The Backyard Peace Treaty of 2001 has been Broken

Today they started working in the backyard. Still not having won the lottery, I was forced to go to work instead of bearing witness to this asupcious occassion. Despite knowing what the intended backyard result is, I'm not exactly sure what the steps are to bring it about. I suspect today's activities generally consist of "Bulldoze everything. Avoid damaging the house". 

This is reason #3 why we are not doing the backyard ourselves. If you are wondering why this is not reason #1, you are clearly not paying attention to my previous predisposition toward "how hard can it be?" Much to my husband's great frustration I had a tendency to just "try to figure it out". And not by researching or reading the manual. Oh no, manuals are for people who don't already know everything. I "figure things out" general by trying different things and observing the reaction. Also, I'm a big fan of taking things apart whether or not I think I can put it back together (Really, how hard can it be? I got it apart). You can see how this is extremely annoying to my engineer of a husband. This isn't the worse part, though. The terrible part of this is I actually happen to be pretty good at this and have a mostly positive batting average for figuring out strange and complex problems. The most commonly heard refrain in our house during a project is generally, "Just because its fixed doesn't mean you did it the right way". Bah. It's fixed. Problem solved.
Why is this important? Left to my own devices, I probably would attempt to just try to figure out how to drive a bobcat, pour cement, and install drainage. This brings us to reason #2 we're not doing the backyard ourselves...

I'm cheap. My dad used to say he was the second cheapest man in the world. The first was my grandfather. Well, clearly some things are genetic, because I certainly inherited this. When we first moved in, my inclination was to do everything ourselves to save money. What I learned instead was that many things are more cheaply done if you hire someone to do and watch them, asking questions, to learn how to do it yourself later (when it breaks again). This isn't true for everything. I'm fairly competent at many plumbing things now, and, of course, I still have to fight my urge to think "How hard can it be?" but the backyard was not one of those things. I was positive this is something that is much better and more cheaply done if someone else does it. Maybe not, but this leads us to reason #1 we are not doing the backyard ourselves...

Due to a series of repetitive close encounters with baby and adult rattlesnakes over my lifetime, I have developed a, dare I say, HEALTHY dislike of rattlesnakes and an extreme disinclination to come into close proximity of them. I completely understand their role in the food chain, their value to nature, and respect them as a fellow meat consuming predator. That being said, if they are in my house, garage, or yard, they are fair game for being shot (I hear you laughing at the in the house part, but I assure you this has happened to me before). I am generally inclined to leave any creature alone in the yard as long as its not actively threatening me. As we live in rattlesnake country and the rock piles in our backyard are prime living quarters for them, I am absolutely astonished that we have yet to encounter one in the time we've been living there. Other neighbors have had trouble during this time, but we have yet to witness a rattlesnake in the yard.
I can only assume that this is due to the previous Peace Treaty of 2001 that the previous owners had with the rattle snake overlords to define the Backyard Snake/Human Borders. Now that we've started the backyard, we are clearly in violation of the terms of the Peace Treaty and I expect vicious retaliation. 

Backyard Status Day 1: After work today, the backyard is a bit flatter and some rocks have been moved. We have lost our 2.5 bushes and the kidney bean pond hole has been filled in. Carefully laid on rocks were the bodies of two baby rattle snakes sans head. I'm tempted to bury them as the first causalities of war. Tonight we mourn all the things that lost their battles in our backyard: the pond, the bushes, the snakes.