First week back blogging

     Well, it’s definitely been a week! Let’s see, as you know, Thursday we were at the library. I got 5 volumes of the wonderful series of books I’ve just discovered by Robin Jones Gunn. It’s her Sisterchicks series and I’ve been tearing through them and even making notes of some very inspirational parts.  AJ is all into the Nancy Drew books, she loves a good mystery. The library is also clearing out shelves of “older” books and ones that never had good check-out rates, so we also came home with a nice stack of books at 10 cents a piece, from books to learn from to cookbooks to enjoyment to National Geographic mags.  We stumbled to the car loaded down, decided to bypass our usual trip to the coffee shop and hit McD’s since she was starving and I needed a milkshake. Then a quick run into the Gregorson’s grocery for their meat special and finally home again in time to cook dinner.

     Friday is always errands day around here. The only “set in stone” part is stopping at the grocery store. This week our mood was to hunt down bathing suits. We lucked up for AJ and found 2 that will do her nicely for the summer, but none that appealed to me since mid-life decided to kick me in the rear and move me up a few sizes in several areas.

     Saturday, oh Saturday was an awesome day of floating the creek with my guy. We had no clue how much we had missed it these last two years! It was a long trip lasting 7-8 hours and full of fishing, fun, sunburn and smiles. Hubby, the turkey, already has his burn turned tan. My lovely burn has also turned tan but itches, meaning it will most likely peel and make me cranky for a few days…not to mention leaving a lovely spotty tan behind. I have to state (though I’m ashamed to); that for the first time EVER, my hubby out fished me. Never once in all our years has he caught more fish than me. He always catches the biggest, but I catch the most. However, I was fighting with a handicap. I’m addicted to the simple “push the button and cast that sucker’ poles. I really KNEW I should have brought more than the one my generous guy had bought me the day before. I lost quite a few fish when we realized I could have had a pinkie sized fish on there and on full drag there was no way it was going to reel in. So, that leaves me using his favorite kinds of poles…you know, those ugly things (lol) with the line showing and that bell/bar thingy over it. I’m not good with the whole “catch string with finger, flip the bell, cast, flip bell back and then reel in” thing. I spent half the day forgetting to flip the bell before casting which led to a lot of words I don’t normally use as I yet again untangled my lure from my line.

    Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday whizzed by for us. We were hoping for a special arrival on Wednesday, but the girls didn’t arrive until Thursday. We made a pit stop at the Farmer’s Co-op to pick up a few more things we needed. Then we headed up to 4-H headquarters to pick up 20 lovely little ladies that are AJ’s project for the summer, culminating in taking her best 5 of breed to the State 4-H show and auction. Prizes and ribbons to be won galore!!  She’s so tickled with all her little girls that she has dragged one of the dining room chairs over so she can just sit and stare at them. They sure are cute and we are all looking forward to getting back to having fresh eggs again. We are still torn over if we want to keep them all and sell eggs from home or just keep the few we need for our own needs and sell the rest of the pullets in September. Decisions Decisions, LOL.

     Today I also got about half of my medicinal and tea herbs in the ground with the rest to go in tomorrow evening. The veggie garden is slowly coming along with the tomatoes, pumpkins and watermelons outdoing everything down there so far. All my cooking herbs are up on the front porch in pots and doing well, still haven’t decided if I want them out in the front bed or just keep them potted so they can come in for the winter. It’s so nice to be settled in, growing things, painting rooms and homeschooling/unschooling to our hearts content!

     AJ seems to thrive on this way of learning in our combo of homeschooling and unschooling methods. She is very much a visual learner. So far we are having no major problems, other than the dreaded multiplication tables that we seem to be completely stuck on. That is one of the “required learning” we have. She was “supposed” to come out of 4^th grade last year at public school with them down pat. When we took her out mid-year this year the secretary mentioned that if she had to guess about 80% of the 5^th grade was failing math because none knew the times tables… yet the teachers don’t “have time” to go back and teach them again since they have certain things they HAVE to get done this year. How are kids supposed to add, subtract, multiple and divide fractions when they don’t even know the basic times tables. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of upset kids repeating 5^th grade at CMS, and I’m thankful mine won’t be one of them!

     Other than that, I'm looking forward very much to my guy having 3 whole days off from work. We had wanted to go camping, but when the weatherman informed us of 95 degree temps we decided we might want to plan something else. I’m sure cooking out, fishing, gardening, driving back roads, board games, movies and many other things will abound this weekend…I can hardly wait! When he gets off in the morn we are going to tuck him in for a nap while we make the library run since we’ve both plowed thru all our books, movies and desperately need some high speed net time!

     Whew, quite the lengthy post here. Thanks for hanging in if you made it this long. I’m really hoping this will work until we can finally get high speed here at the house.

Until next time,

Missy

The Rambling Granola Gal….