Unfinished Projects

Good morning, everyone :)

Today I get to spend the day with just Shane. Aften went with her Gramma Pat (Jer's step mom) last evening. She spent the night and is going to help Pat baby-sit baby Hayden, Jer's cousin's 6 month old baby. Aften was excited to get out of here alone and Shane is enjoying his alone time, too.

Shane and I don't have any fancy plans. We have to run to the grocery store for a few things for our weekend camping trip in Pine Creek at the cabin!

When you're outside in your yard or relaxing inside the house, do you actually relax? I often spend the time sitting there thinking about what I should be doing...lol Going outside these days is very frustrating to me. I look around and I see all of the work that needs to be done, instead of just enjoying what all we have. I have plans in my heads, visions I guess you can call them, and until those projects look like that, I'm not satisfied. It doesn't help matters that we don't have the money to finish most of these projects. Projects, that in some cases were started many years ago and never fully completed. At the time we probably started it based on what we had on hand or could do at the time and planned on finishing it sometime soon...not a few years later. LOL I guess it's not that bad but I still look at everything and see the negative side to it.

Jer has made a lot of progress on this area up back. I'm sure it's going to look wonderful when it's done...it's just when will that be?? Not that I'm rushing him, but I just know how things have been going...

The back porch needs painted/stained, including the roof braces, you just can't see them in this photo. Actually, if you notice the bottom step is broken. I did that right before I snapped this photo. I went on the porch to dead head the flowers and on my way back down, the step let lose. It's been wobbly for awhile but Jer hasn't listened to me about fixing it...As you can see in the background, he was mowing the grass when I shared the news with him. He wasn't very happy. The mowing was abandoned and he started on rebuilding the back steps. Now I have those to paint, too, and actually he claims they look horrible and didn't go together well at all.

The other side of the porch is home to our oil tank....which again, you can't tell from this photo but it needs painted. Our oil tank was just freshly painted when my Dad bought a corn burner and gave us the oil and tank that he had. It was in better shape than ours but here it is, about 3 years later, still hunter green with brown paint splattered on it instead of gray to blend in with the trailer.



The sitting area by the pool....It took me about 5 years to get Jeremy to put the boards on the old glider so we could use it once again. I want to stain it and the metal needs painted again. The spool is Jer's and he wants to make it into a feeder for up back...we need chicken wire or something of the sort. The black stuff is rolled roofing that I put that down to block the weeds and grass, which are starting to grow through it. This area is supposed to be covered with river rock, but it hasn't happened yet. We thought we had the perfect solution...my BIL and SIL have a patio made of large concrete pavers that they want to remove and replace with one slab of concrete so it's flat. We asked for the pavers and we believed this spring would be the time, however, with the budget not passing yet and my BIL facing the possibility of no paycheck come next week (My SIL went and applied for food stamps yesterday), that's been put on hold, which means our project is on hold for yet another year...sigh...

Oh, and in the right hand corner you see a board, that's another project that I haven't worked on. I wanted to paint something on it, possibly a huge sunflower and there it sits, where I put it last summer....

BTW~I trimmed all of the hosta flowers off after I snapped these photos. I never really cared for them and they stick out in the way, so off they went!

The list is much longer..the entire front porch railing needs replaced (It's rotting. It was a temporary railing that my Pap threw together out of scrap wood, not pressure treated, so that we didn't have to worry about Shane taking off when we moved here because he was only 15 months old and not used to being this close to the road and all), the dry river bed and pond needs stone, the driveway needs stone, the shed needs new shingles, three windows still need replaced on the trailer, the roof needs a new coat of aluminum paint (That, thankfully, is at my Pap's so we don't have to buy any), a few things around the yard like my arbor needs stained, my swing needs something done to it....the bathroom floor needs replaced....sigh...

I guess I have to realize how much we HAVE done in the last nearly 9 years that we've lived here...it's really been a LOT, it' s just we've never had to let so much go in a summer before. And I kept thinking, I want a camper so we can camp next summer...when will we ever find time for this stuff? LOL

I was so bummed, so I sat down on the glider and felt more depressed. Then I got up and started weeding and deadheading a bit. I guess that helped. My mind got to wandering and I dug out some wood for some more projects (And I have how many that I haven't finished already?) and then found myself inside painting....a good way to cheer myself, up right?

I sanded a few pieces and plan to work on them but in the meantime, because it was dark and I really needed to sand more but couldn't see very well and Jer was in the shed working on the steps so I didn't want to be in his space....I started on stuff in the house.

Remember this little checkerboard that I found at the TS a few weeks ago? Someone just used a stencil on a piece of wood...

Well, it's been repainted and I like it MUCH better :) I also found the other checkerboard at the TS a few months ago. I bought it for the backgammon board on it to hang on my wall with my other two gameboards in the empty spot...only thing was the backgammon board was printed crooked on the wood and I knew that would drive me insane, so one of my plans is to make my own gameboard. Instead, I started to prim up the other side, the checkerboard. I painted the edges and I'm painting the natural wood-toned blocks a tan.
The stitchery is my Mom's birthday present. Her birthday is Monday, so I have to keep at it. I was up this morning around 7:00 (After going to bed at 1am) and stitched while I watched a bit of TV. I'm using Shabby Roses Block #2 for inspiration. I had to shorten the vase to make it fit in a frame and I'm not going to add BEAUTY to it...it will just be a vase of red roses for my Mom.

So, that's what I'm up to. I should get to work on something and get Shane around here so we can get to the store and get back....

ETA: The painting helped lift me out of the mood I was in. I needed to focus on something that I could work on right now instead of something I could not. So I got the creative juiced flowing and off to work I went. Of course now I have like 6 projects that I want to start! LOL

And the photos were a help, too. I don't think the things look as bad once I see them in photos :)

Have a great day :)

Whatcha Working On Wednesday

Good morning! It's Wednesday once again, so what has everyone been up to? More on that later...

I actually planned to wake up earlier today. This whole "sleeping in until I wake up" thing isn't working so well. I'm more tired than I am if I wake up early to an alarm. So, I set the alarm last night but when it went off at 7:30 this morning, I shut it off and went back to sleep! LOL I was tired from Af waking me at 2:30am because she had a bad dream and then I went back to sleep and had strange dreams all night and didn't sleep well. Maybe tomorrow I can start my new routine? LOL

Yesterday was another calm, relaxing day at home. I worked on laundry. I washed and hung the kids sheets out to dry and ours on Monday, so that's all done for a bit. Everything is caught up now :)

I also picked up and did the dishes several times, as always...froze some more blackberries, made venison chipped steak sandwiches for supper and baked another blackberry pie for the family last night.

Jeremy came home close to 6pm last night, ate supper and went back out to work on his project. Things are really coming along. It doesn't seem like it until you realize how many cart loads of dead briars he drug up into the woods to let them rot and how many rocks the guy has picked out of the ground. Now he's working on leveling the area a little bit more so it's easier to mow.

On Sunday, Scott asked if we would like to go to their cabin in Pine Creek like we did last year. (If some of you may remember, Jer took us up there for the first time last summer on our anniversary weekend. I was a bit cranky about the idea, not because of our anniversary but because he would be leaving the kids and I all day at a strange place with Scott's wife, who I only talked to maybe three times in my life and Scott's mother, who I knew nothing about! But it worked out. The kids enjoyed themselves and everyone was wonderful, so two weeks later we went back :)This time there is not huge 3D archery shoot that the guys will be attending so Scott thought it would be the perfect time to have us up so Jeremy can enjoy the cabin a bit more. He was up last fall and spent a few days for archery season but he missed out on a lot of fun stuff last summer because he was really only there to eat supper and sleep and then gone the rest of the day. So, it should be a fun weekend...

The last time I was up there I decided I wanted to make something for the cabin, as a gift. They have it decorated in a lodge theme and I thought about several things all winter but figured I had plenty of time. Well, time is up! LOL I took some time to myself yesterday and worked on some stitching :)

I found this pattern a while back and it seemed perfect for now...until I have more time to work on what I was really planning...



And here is Af's block that I worked on on Monday....she insisted on a red boot.
And I'll finish with some photos from Monday...

Aften in her "boat"

Shane and his "Fossil Rock Museum"

A cool rock with a hole in the center that Jer found in the ditch...
Aften wanted to make her own museum so she pretended stuff on the porch belonged to her...

This is Aften's birdhouse and her "hanger" for it...she came up with that herself! LOL


Shane said Af was crazy...

And she caught him and said he was kicked out of the museum...

Some blooms from around the yard...

My pink daylily...

My Astillbe....I love how this flower blooms and then dries and stays nice looking all season.

Have a great day :)

Catching Up

Why do Monday's always feel like catch-up days....even if I am home all weekend and I do laundry and pick up and clean, I spend Monday doing the same stuff. It doesn't seem fair, does it?

I was already to post early this morning and then I started playing Farm Town...big whoops on my part. It was REALLY slow this morning and I wasted too much time, so I gave up. Then Shane took over the computer and I washed laundry and hung it to dry, folded some stuff that was in the dryer, washed up dishes several times and decided I was sitting down to stitch....Now it's time to plan supper! Where did the day go? Heck, where did the weekend go?


On Friday, the kids and I got up and kind of moved slowly so it was after lunch until we went to Pap's for more blackberry picking. I was in the berry patch for about an hour and a half and picked 5 quarts of berries myself. I have a pie to bake and probably some cobbler and the rest, are being put on cookie sheets and frozen and then put in bags for later.

Berry picking is over for the season...Pap called today to tell me that since Friday, many of them have dried up, so we didn't go back for more today. I don't know if I could take too many more days of it...we haven't had the best of luck! LOL

I forgot to tell you that on Tuesday when we picked, Aften found a skunk...thank goodness he was dead! LOL But imagine when you're picking berries and hear your 6 year old yell, "Ugh...Mommy...come here.." I asked what was wrong and I hear, "Um, it looks like a skunk!" Well, just a few minutes before, I heard something walking further in the patch but thought nothing of it. It was probably a rabbit, I said to myself. So, I get out of where I am and go down on the path that Af is on below me and yep, there is a skunk laying along the side, just in the berry bush. My first reaction was to run but I leaned in closer to inspect it and see if it was breathing. I didn't think it was but I grabbed Af and off we went. Aften then went and got my Pap, who said she was talking so fast he didn't know what she was saying at first. He got his gun and came down and I told him I was certain it was dead because all of our talking and yelling hadn't roused him...and even Shane's smart plan of throwing a stick at it! DUH! Pap said that he had something digging in his flower bed and he suspected it was a skunk but he had put poison out. He said nothing had dug in the flower bed for the last two nights so he figured he got whatever it was and we just happened to find it. So the skunk got buried in one of the many groundhog holes...

I also managed to lose my sunglasses that day, break my anklet and get nice berry juice on my pale pink shirt. The berry juice came out but the sunglasses are still missing and the anklet is still broke.

Friday after we got to Pap's the kids and I changed into jeans. Aften had on her cute little pink mud boots and apparently had dried mud on bottoms because she tracked it around Pap's kitchen. I bent down to pick it up and ripped a hole in my pants!!! Now, there was a hole there in the first place but I sewed it shut because I liked the pants. Not for good or anything but they were nice to throw on to work around here or to go riding or something. Not anymore...nope, I ripped the hole right out by the seam in the butt and got to walk around with my butt hanging out for a bit. Thank goodness we were in the berry patch at Pap's and not out in public...lol

Later Shane went to sit down on my Pap's mower...he has one that you steer by the handles, not a steering wheel. He has plenty of room at his feet that the kids plopped down to get a ride to the other side of the yard to pick berries. Shane's bucket was attached to his pants, so he sits down and throws his entire bucket on Af's lap...purple berry juice all over her shirt and jeans! She was not happy! But I got it out :)

Friday night, we went grocery shopping. Yay, huh?! Right now it's my least favorite thing to do because it's the thing we spend the most money on. I buy on sale, I buy generics, I buy as cheap as I can... but we have to eat!
Saturday morning, I had to get up and take Aften for baton pictures. We had to be at the place at 9am. We were a tad bit late but people were still pulling in after us. It went pretty fast. We were done with Af's group and on our way in 20 minutes.

Jeremy was just headed outside when we got home. He needed to go work on his latest project. On Thursday he started clearing these huge multiflora rose (jagger bushes as we call them) that were growing over the spring that runs down between our property and the neighbor's. The neighbor mentioned something about yanking them out a few years ago, but we left it go. Now one big section was dead and the thing was just an eyesore to begin with, so Jer decided it had to go. I held my breath, though, waiting for Nelson to come up and ask what he was doing, however, he sat on his back porch and watched.....lol I think he's happy to see it gone, too!


I didn't take a before photo but this is from last summer....you can see the bush from this photo. It was really, really big...like 7' tall, 8' wide and probably about 12' long. Jer has plans that he told me about...flattening off the ground, planting grass and putting rocks in the ditch for the spring to make a sort of water fall when the water is up :)
Of course, Jeremy didn't get to finish what he wanted to do because as always, we had somewhere to go...Pat's (Jer's Step Mom) Surprise Birthday Party. Pat turned 70 today and her daughter's planned a surprise party to celebrate!

The guest of honor came about 45 minutes late to her party...because they couldn't figure out how to get her to camp. Lisa was going to suggest walking around and picture taking but it started to rain and that wasn't going to fly. Finally it cleared off and she got Pat in the car. Pat's face was priceless! I wish I had a photo of it. She only noticed Shane and Aften, so she thought Jer and I were having a party or something and she said she wasn't staying and didn't even want to get out of the car. Finally she started to notice other people and then we all yelled, SURPRISE! :) It was a great party. Lots of good food and lots of talking and fun times!

I spent most of the time talking to my SIL, Gay, which is really ironic considering not even a year ago we were hardly talking! It was like that the whole time that Jer and I have been together. My MIL ruined things for us from the very beginning but we're trying to work on things on our own. Normally when she went to things like that and avoided me the whole time but now that we're okay with one another, I was the first person she sought out and we sat and talked. We mostly talked about the crazy state budget that hasn't passed yet and how my BIL, Chris, (Corrections officer) and MANY others aren't going to be getting a paycheck if things don't get resolved very soon!

Gay & Pat

I finished Pat's present in time! I decided to skip the berry vine on the sides and I think it turned out very nicely!


Look at my goofball FIL....he's got his brother's four wheeler with a carseat strapped to the back with baby Hayden in the seat! LOL This kid is so spoiled already and he's only 6 months old!
The highlights of the party were a HUGE thunderstorm that came in for a bit and totally drenched everything and the wiffle ball game...

In this photo, everyone was laughing because the guy on the ground just slipped and fell on his butt. You know, it's not smart to play ball on a hill after a rain... Shane is doubled over laughing and Jer is down there reenacting the fall. What he didn't know what that a bit later, he was going to round 2nd and his brother was going to jokingly trip Jer. Only thing was that he actually did trip Jeremy. Jer went sailing through the air and landed flat on his belly. Oh, did we ever laugh!!!!! He wasn't hurt :)

The party lasted until about midnight...everyone was having a blast just talking and hanging out :)

Sunday...Jer got up and went to a 3D Archery Shoot with his buddy and his son, both are actually co-workers of Jer's. I knew when he left that it would be at least 3pm until I saw them again. It was 2:30.

Jer got back to work on cleaning up some of the dead stuff from the back yard for the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening. We had a nice supper of burgers on the grill and got to eat on our porch for once this summer because things were cleaned up :)

After supper, Jer and the kids went hunting for worms and then we loaded up and went to the Dam for some fishing!

It was kind of busy when we got there and normally close to dark, everyone clears out but not so last night. Instead we gave up and called it a night around 9pm. The fish just weren't biting that much and there was a chill in the air....It feels more like spring than summer here this past couple of weeks. So, we may go night-fishing another night this week...Who knows? It could be tonight!

Jer with his catch

Shane's first cast of the night...

My "Hula girl", as I kept calling her, getting serious..

Shane trying hard to not get poked by the sunfishes' spikes....He caught this fish with NO bait on his hook! LOL

This picture of Af is priceless! She just caught a small-mouth bass and Jer noticed that it had two other hooks in his mouth besides hers...not the smartest fish, huh? Jer got one of the hooks out and we were worried that the fish would die before he got the second one so he tried to hold it in the water for a bit before removing the second, only the fish got away...

After the look of shock

I don't fish because I don't have a license and at this point, I'm not spending the nearly $30 to get one...so I sat and stitched in between getting lines untangled, baiting hooks and of course, taking photos of the catches.

(This was taken this morning. I worked on it this afternoon and I only have the sole of the boot and REST to do yet. Aften insisted that the boot must be red for some reason. I don't know if I like it but it's her quilt! LOL)

We planned to night fish but it was getting a little chilly (The weather is so off right now. It feels like spring) so we called it a night around 9pm and came home to watch the last two episodes of Harper's Island!

Well, I need to get my supper in the oven! Jer is on his way home and will be here any minute and I have no clue what he has planned for the night.

Have a great day :)

Surprise!

It's me again...two posts in two days! I am going to try harder to post more often once again. They may not be the most interesting posts and they may not be the traditionally long ones that I normally write but I do miss blogging. I found some sort of comfort in getting everything out there that was jumbled in my head from day to day. I guess it's sort of like my diary but way less personal, huh?

The title of the post actually has more than one meaning....Surprise that I'm posting again this week, A Surprise party for Jer's step mom and what I'm working on and something that surprised me last night! The first part is out of the way, now on to the second..

Jeremy's step mom, Pat, isn't aware but her daughter's planned a Surprise 70th Birthday Party for her (Pat is 13 years older than Denny, my FIL) Pat's oldest daugther, Lisa, came up from Florida last weekend and her other daughter, Sherri, will be coming up from Reading this weekend along with other members of her family. They're having a Surprise Birthday Bash for her up at camp on Saturday afternoon and as far as I know, she has no idea. The only thing is, Aften does know and we have been supposed to go up all week for a little campfire and some s'mores and since this is the last night we can do it this week, I'm crossing my fingers that Aften remembers to keep the secret!

In my usual style, I waited until yesterday to decide what to make as a gift. Why do I do this to myself? I wanted something about family and after digging through the free stitchery pattern sites and all of the ones I have saved to my computer, I settled on a design by Char at the Pickled Pepper Patch.

I started on it last night. Now, I have to say that I'll be lucky if I ever finish it. There are a LOT of French Knots and they're not my favorite! Time is running out....



I went up back to my little Adirondack chair in the woods and relaxed for a bit and stitched. Although, I don't know how relaxed I was because I kept pulling out stitches to make it look just right (I'm very picky, especially with wording!) and the mosquitoes started to eat me alive, in spite of spraying myself with the Sportsman's strength bug spray.

Jeremy was nearby digging and pulling and messing around over by the edge of the property line by the spring. He said he's tired of that part of the yard looking like an eyesore...I was just waiting for the neighbor to come up and complain because he swears he owns that area, although he did ask if we could take the old Multiflora Rose bush out some time awhile back and now most of it has started to die, I don't know if it was from Jer cutting into it to retrieve an arrow or if he got carried away with the Tough Brush weed killer last summer.

Shane and Aften were preoccupied with the neighbor, two houses up Golden-doodle. Shane insists her name is Roxy but I didn't hear them call that when they yelled for her. She was over here for about 20 minutes before anyone realized they left her outside alone. The kids were afraid she would run off or go out on the road. At one point she was next door with the neighbor's Pit bull mix and then the other neighbor two doors down little fluffy white dog came over to. I guess there was a party going on next door?

In between all of that, Shane kept whining and crying because Jeremy supposedly was tearing apart one of his forts. How can anyone keep track of that anyway? The boy moves his fort around up in the woods every time he goes up there and the has like 10 spots that he says are his...lol. I think he'll be okay and he'll get over it. Although, I have to say I am really tired of the boy's whining and crying. He's worse than a girl lately. And honestly, that's my only complaint this entire summer and the only reason I would even wish that it would be fall and school was starting. Other than that, everything has went fine.

And my third surprise...

Vienna e-mailed me yesterday! Now, I had my e-mail set months back that things just got deleted. I thought I turned that off since it had been awhile and I heard nothing, I just didn't want her sending me nasty e-mails...I was looking through my in-box and accidentally deleted an e-mail further down the list than I thought I was. I went to the deleted mail to figure out what I had deleted and there it was. She wrote to me to ask me where we bought our truck because they're looking to buy one and she remembered me saying that they had great deals...Can you believe it???? After four years of friendship, she threw a fit over me inviting Shannon over and then didn't have the decency to thank me for the wedding sampler that I made for her anniversary but she asks me where I bought my truck at??? The truck that she was sooo rude to me about when we went to get, saying we didn't get that great of a deal and how her interest rate was so much better...right because someone co-signed for you! I haven't responded and I don't think that I will.


There is something else that's been on my mind lately...you know the old adage that you can't be your employee's friends? Well, I guess it's true. Jeremy has learned that over the last year when some of his buddies stopped taking him seriously at work and so he started distancing himself from them a bit to get his authority back in a sense.

I, myself, thought that Jer being the boss wouldn't effect me from being friend's with the employees wives and girlfriends but I was so wrong. I know too much sometimes to really be a friend to these women...For example they decided they had too many people in the shop the other week and didn't like how some people were working in their positions, so the owners asked Jeremy to interview people to replace his one buddy. Jer didn't sleep for days....But then they decided that he's been there longer and knows things and that just the position he was in wasn't working for him, but he was better elsewhere so they just put him back in that position. But that meant someone else had to go...I knew for about a week or so but I couldn't tell this guy's wife what was about to happen. And now, I see her posts on Facebook and MySpace, she's upset, sad and depressed and the person that I am, I want to reach out and say "I'm sorry", try to comfort her...but I think I'm viewed as the bad guy since my hubby was the one that had to do the job. It wasn't Jeremy's decision but nobody sees it that way. Jeremy asked me to let the dust settle because he was basically told the same thing at work. He was told what to say and how to go about laying him off and they don't want anything else being said about it (I have a habit of not knowing when to keep my mouth shut, unfortunately) Sometimes we would hang out with these two...but I don't think that's going to happen anymore....


Well, I want to get moving here. I'm not sure what I'm doing with myself today. I told my Pap that I may be down for more berries today when I left on Tuesday (The pie is gone already and I only have enough for one more. The berries only last so long so I could pick and freeze some, too). I also need to take the kids to the library to return their books, get more and get their prize for the week from the Summer Reading Program. And I am dying to get my hair cut! It's been two months and I have just fought with it for the last few weeks and enough is enough! Plus, as I mentioned earlier, my FIL wants us to come up and visit and have a little campfire. Another busy day! And how will I find time to finish the stitchery with all of that planned???


Have a great day :)