Happy Memorial Day!

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day, today has been HOT (90 degrees) and sunny with 15 mph winds. The weather around this place is very random. Saturday and Sunday were cool (60's) with rain showers every couple hours and today the temp goes up by 20+ degrees and there isn't a cloud in the sky. The only thing that you can predict is that the weather is going to be unpredictable. I think it was much more consistent down in Georgia.

With it being sunny, I got a good bit of work done in the yard today, pictures coming soon. While I was working I noticed that the mother robin was in and out of the nest a lot. After closer inspection, there are babies in the nest. At first I thought there were two babies, but when I was taking pictures, I thought that I saw a third moving around in the background. When I was going through the photos, I did see a third beak. I guess I will steer clear of that area for a while so I don't disturb the nest.

while the wife's away, the husband will..

Try to find cheap projects to keep himself busy. Karen is in Nagshead NC with her family, so I'm holding down the fort here in the plains. It has been raining a lot, so the outdoor projects haven't been getting the attention that I was hoping to give them. Instead, I put some energy into an inside project.

I've started collecting license plates, especially if I find them in souvenir stores when we are travelling. I had been kicking around ideas on how to hang them up in the garage for a while. In our GA garage, they were strung together vertically with wire, but I didn't really like how that looked. I picked up a couple cheap 2' x 4' pieces of OSB, painted them black and attached the plates. I think it turned out well... The funny thing is that we haven't hung a single picture inside the house! The garage is looking good, though.



Whenever people find out that Karen is out of town for a week or more, the typical response is, what will you eat? I keep saying that I do a lot of the cooking, but no one seems to believe me. I made my first visit to a local butcher shop this week... I think this meal turned out pretty well, it has meat, veggies (with a splash of cheese) and a roll. Mmmm, steak. What more could a guy want?

Stormy weather

After work, I decided to go run some errands. I knew there was a thunderstorm coming, but what I didn't plan on was that storm had the potential to create a tornado... I was standing in line to check out when an announcement came over the PA system that said there was a tornado warning and that we all had to move to the back of the store. Ah, great... The good news is that the storm blew through pretty quickly and after 15 minutes they let us go back to our business. Two twisters touched down in our county, but it sounds like the damage was minimal.


Once I finally got home, I went out to check on how the creek bed was handling the storm. I took the flip video camera with me and shot a video for ya'll... I guess I need to stop calling it a dry creek bed.

No ducklings...

Evidently I am not the only carnivore around here. I noticed mama duck wasn't sitting on the nest tonight, so I took a little peak. Half of the eggs are MIA and the ones that are left are broken open. I guess it is possible that they hatched, but I haven't seen any babies and I spent a lot of time in the yard over the weekend. I think I would have seen and heard any babies.

The mother robin has been watching her nest closely and she gives me a lot of verbal grief every time I venture near the nest. Not much else going on, Karen flew to VA this morning, so I am on my own for a couple weeks. Bad timing has kept me from getting my native grass seed out earlier,, but I am going to try to get It in this week. Since the farmers just planted their crops, I am hoping that I am not too late. Once this is done, I will get back to the creek bed. So much to do, so little time. I planted a bunch of various plants that we got from a friend who was thinning out his beds. I'm all about free plants... I just wish I had some money to put in some trees!

Girls weekend

Last weekend was girls weekend, Karen drove to Ohio and met some of her friend from Virginia. I was hoping for a weekend of working in the yard, but mother nature had other plans for me. It rained the ENTIRE weekend. Since I had some time to kill, I decided to attack an indoor project instead.

I picked up some 1x6's at the hardware store and built some racks for the yard tools. They turned out pretty well and now the tools are up and out of the way, yet easy to get to when needed.



It has been sunny all week (since Monday) and now they are forecasting rain for this weekend too... it just isn't fair... I have work to do.

Eggs, eggs everywhere

We had a weekend full of beautiful weather, plus this was my first weekend home on Saturday AND Sunday since working at the car dealership always required Saturday work. I was able to plant tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini, but we are still looking for yellow squash plants. Please note that Farmer Homer, the farmer who owns the property behind us, says that we are 2 weeks early on planting. He says the old timer farmers say that you shouldn't plant until the hedge row tree leaves are the size of squirrel ears. How big are squirrel ears? He also said that we also typically get a frost while the lilacs are blooming... we'll see if he is right.

I took advantage of the weather and did some work in the yard, planting a bunch of plants that one of Karen's coworkers gave us. I've also made some progress on the dry creek bed, here are some pictures of the progress:



Evidently, we aren't the only ones who like the lot that we picked in the subdivision. I was taking a hose to the hose bib near our air conditioner when I was buzzed by a duck who came flying out from behind the ac unit. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on, but she built a nest between the ac unit and the house wall. There are 9 eggs in the nest, I guess we will have ducklings this summer. In addition to that nest, we also have a bird's nest on the beam under our deck too. I haven't seen the bird, but there is one egg in the nest. All kinds of wildlife making their home here at our house, those of you who know Karen well enough know that she isn't thrilled with the animals being so close to the house...




And finally, we have had some great sunset views from our deck...

Quick (and sometimes not too quick) trip

We made a whirl wind trip to Virginia, DC, and (for me) Georgia over the last week and a half. We spent Easter weekend with her family, went to dc for an educators conference and then I flew to ga to visit the family and get the miata. What was supposed to be a short 4:30 to 6:30 flight ended up being a 19 hour adventure due to the bad weather in the south last Wednesday night. I was supposed to be in Atlanta Wednesday night at 6:30 pm and didn't actually arrive until 3:45 thursday morning. NOT FUN. after finding out that all the rental car places were all out of cars (I wasn't the only stranded traveller), I had to wait for the 7:00 am shuttle to Athens. What a long, restless trip.

After all of that, I was able to get the car road ready Friday and I met my friends at the Mitty historic car races at road Atlanta on saturday morning. My plans were to drive to Chattanooga Saturday night and the rest of the way on Sunday, but the threat of storms on Sunday pushed me to make the entire drive on Saturday afternoon and night. I really didn't want to drive through the storms in the small, light weight miata. Doing the full trip solo really wasn't that bad, but I don't want to do it again soon either. Saw some tornado damage in north ga and tried to snap some pictures while driving... It is amazing what those storms can do!

I started my new job today and we won at curling tonight. We came back from a five to one deficit to win seven to five. I like winning!