PAD Jounral 7/30/12

Michelle and I have been busy today trying to get most of this week's worth of house cleaning done all today so we can play for the rest of the week. We picked berries, harvested and weeded the veggie patch first thing this morning before it got too hot out. We enjoyed a nice picnic lunch outside and then got to work inside. I have a little bit to do in the kitchen this evening, and some clean up in the office, but otherwise, the house is all cleaned up. :o) I have several craft projects I've been wanting to work on, so I'm excited to have the free time this week to do it.

Do you remember this pretty fella from yesterday's post? It turns out that he is a black swallowtail butterfly. And guess what I found crawling up one of my chives this morning?

This is a black swallowtail caterpillar. We did take a break from housework to do a little research and find out what kind of yummy treats he would eat. Black swallowtails like carrot tops, parsley and dill, all three of which I had in the garden. So we cleaned out the bug box, snipped some yummy goodies, found a couple of sticks and made a new home for our friend.

You see that orange thing on top of his head? That's his osmeterium. Apparently he pokes it out when he is threatened and it emits a foul odor. It must not be a very pungent odor because we never smelled it. He hasn't eaten much of his leaves, and he's been pretty still for the evening. According to our research, he's either getting ready to molt or pupate. Either one should be pretty cool to see.

Well, seems like this was a pretty productive day; got some yard work done, got some house work done, and snuck some learning in there too. ;o) Hopefully tomorrow I will get some of my craft projects checked off the To Do list.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!

I've been MIA for a while.

My apologies for being MIA for so long. As seems to be happening more and more often here, I've been busy with cakes. Then I have to play catch-up on the house work, then it's been a couple of days since I've blogged, and I know it will take a while to upload photos, so I procrastinate longer, and then more cakes to do. It's seems to be a cycle. Then, this last week or so we've been having internet issues, so I got even further behind. This time, rather than trying to post something for every day I have missed, I'm just going to cover the highlights.

Camping

If you remember from this post, Mike built a platform at the top of Michelle's zipline. Eventually we're going to build a fort up there, but in the mean time, he set up our tent on top of it for Michelle to play in. Michelle spent the entire day in it and then decided she was going to camp out over night. I wasn't sure she would go through with it once it got dark out, but she insisted. She had Layla to guard her and she felt perfectly safe. I, on the other hand, did not. We have had bear on the property before, so after finishing up the cake I was working on, I grabbed a blanket and headed out to join her. She was already sound asleep. I think I could have had a great night's sleep if I had the air mattress, my own pillow, and more blankets. Our temps had been in the 90s for a couple of weeks before this, but they dropped that night and we both started freezing in the early morning hours. However, I was too tired to hike back down the hill in the dark to get more blankets. Instead, I just curled up with her baby doll's blanket and the towel she'd used earlier in the day for a picnic blanket. Next time...we will be prepared! I'm still quite amazed that she stayed out there all night. Brave little girl.

She even took her math work up there to do. :o)

Layla, the guard dog.

Garage Sale

Two of the things on our To-Do list for this summer were to have a lemonade stand and hold a garage sale and get rid of some of the junk that has been accumulating in our storage building. Last weekend was one of those unusual weekends with no cakes scheduled to do, so she and I got to work. We sorted, and cleaned and priced everything, then made some cookies and cupcakes to sell at her lemonade stand. Thursday and Friday she was a super trooper and helped me with everything both days, but by Saturday, her enthusiasm was waning, so was our customer base. We made $60 on Friday and only $25 on Saturday. Oh well, we had a good time working together and managed to clean out a bit of stuff. Since we have a large storage building, we were able to just move everything back in and are ready if we decide to have another sale before the summer is over.

She's drinking up her profits.

I have been so busy with cakes lately that I felt like I was constantly telling Michelle "no" when she asked about doing something fun this summer. So, we decided that after the sale, we would either go play miniature golf, or go swimming. She voted for swimming. I think that's part of the reason her enthusiasm for the yard sale was waning Saturday morning, she was too antsy to go swimming. I don't know many places around here to go, and the indoor pool that I did know about is closed on Saturday, so we stopped by the local motel that has an indoor pool and she had a blast playing mermaid and making a couple of new friends. I actually like this pool better than the big one. It's much closer to our house and they didn't have as many restrictions. Next time I think we'll grab her friends, have a picnic lunch at the park, and then go swimming.

Harvest

I've started harvesting goodies from the veggie patch the last couple of weeks. We've been eating snap peas and beans most every night. The tomatoes and cucumbers are taking a bit longer. Next year, we're going to have to make some room in the garden for corn. I LOVE fresh corn on the cob. The blackberries have started to ripen. Although we got a LOT of rain in May, the last few months have been kind of dry. I had a lot of flowers at the beginning of the season, but it looks like about 3/4 of those didn't develop into berries. I'm sad, but at the same time, I still have bags of them in my freezer from last summer. Tomorrow morning I will have to get up early so I can get out in the field before it gets too hot out. Last time, I waited too late, and once the sun is overhead, it gets way too hot, especially when you have to wear long sleeves, boots, hat and gloves to keep your skin intact.

 
Butterfly

I saw this beauty one afternoon and had Michelle run my camera out to me. I'm not sure if something was wrong with him besides the piece of missing wing, but he was moving kind of slow. I'm grateful because I was able to get a couple of great shots of him. Anyone know what kind he is?

 
Rainbow

One day last week we had a couple of quick downpours. It was one of those where it was a beautiful blue sky one minute and pouring buckets the next, which usually means there's a rainbow around somewhere. I was excited because it happened to be out the kitchen window where I was working on cake projects. 

Well, that completes the updates from us. I will be posting some updates over on the cake blog later today (I hope). I don't have any cakes scheduled until the end of August, but that's a big one, so I will be doing some of the prep work this next week or so. Hopefully things will be a bit less hectic here so I will be able to post more regularly. We'll see.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings. :o)

PAD 7/4/12-7/9/12

I told you I would be MIA for a couple of days, but I didn't expect it to be this long. Sometimes it's harder to get back on here when I know I have a lot of photos to go through.

As I mentioned, we had some friends coming out to visit us from out of town. Out of state, actually. We had a nice relaxing visit. Since they had just driven across the country, and were only going to be at our place a couple of days, we opted to stay home rather than planning any great adventures while they were here. We really didn't think they wanted to spend any more time on the road. Unfortunately, it also proved to be the hottest week of the year, so far, so we didn't do very much outside. Lots of chatting, card playing, and reminiscing. The kids didn't even use the zipline much 'cause the bugs were atrocious!

7/4/12
We had a yummy bar-b-q for dinner and then we all headed off to the church for a special July 4th service. Michelle sang a special and they asked Mike to wear his uniform and give a prayer for the soldiers.

After the church service, we headed back home to shoot off fireworks. Mike and Russ had picked some up earlier in the day and apparently they got a little carried away. We didn't even shoot them all off. It was getting late and we were being eaten alive by the mosquitoes.

We were happy to have Angel home for the Fourth. While Mike and Russ were busy getting the fireworks ready, she made an awesome fire for us to roast marshmallows on.

Michelle's favorite fireworks are the "happy face" ones, but this one came out a bit scary looking.

7/5/12
Thursday we relaxed some more. I really wish I'd gotten more pictures. Unfortunately, most of the ones I did take didn't come out well because I still had my camera set to take the fireworks pictures the night before. :o(

Michelle was running ahead of Helen. Not sure if she was trying to beat Helen or the mosquitoes.

7/6/12
Our friends left early Friday morning. Mike spent the rest of his day off to finish his school assignments for the week, and I worked on cakes all day. I'll post pics of those over on my cake blog.

7/7/12
After delivering the cakes, Mike, Michelle and I went out to get some shopping done. I snapped this shot of Michelle as we were waiting for our lunch. She's trying to grow out her bangs for the first time.

7/8/12
I snapped this shot of my daisies as we were heading out to church. Next week I'm going to have to cut most of them down as they are getting way too long and floppy. I need a shorter, more compact plant in the front of the beds to keep the daisies from flopping over.

These always make me smile. :o)

7/9/12
Monday we got back into our normal routine, sort of. Michelle and I usually try to go for a walk in the morning, but I was out in the garden so long that it was getting way too hot, so we waited till evening when it cooled down a bit. I'm glad we did. I got some fun pictures of the neighbors cows that had come to the higher pasture and an awesome sunset. Michelle found this huge "poof ball" and had fun blowing the seeds around.

I spent the afternoon working on roses for a wedding cake while Michelle did her math. (yes, we're still finishing up some of our school work from last year.) She took a couple of pictures of me working.

18 roses=323 petals, just sayin'.

Well, this has taken up a good portion of my afternoon. I still have some housework and cake projects to work on, so I will close here. Hope y'all had a nice week and are able to stay cool.

Till next time...
God's love and blesssings!

PAD 7/1/12-7/3/12

Can you believe it's July already? The summertime heat and humidity has definitely hit here. And, although I'm learning to be happy in whatever weather God thinks is best for that day, I am definitely grateful for good air conditioning.

7/1/12
We did spend a little time Sunday afternoon outside working on the zipline deck. Actually, Mike spent the time outside, I just stepped out as he was finishing to take a couple of pictures. ;o)

I'm standing on the deck. That tiny yellow dot in the middle of the pic is the end of the zipline.

Phase 1-done, well, we still need to paint it.

7/2/12
Michelle and I did a little, tiny bit of garden work Monday morning, but the humidity had already hit, so we quickly made our way inside to get a lot of housecleaning and organizing done. We have some friends coming to visit us on Tuesday and wanted to make sure they felt welcome in our home.

This is the little seating area I finished up this week.

This area under the deck has been a hard place for me to figure out. We can't plant anything here because our septic tank is directly under it (the windmill is sitting on the lid for it). I tried making it look nice with some pots of herbs, but they just looked out of place by themselves. It's amazing the difference just putting some chairs and a little table with them makes. Eventually I would like to put some bricks just under the chair area and make it into a little patio.

 7/3/12
I'm going to post a picture for today, although I know I will be taking a bunch more later when our guests get here. Michelle loves to "swab the deck" with me when it's time to clean up the kitchen floor. Who says cleaning has to be boring?

Yes, she's mopping the floor with her socks.

Well, I've got to get going. I'm not sure when our friends will be arriving and I am trying to get some cake projects done before they get here so I don't have to "work" during their visit. I probably won't be posting until our guests leave so I will say now that I pray you have a safe and wonderful Independence Day. Please keep in prayer our service members around the world--including our son. :o)

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!!

PAD 6/26/12-6/30/12

So it looks like another catch-up post for me again. I'm having a hard time figuring out a good time of the day to sit down and blog. I used to try and do this in the morning after my prayer time and before Michelle and I started our school work and chores, but this time of year, I try and get outside and get the gardening done and take our walk early before it gets too hot. The evenings are hard because we live in the boonies. You see, living in the boonies means you are far away from internet services and then your connections are slow-especially when everyone else is using the same connections. And uploading photos means even slower connections. On that note, one thing you may or may not know about my dear husband--he's a gamer. Yup, some guys like football, some like cars, some like hunting, mine is a gamer. That's how he relaxes-blowing something up or going on a quest. And, frankly, he's not very happy when his shots miss or his quest is slowed down because I'm trying to upload photos. I like to keep my man happy, so I try my best not to interrupt his game time. Maybe I'll have to start getting up a bit earlier so I can work it in, or just do my chores later in the evening. Anyway, I have been given permission to do some uploading as he is currently studying and doesn't care one whit how fast or slow our connection is, so I better hurry up and get these photos on here before he's done. :o)

6/26/12
I have two pictures for Tuesday. First, here's how our tie-dyed shirts came out. Pretty cute, I think. Of course, the girls' smiles make anything look cute. :o)

Secondly, we had an unexpected trip to the Mall of America. Some friends that were stationed in Japan with us are currently on their way across country as they change duty stations, so, since they were going to be so close, we met them at the MOA for a couple of hours of fun and catching up. Angel is the one screaming in pink. ;o)

6/27/12
I know I left y'all hanging about the curtain tie-dye experiment. ;o) I took one of our sheets, cut it in half so I could do two different colors and then dyed it. I was trying for an ombre look where the color fades from dark to light so I accordion folded the fabric and simply laid it on top of the dye. I can post pics if anyone is interested in seeing how I did it. Anyway, after dying, I sewed the two colors together and made simple curtains out of them.

As you can see, Michelle is happy with them.

6/28/12
Day two of curtain makeover. I used some of the extra fabric to make some flowers and tie backs for the curtains. Michelle and I also did a lot of work outside in the yard trying to get things cleaned up a bit. I'll post pictures of that sometime next week...maybe.

6/29/12
Friday Michelle worked a bit on finishing up some of her school work for the year and I spent some time in the kitchen on a couple of cake projects. We also spent time outside gardening. We should be harvesting some beans and peas some time next week. Yum! We decided to get some grocery shopping done after Mike got home, and then we stopped by his mom's house to help her with a couple of projects. We've had a lot of rain this year, and everyone is harvesting their hay right now. This field was amazing. Sorry for the blurry shot, I tried to get this while we were driving.

If you click on these, you can see them much better.

6/30/12
And, finally, today, Mike spent most of the day working outside. It was a little warm, but he was working in the woods in the shade, so I don't think he got too hot. Although he probably lost a pint of blood to the mosquitoes. This is what he was working on.

He's building a deck at the top of Michelle's zipline. It's 8 x 14 so there is plenty of room for us to build a little play house up there later. Do you see the table in the foreground? That's what they kids were using to get on the line. It's pretty sturdy, but probably not the safest thing when there's 6 or 7 climbing on there. Besides, this project is great practice for the work we are going to be doing over at the kitchen, hopefully later this summer. 

I was in and out of the house. I helped him a bit, but spent most of the day in the kitchen working on "critters". I have another barn yard cake to do and wanted to get a jump start on the figures since we will have company next week. I was also working on several other cake projects at the same time, but didn't get any pictures yet.

I still have naked sheep, and albino cows, but they're almost finished. Too cute!!

PAD 6/25/12

6/25/12
I like Mondays like this. Nice and relaxing. No school work to do, no cakes to prep for, the house pretty clean. Just a relaxing kind of day.

Michelle had a surprise this afternoon as her two buddies showed up to spend the night. :o) They quickly bored of riding bikes so they took off to explore up the creek for a bit, then they changed into bathing suits and played in the sprinkler for a while. I heard them say something about going to the creek so I decided to grab my camera and follow after. The creek is pretty much just a trickle of water right now, but the girls managed to find a "pond". It was really just a pretty deep puddle in the bend of the creek. It was in the shade though and they were soon shivering so we headed back upstream till they found a nice sunny spot to warm up in. Not a nice sunny spot in the grass, but a muddy, sandy spot in the creek. They proceeded to give themselves a mud bath.

We did learn that it's a good idea to hose them off outside before going in to take showers and clean off. That was a lot of sand coming out of those bathing suits!!!

Tie dying some shirts is on our list of things to do this summer, so after dinner, we braved the million mosquitoes on the porch to dye a couple of shirts. We won't see what they look like till tomorrow as they have to sit in their plastic bags for 6-8 hours or longer. We're opting for the longer part 'cause I am so not getting up at 2 am to rinse them out and wash them. After the girls were done with their shirts there was still 2/3 of the bottles left so I grabbed some of Michelle's white socks to dye. There was still more than half so I swiped one of Mike's t-shirts to make a matching shirt for me. Thankfully I trust myself enough with the dye not to have to go outside to do it. I don't feel like being mosquito buffet anymore tonight. I still have half left in all 3 bottles. Wonder what else I have around the house that's white, cotton and needs to be bright pink, blue or purple? Too bad I don't have any cotton fabric or I would dye some to make curtains for Michelle's room. Oh! Idea! I have some plain white sheets in the closet and I know at least one of them is torn on one side. Looks like I need to get off of here and find myself a large enough bucket to soak a sheet in. I'll let you know how it comes out. 

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!

PAD 6/24/12

Today is Sunday which, of course, means we get to spend the morning in church fellowshiping with other believers and worshiping the Lord. It was unusually quiet this morning as several of our families were on vacation and our Associate Pastor and most of our youth were assisting another church with their VBS. It was still a wonderful time at church, and in this evening's service, 3 of the ladies sang a special for us that I had never heard before. I don't remember the name, but the message was that we often take the brush from God and try to paint our own pictures of our lives, which never comes out quite right, but when we are willing to give the brush to God and let Him do the painting--oh what a masterpiece! I pray that this week, I will let God do the painting. :o)

It was a beautiful day here. I spent a little time in the garden picking strawberries and Mike worked on his school assignment. We had burgers on the grill for dinner and even had time to roast a marshmallow or two. :o)

Here's the pictures I think I mentioned before of the daisies. This first one I took out in our pasture.

This one was taken by one of my flower beds. We did put some compost and peat moss in the garden when we first tilled it under, and I've sprayed Miracle Gro on here twice this year. That's it. I don't know any other reason why they would get so tall. They don't look that great from this angle. They had gotten so long and bushy they were laying on the grass outside the garden and Mike couldn't mow or trim around it so I put up some extra white fencing we had to hold them up out of the way. Now they look all squished up on this side. Oh well. Maybe I should have taken the photo from the other side.

Michelle and I decided that each night, after prayers, I would check her room and give her a sticker on her calendar if it was all clean. She, in turn, would check my kitchen and give me a sticker on the kitchen calendar if it was all clean. Now we have to decide on some special prizes and figure out how many stickers will be needed to get the prizes. Right now though, I need to go make sure the dessert dishes were taken care of so I can get my sticker. :o)

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!