Spooky Flowers and a busy August!

And a whole bunch of other stuff.

I've spent the last half hour (maybe even an hour) pouring over a really great blog, here's a link if any one's interested:

http://marmitetoasty.blogspot.com/

Completely hilarious, serious, funny, sad, crazy, confusing, funny, did I say funny? She writes about her very young son getting hit by a car, her other sons that she raised by herself, there are snippets of her childhood (which were sad), pictures of her surgery and all other sorts of things. It's quite the roller coaster ride.

Anyway, back to what I should have been doing.......

The month of August flew by and here are bits and pieces of what I have been up to.

The new oven was installed! Thank you Tom and Husband. Tom (BIL) was at a friends house and his friend had a black, 30" (which is exactly what we were looking for) gas oven in his garage that they had bought but they decided not to use and it had been sitting there for months.

It costs, brand new about $1200, they paid $820 at a scratch and dent place but it was immaculate with maybe a little scratch on the handle. So, Kevin wired their closet and we got the stove for free, minus a couple hours labor. It has a super large burner that will bring the canner to a boil in record time, our old stove would barely boil water.

We painted the front of the bottom cupboards.

And the bar.

And this morning I painted a drawer front. Last night I broke the handle tips off of the old, hated handles, sanded the edges, painted them with a nice brown, rough-textured paint (matches our lights) and installed a new drawer slide and screwed on the drawer front.

(p.s. Amy, call me and let me know how it looks, is the handle too curvy?)

What do you think?

Yesterday I looked out and saw Flipper messing around the apple tree. They go out most days to the front yard to eat the apples that have fallen. He was trying and trying to get one off of the tree, they had eaten all the ones on the ground.

Pretty funny to see a goose trying to pick an apple off of a tree. I felt so sorry for him. He worked and worked but couldn't get ahold of one so went out and picked a couple and dropped them on the ground. A browsing goose!

The kids snapped green beans for two hours all the while watching Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure. When the Tequila dance came on I told them to stop and watch this part because it was a classic. I think they thought I was nuts.

Amy (sister) works at a Ford dealership and she said that the Tequila song came on the radio and one of the mechanics jumped up on the bed of the pickup truck he was working on and started to do the dance. She said all the customers that were in the waiting lounge could see him and they were all cracking up.

This is the second, later batch of corn. Much bigger but I don't think quite as sweet.

Beans to snap. My pictures are out of order but it takes too long to sort them once you get them in the post. Blogger should fix that.

Amy and I put these up while watching Pee Wee with the kids and we did a little of the dance when the song came on.

Here is the early corn, smaller but like I said, it was a little sewwtwe (this is why it takes me so long to blog and my posts are so far between, that is what it looked like when I tried to type sweeter). We only froze a little because we ate all the rest.


Side by side - early and later. I think I will only plant the yellow corn next year, corn should be yellow.

Tom (BIL) and Kevin had fun shooting their guns last weekend. Puppy didn't like it, she hid in the house the whole time.


We have a kinda cool shooting bench, no credit to us, it came with the house. You see, when you buy a dilapidated house in red-neck country they all come with a shooting bench. Maybe no indoor plumbing but always a shooting bench.


If we get invaded we will be ready, can't afford the bullets but we have the arsenal. The shells for the bigger guns cost over a dollar each. Bang, a dollar, bang, another dollar, $$$, they had fun though.



Paper plates hung on a piece of plywood with a mound of dirt behind. (There were funny things drawn on the plates that I won't describe.)

Have to go and check the plates.

Trying out the .454.

Always happiest when they have holsters on. The bigger the better!

And.....

We had a party at my mom's house. This is where I grew up. My BIL, Tom built a Tiki Hut (of sorts, actually bigger and better) at the beach and we have had all kinds of fun this summer. Tomorrow is the end of the year party.

See that big tub out on the dock? They have been playing a new game this year. Somebody, usually a good golfer, will stand on the beach and hit golf balls, aiming for the tub. Hopefully not hitting bystanders or swimmers. That is where the part about a GOOD golfer comes in!

They usually stand a little to the left from where I took this picture, but you can see the distance. The object of the game is for the people on the dock to retrieve the balls before they sink. (Also why we need a good golfer.)

The balls sink kinda slowly so if they land close to the dock you can't dive in because you will overshoot them and end up under them and lose them.

So you kinda have to do a really shallow, monkey kinda dive. They also try to catch them which is even better than having to dive for them. But, the best thing is for the golfer to try and hit the bucket.

This had not happened until the last party. I had been watching my cousin Dave hitting balls all day and then all of a sudden one went right into the tub!

It was awesome.

The cheers went up all over the beach! (There were only about 25 people but you would have thought it was a hundred from all the noise.)

Here he is!

The best Water Wedge player at Stewart Lake! He's also on a golf league and really good.

This picture is what happens when you see a beautiful rainbow, run to get you camera and then it's gone. It was beautiful but I guess you had to be there.

Then..........

The son and I enjoy our zucchini bread so much that we spent one evening after work grating craploads of it with my food processor to the tune of 19 bags. I'm a little sick of zucchini now but I still have a bunch more to grate. The only problem is that when I went to chop up some tomatoes for salsa the other evening I loaded up the processor, pressed the button and nothing, zippo, naughta! My processor was dead. Yikes, the thought of grating 10 giant zucchinis by hand....blah! I am on the hunt for a processor.

This may be the last of it.


And.................

Of course you gotta have a Brats cake for an 11 year girl's birthday. Especially a Dairy Queen ice cream cake! When I went to pick it up and pay the cashier said "That will be $30.00 please." I practically fell down! It did not taste $30 dollars good but the 11 year old was beaming so what can you do.

This is the spooky flowers part.

During the work week I get up at about 4:00 am. I make husbands breakfast, pack his lunch and see him out the door at about 4:30. I don't have to go to work until 7:00 so now it's time to relax, get on the computer, do laundry and whatever. I'm usually in a daze and unfuntional cause I hate getting up at 4:00 a.m. Five is fine but something happens to my internal clock at four.

A weeks ago after he left I went out to sit on the back deck to escape from the the heat of the house, itwas still hot from the 90 degrees the day before. I think it was already really warm outside, like 70.

It was kinda misty and foggy when I sat down on the step with my cup of tea. Puppy was with me, ever the shadow. I went back in to get my camera because all the mist made it look really cool. My camera is not an expensive one so I couldn't catch exactly the mood but it was close.

The moon flowers that I have bloom only at night so they really stood out in the dark and the trees in the back looked really cool. There were shadowy figures moving in the background, visible only because they were stark white.

Not ghosts, only big, fat white Thanksgiving turkeys.

There's Puppy and my cup of tea. (plus the towel I was sitting on because the deck was wet)

To give you an idea of how foggy it was check out the next picture.

This is what happened when tried to take a few pictures with my flash on. I guess the flash bounced off of all of the dew drops in the air. Odd huh?

Here is the same scene a little later as the sun started to come up, still really foggy though.

Next on the agenda here:

Paint the back of the house, install a few windows, pickle beets, can carrots, finish drawers, paint cupboard doors, clean freezers and move the small one indoors, can excess meat in freezers, drywall living room, paint kids rooms, finish trim in bathroom, completely remodel our bathroom and on and on etc, etc.

It took me forever to finish this post and there were so many more August activities that I could have included. I'm kinda glad Fall is coming. It would be time to slow down but that is when the inside remodeling work will begin.

Til next time,

Beth