Roses!

I love owning a house. Of late, it has truly started to become my home. I finally paid to have the whole yard cleaned up and I figured out how to set our sprinkler system. Our living room is painted and full of nice furniture. I spend spare evenings sanding a table so I can refinish it and use it as a desk. There is still much work to be done but I am making certain progress. I need to pay taxes and buy plane tickets to Europe before I start spending more money on the house.
Our yard looks much nicer now with mowed grass and trimmed trees and bushes. Even more exciting is that my roses have started to bloom (when I talk about the house I use 'our' and 'we' for Brian and me but we both agreed that the yard is purely my domain). I have a rose bush growing over the arch over the walk to our front door and half a dozen bushes along the white picket fence to either side of the arch. The arch bush has bloomed with dozens of small red roses while none of the other bushes have begun. I pruned almost all of the green off these bushes in early February but they have exploded back with growth. I cannot wait to see how many flowers they produce. I also have a handful of rose bushes next to the hottub in the backyard. These have been blooming for the last week, decadent and intoxicating and beautifully convoluted in form.
After work yesterday, I pulled, hacked, chopped and otherwise killed a number of parasitic plants that were attacking my rose bushes. One particularly vicious guy had grown up through the middle of the main trunk of one rose, forcing the rose to grow around it. I was able to take all the branches off the weed/tree but could not extract the base of the trunk without harming the rose.
I brought two roses to work today to remind me of spring amidst the fluorescence-lit despair of the Engineering basement. You can view photographs of my flowers here. I will post more photos of my home as it develops.