I paid a visit to Lowe's on this day to pick up a new lawnmower. The John Deere I bought last year blew up on me for some unknown reason. Lowe's was nice enough to work with me regarding that mower's warranty. This time, I went with a Troy-Bilt with a Honda engine. I had one in Columbia and was quite happy with it.

The first order of business for today was to put the new mower to work. I headed into the yard for my weekly walk.

In addition to my adventures in the yard, I also recently addressed a few other projects that had been put on the back burner. A previous owner had a short-wave style radio antenna mounted on the chimney. I'm not into that hobby and decided to have it removed.

I recently discovered I had a squirrel problem in the attic. At some point over the winter, they tried to move in. The prevailing theory is that long branches from the trees on the right side of the photo above that were hanging over the roof served as expressway to their new home.

While the attic repairs and insulation work were being done, I had the workers break out the pole saw and hack a few branches. Hopefully, this will encourage the squirrels to move elsewhere.

I had several cherry tree branches that were hanging over the garage roof removed as well.

Once we found where the squirrels were getting in, the insulation company repaired the damage, fixed the attic insulation, and removed a lot of overhanging branches.

I also got rid of the basketball pole and backboard. The pole was beginning to rust, and the backboard was broken. One of the guys working on the insulation said he would love to have it and took it home with him. This is a win - win !

With the work done for today, I decided to play with the camera settings. I found this guy building a home in the side yard.

The macro setting would get me in close. But I had trouble getting the camera to focus properly.

Such is life. Maybe someday I'll get the hang of this picture-taking thing.

And since I was playing, I had to take a couple of panorama shots, because why not.

I started with the front yard first.

The resulting two-picture front yard panorama turned out quite well. The only reason why I do this is because it allows me to take a larger picture. My Canon S3 IS is a wonderful camera, but is limited to 6 megapixels. Taking two vertical pics and stitching them together gives me more total pixels, i.e. a much larger image.

I then headed to the backyard.

The futon frame seen in the photo above was outside because a coworker was going to stop by and pick it up. I forgot it was there, otherwise I would have moved it out of the shot.

The two-picture panorama of the rear of the house also turned out quite well, even with the futon frame in on the porch.