Saturday, April 21, 2012

4-21-12


Zach knocked on his bedroom door and yelled “Come In!”  Then, “Daddy! Daaaday!” the other morning when he woke up. 

He walked along side of the cart for my entire Wal-Mart trip and was able to help pick things out.

He has been saying, “Oh my gosh!” in a surprised tone and holding his hands up to the sides of his mouth. 

Despite playing with Easter eggs all year long, he was very surprised when the Easter bunny delivered eggs to the ranch. The older boys were kind of acing him out and he got upset, but Dale, Warren and Steve told them to follow behind Zach. The boys did a really good job with that. 

Zach liked the ranch, but not for the livestock or the gun shooting. He liked the swing set and Little Tikes slides, exploring around the pond with Daddy and climbing the “mountains,” which were steep dirt hillsides. I have been looking for some used playground pieces ever since.  There is a lot of expensive new crap and a lot of expensive old crap.  I’m going to find some slightly less expensive, not-crap, used stuff. 

I have a bumper crop of Yukon Gold potatoes growing, and all I did was put the pieces in the ground and water once or twice. The onions and lettuce are ok too.  It is strange when you think about all the bacteria and manure in a garden, how we don’t worry that any of it seeps into the vegetable (well, I guess I do now).  Mike said he’d help me weed the damn thing today.

Don sent us another email to say that he didn’t know how much notice he could give us about when they would cut us off from the driveway.  We have decided to just not reply. We’ve been over this stuff a million times with him.  He is the only one worrying about the 1-inch difference in the property line and the imaginary lawsuits in his head.  Our neighbor George Dunning said, “I bet he got beat up a lot when he was a kid.”  Rumor also has it that Don brought some of their eggs to George and George told him to, ”Get out of here. I don’t want you coming around here.” George is known for embellishment, and he told me a slightly nicer version, but I like the first one.

We have 2 blue jay pairs and 2 cardinal pairs that fight over the bird food. A blue bird family moved into the blue bird house, but the other day I found Speedy had climbed up to look in the hole. Hopefully she didn’t hurt one.

I guess I like St. Mary’s. I am getting better at knowing the patient population and physicians. I can’t imagine the drive to KUMed now that I am not doing it.  It was really neat to be around all the smart people doing cutting edge research at KU, but that was sort of remote anyway.  

Mike is getting over his sinus infection. He had trained up to running 3-4 miles every other day, prior to getting sick.  He is anxious to get back to it.  He has $44,000 in orders to process at the office this weekend.  All of his compost is gone, so he is using fertilizer to help process the existing leaf pile.  We are sort of lost without it.

Tonight is parents’ night out at Kidz Kabana. Zach’s friend Hudson is going. So we are going to do something. We decided not to plan what though, because these nights are sort like New Years eve, in that you feel forced to feel like you are having a good time for the time you have.  Hopefully spontaneity will be fun. 

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Sunday, April 15, 2012

4-15-12

Eric's Facebook post today:  RIP Seaweed, Stanley, Boulder, Sparkles, Bubbles the gold fish. It seems like just two weeks ago you came to join us and now you are gone.... Sushi anyone?


March 3 he wrote:  Retained the services of a fishing guide this AM. He dumped his coffee on me, gave me a defective beach chair and didn't find any fish for us. He is lucky he is family or i would mention his name on here........Dickie Durant.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

4-14-12

I guess the reason I couldn't locate my camera, and Easter pictures, is because I left it at the ranch. Warren and Cole rescued it. Steve posted this one of me on Facebook with the caption, "While the rest of us were fishing, Andrea unwittingly became a Jeep commercial."  He's a pretty good brother-in-law.


Sunday, April 1, 2012

4-1-12

Last night we went for ice cream. Zach got a choc-o-late cone.  On the way home, he said look I'm a lion. He had chocolate ice cream all around his mouth and face, like a lion mane.  He did that a bunch of times, and through in a look I'm a ghost, oooOOOOoooo. Mike said it is because ghosts have those big circular mouths.

Last night, I taught Zach how to find frogs in the pond and make them jump in.  It was fun, but now I sort of think I opened the door to pond fun. It would be nice if it wasn't green.

I have mowed now for the second time. I'm not mowing the neighbors portion of the yard anymore, and it does go a bit faster. I am actually excited to get our new drive. Shane has a really nice slightly curvy plan for it. We'll disconnect from that guy next door, who is a loose canon. And, I will be able to buy a cute new mailbox. Someday I wouldn't mind dividing the pond. It would be fun to have a little land bridge and maybe making it slightly smaller would make it easier to maintain. Mike says the problems are all on their side, and I believe it with all the cattails and weird septic work.

Speaking of the neighbors, they have hired a woman to to their spring yard work. She shows up in an old minivan and works her tail off all day. Yesterday she was shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow and unloading it somewhere all day.  That is hard work.  Probably got a deal on some lady from their church.

Mike found a great shelter at Jacomo that has a nice playground and overlooks the lake. We wen there this morning. After 30 minutes, it felt like we were getting a little over-exposed even with sunblock. So we ran to Ace Hardware. Mike got some fertilizer to put in the compost heap. We came home and turned on the air. Record highs forecasted today in the upper 80's.