Some people have been curious about the retaining wall that I've been working on, particularly when I tell them that I bought three palettes brick and about thirty tons of dirt.  (Of course, what's the purpose of building a retaining wall if you don't have anything to retain.)  In short, we're trying to level out our yard to be followed by xeriscaping.  I'm doing this part while my lovely wife, Laura, will tackle the xeriscaping.

I really should have taken pictures along the progress of this, but I didn't.  And this isn't really finished.  I've stopped only because I ran out of brick.  I figure I need about another 200 bricks to do the walkway and the other side of the yard.

By the way, each palette is 128 bricks, so what you see here is 384 bricks, each one weighing 24 pounds.  So what you see is here 9,216 pounds of brick or roughly 4.6 tons.  Laura picked out 2 palettes of "terra cotta" colored and 1 of "sandstone".  I call 'em red and tan.

If some of the pictures are blurry, sorry; my arms are very tired.

Click on any of the pictures below for a larger view.

Also, we had quite a rain storm through here a couple of weeks ago.  Frankly, I've never seen it rain like this in Colorado.  Doesn't really show up all that well in a picture, but it sure did come down.  Note the water spraying off the roof of our sub-house (for lack of a better term) and the puddles in the driveway.  We got about two inches in just over an hour.