Ghost girls

Adreinne has been my best friend since I was 4 years old.  So when she buys a house to use as a rental, and says the house has a creepy basement, and the neighbors say it’s haunted, we had to go investigate.   Plus, we aren’t extremely busy right now and have plenty of time for conducting paranormal investigations.  Quincy even downloaded a temperature sensing camera app on her phone (although I have my doubts on if that works or not?!?).   It isn’t the first time we tried to find a ghost, remember the trip to Evansville, Indiana where we forced poor Jim to go to a haunted library?  We were disappointed that we once again struck out on seeing a ghost.  Or even anything scary.    Our investigation’s official position is old - yes, haunted- nope.  

We did have a really fun afternoon of visiting and laughing like hyenas though.  Sometimes the best thing in the world is being giant dorks with old friends. 

Saige was really not into conducting a ghost hunt with us.  She was so opposed that when grandma stopped by, she jumped into grandma’s car and begged to weed flower beds rather than go!   She had a great time today too!  And the flower beds at grandma’s house look amazing! 

I have always loved school breaks.  Having the kids around, freedom from schedules, having more time together, and just basically enjoying my kids has always been a favorite for me.  Yesterday, I let the kids go grocery shopping with me.  We ran a couple of errands and then hit dillons.  They have not been inside a big store for months.  None of us really have.  I have been doing pick up on groceries and getting my cleaning stuff at dollar general in our little town.  They were happy to go.  We had a great time driving around, singing and chatting. It was a good day!  I was laughing though, Preston and Quincy work every weekend.  While they are working, their boss listens to classic country.  As a result, they have started listening to classic country. Preston has downloaded a bunch of stuff on his phone and was using blue tooth to play stuff that he thought I wouldn’t know.   Joke was on him.  I grew up in a family whose car only had AM radio.  We listened to 61 country all the time!  Not only did I know all his songs, but I was enjoying the blast from the past!  It amused me that all of my younger crowd was cruising around town singing old Dolly Parton!  I almost wrecked my car laughing though when Harper sang “Jolene please don’t take my man card!”   Poor Preston was severely outnumbered!  

We had to get home in time for me to go to my township board meeting.  I found this guy crossing the road.  It’s hard to tell in this photo, but he might be the biggest snapper I’ve ever seen! 

I also mentioned that we are keeping busy with many projects.  This is a new one.  Quincy bought herself a new incubator with an egg turner.  She was so excited about her purchase, but we already have enough chickens.  So I called in a favor from a friend.  What do we have?  A dozen royal palm guinea eggs!  Fingers crossed that we have babies!   We didn’t have any luck with the duck eggs earlier this spring!  

Despite all the craziness of the country currently, we are having a good time, living our best life.  

So fast.

Weekends never stay as long as I would like, and this one was no exception.  We had a good one!   We got a lot of work done around the house, laundry caught up, some grocery shopping accomplished and the house quasi cleaned.  

We stopped after church to check out the chickens.  They are already getting big and have Wing feathers!  It’s crazy how fast they grow!  

We had a nice Sunday of hand washing clothes. Our new washing machine will be here next Sunday.  I hope that it comes in on time because I like doing laundry so much better with a machine!  I know I could go in to either Madison or Mallory’s houses, or to the laundry mat, but loading and unloading aren’t much fun. Hopefully we make it to next Sunday with the clean underwear we now have!   

A little labor

We had to run a few errands today.  We got home just in time to make a little dinner.  Saige wanted to make fruit dip to go with our pork chops and fresh salad.  She did a really nice job and then took photos. 

We had to kick it into gear on the pool deck repairs.  We believe the pool guy will be here very soon.  Preston got all of the bad boards replaced while the girls and I water sealed everything.  Jim was mowing.  We all worked really hard.   Unfortunately we didn’t get finished before we ran out of daylight.  I didn’t get a picture of Preston, but he did such a good job of  fixing the deck floor.  He has some skills.  

We have a busy weekend planned,  filled with repairs, grocery shopping and projects.  I  looking forward to it.   

I love the wild flowers that grow along our driveway.  Such beauty to enjoy on my morning walks.  

Excitement

It got hot.  Evie broke out her pool!  She’s practicing for when Grammy gets her pool set up!   Our pool finally arrived.  It is just waiting for the pool guy to arrive and set us up!   

In the meantime, we have other projects going.  The kid’s 4-H goats are growing great!   Caramel tried to have a little snack in our zucchini patch. Luckily we got him stopped in time!  

The asparagus that Preston helped me plant is up!   I know we can’t touch it the first year, and let me just say as an asparagus lover, this is a difficult struggle!  

Our gardens are looking really good.  We seem to be getting rain at all the right times, and for the first time in 21 years, we are not spending our evenings at the ballpark, which leaves a lot of time for weeding!  Not to say that we don’t enjoy the ball park, or miss it, but it is a lot of time spent if you have multiple kids playing.  

Evie is learning to help with projects too!  Today she learned to sweep floors at my office.  

A friend was cleaning out her garage.  She posted that she had some bikes and a mower all free just come get them.  I sent Preston right over.  The kids got some really nice bikes.  They also delivered a bike to a friend from 4-H.  They told us that the mower ran last summer but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.  They bought a bigger mower and just wanted it gone. My immediate thought was we will just run it over to Ronny, our long term amazing mechanic. But then I remembered that he passed away earlier this week.  I was overcome with sadness. Ronny has been my mechanic and a family friend for my whole life.  He will be deeply missed.  Preston and Quincy decided they would work on the mower themselves.  While they were figuring it all out, Saige decided to use her newly acquired baking skills to make them a snack.  She is getting to be pretty good in the kitchen. 

It took Preston and Quincy the majority of the afternoon, and they had to rob a couple of parts off our old mower, but they got it running!   Preston said he was so happy because it saved him hours and hours of push mowing this summer!   

Future dinners

We finally got our broilers in today.  It was a weeks in the making project.  It is not the optimal time for raising them, as they usually do better before it gets too hot.  Unfortunately, when we ordered them several weeks ago, they were back ordered and today was the earliest batch we could get.  The yellow ones will be future dinners at our house.  The black ones are grandma’s laying pullets for this year.  The pullets have feathery feet and are so stinking cute!  Our’s are Cornish cross, grandma’s are light Brahmas. 

Little miss sassy pants liked them too. Kept yelling “duck” at them!   

The pandemic has done a lot of weirdness to life.  When I think of pandemics causing shortages of things I guess I would have thought medications. But no.  Instead we now have to wait weeks to order meat birds, we have to ask for medicated chicken feed because the tractor supply has a new vast array of “organic” chicken food!  My washer blew up this week.  Getting the machine I want is going to take a while too, as it is “backordered”.  Yes really.  I guess people bought chickens and appliances with their stimulus checks.  Side note - organic chicken food?  What the heck?  Chickens eat literally everything.  Mice, snakes, bugs, grass, cow poop -if they can fit it in their beaks, they will eat it.  Organic food for them seems like a tremendous joke.  I was channeling my grandpa perhaps as I laughed and thought “city folks!”  

2020 has been an interesting year.  We have had a pandemic, depression era unemployment rates and economy, and now rioting in the streets for basic human and civil rights which I feel really shouldn’t even be a thing we are still taking about.  It seems to me that the world has gone a little crazy.  I once again am thankful for the life that we are living.  Even when it’s scary.  Even when it’s hard. Even when life is absolutely chaotic, I count myself among the blessed.  

A fun weekend

We had no plans for the weekend.  But somehow the weekend planned itself and it was a good one!  Saturday, a friend of mine had the bird guy at her house.  She allowed me to crash the party and bring Frankie over for a beak trim, nail cutting, and flight feather trim.  Frankie loves the bird guy. He put on quite a show!  It was hilarious.   He even got a beak oil and looks very pretty!   We always learn a lot when we take Frankie over to see Brent.  

Saturday evening, Quincy and Preston called Andrew and asked him to go fishing with them.  They volunteered me to watch Evie, as Madison was at work.  Harper was very happy to help me with the baby!  Mallory was here using the WiFi. Evie helped her with getting her homework finished!  She’s getting so big and she makes us all laugh.   

Sunday we decided to go visit Colin and meet his new puppy.   Safe to say we all love Volt!  Colin planned a whole day full of activities and even had Cameron drive over from Manhattan.  It was a great day!  Lunch in a restaurant for the first time in 10 weeks would have been exciting enough but Colin had more in mind. 

Zombie hunting in VR world was a huge hit!  

You can’t go to Wichita and not ride scooters around downtown! 

And dinner with Spencer and her parents.   It was a lot of fun getting to know Spencer’s parents.  They are nice people.  Of course, we all love Spencer, so we weren’t surprised that she has nice parents.   Cameron and Colin were also going to work on Cameron’s car, but we left before that fun.  We got home  really late, but it was a great day and I am so thankful for it.