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 4th 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 5th 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 5th 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….
