Well, I just came in from completing Day 4 of my challenge! I’ve done pretty well. Sunday, Paul and I both spent about an hour outside – he cleaning pine straw off the roof and cleaning out the gutters, and me picking up pinecones and sticks. Then I raked for about 45 minutes on Monday, and took yesterday off because it rained. Actually, the rain let up about mid-afternoon so I *technically* could have picked up pinecones at least (yes, we have that many!), but it was also rather chilly. Today I continued raking. All total, we put six 30 gallon bags of leaves out for the trash on Monday, and have collected seven more so far.

Certain areas of the yard look great, but overall it still needs a lot of help. :-) It feels good to see so many bags of leaves at the curb, knowing that my hard work is making a difference!