flew out this weekend so that I could take her to see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Taylor just recently started dancing a few years ago and well, I just couldn't let her go without witnessing the force that is Alvin Ailey's company. It was fun; she enjoyed it .. that pretty much sums up the whole weekend.

Taylor is an amazing young woman and I feel really privileged to have gotten to spend the entire weekend with her. However, the above picture is not quite such an amazing photo of me, but whatever it was a special moment.

So that brings us to this week, I have to head to Pennsylvania for a meeting on Friday and then I will be in San Diego this weekend. OK now that we are caught up, I will try and pay more attention to the details of everyday.