We’re back. The yard is not.

We got home on a Wednesday night after two months away from Utah, and the first order of business — before unpacking, before anything — was figuring out whether we could actually get inside.

Smart locks are great until they're not. Two months of sitting idle had drained most of the batteries, and we were standing on the doorstep with no physical key and a slowly dawning awareness that this was a real possibility we had not planned for. The downstairs front door had just enough juice left to let us in. We now have a physical key in a place that can be accessed from the outside of the house.

The yard did not fare as well as the lock. Utah doesn't allow sprinklers before May 1st — and ours had been winterized anyway — so what greeted us was a stressed, angry-looking lawn and something growing through every inch of it that bore a strong resemblance to Japanese knotweed - which is apparently invasive. I’m now affectionately calling it the Texas bamboo of Utah. We spent most of that first day pulling things out of the ground and trying to locate the irrigation shutoff valve, which, it turned out, was not in the garage, on the exterior of the house, or in any obvious box in the yard. The yard got cleaned up. The valve remained a mystery.

On Friday I had an unexpected day off, so I called the landscaper who had winterized the system. He knew exactly where it was. It was about four feet down inside a pipe - right where we should have thought to look first. (Not.) The previous owners had left behind a water shutoff key in the garage — the long-handled kind — and it was just barely long enough to reach. Water on.

There's a photo from the real estate listing somewhere on this blog — that gorgeous, green, lush yard. We are not there yet. But we are watering now, and that has to count for something.

Oh — and Utah has yellow jackets. Quite a few of them. I discovered this the way one tends to discover things like that. I'd rather not elaborate. I’m now affectionately calling them the Texas scorpions of Utah.

There's a photo from the real estate listing somewhere on this blog — that gorgeous, green, lush yard. We are not there yet. But we are watering now, and that has to count for something.