Monday Ramblings

I haven't been ignoring you, dear Blog... but my brain just seems to draw a blank these days about interesting things to write. Housework these days is even boring to me! So what else have I been doing?

I planted my garden, much to the horror of my neighbor who swears, despite 80 degree weather forecast all week, you should never plant before the "safe from frost" date of May 5. I'm living on the edge apparently.

This year I have given up the idea of planting my normal 75 x 25 foot vegetable garden. My back just doesn't want anything to do with all that tilling and hoeing and weeding and bending. For the past two years I've forced myself to plant the garden, but then never really got out to keep up with it, and that's just a waste of energy and money. So this year we put two raised bed gardens in right on our back patio, and I'm loving it. Each bed is 2 feet by 8 feet, and raised up almost waist-high. No bending. No tilling. Hopefully very little weeding. Of course, I have to cut down on the number of plants, but I'm happy with what I put in - 1 cherry tomato, 2 regular size tomatoes, 4 brocolli, 2 eggplant, 2 green peppers. In the front space of the beds I will plant several varieties of lettuce, as well as spinach. In the back space will go green beans, which will, hopefully, climb those black iron trellises (recycled from a canvas canopy that had to be thrown out). I will also plant a few cucumber plants to climb that same trellis, and I'm looking for some onion sets to put in at the ends of each planter.

The plastic milk jugs have the bottoms cut out, and I put them over the tomato plants at night, just to keep them warm. The black plastic object you see in the front right is my new composter. Mr. B's job every afternoon is to take the compost bucket from the kitchen, dump it into the composter, and spin it 3 times. He takes his job very seriously!

It feels good to be able to garden again.

Yesterday Jeff and I both needed to get out of the house, so grabbed our new Garmin GPS that we hadn't tried out, and drove to Indiana, back roaded it until we felt pretty lost, and used the new GPS to find our way home. Obviously the GPS works fine. A few things we saw along the way:

This photo doesn't do the horns on this steer credit. Wow! They were HUGE!

In the middle of the woods on a back dirt road, we saw this carved statue of a bear still attached to tree stump.

We decided to stop for dinner and found this BBQ place.

Big Daddy's BBQ

Before watching Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives I probably never would have agreed to stop here, but we decided to have an adventure. Once we got inside, the place was clean and really had a nice homey atmosphere. I never would have guessed it from the outside! The BBQ was good - not quite the out-of-this-world great we were hoping for, but it was very good, home cooking.  I had pulled pork, soup beans and fries. Jeff had ribs (done with a dry rub), green beans and ham, and ??? I'm not sure what else. No room for dessert, so you know it was good food!

May is going to be a busy month. My youngest sister, Sarah, and her husband Bryan, will be visiting in mid-May, and I'm excited to have them. Sarah has been wanting to learn to quilt, so I'm hoping to send the "boys" away for the day and let us girls have some sewing time. We'll see how that goes.

My daughter-in-law is making a quick trip out from Dallas in late May, bringing the gorgeous and vastly talented Miss Aimee with her. Umma needs some grandbaby time, for sure!  Just look how much she's grown already!

Calling Umma on her cell phone.

I admit, I do have difficulty having one grandbaby live so close, and one live so far away. Mr. B. and I do things together almost every day, while sweet Miss Aimee isn't going to even know who I am. We have Skyped, but she's not big enough to understand that the face on the computer is her Umma who loves her so much. I guess Jeff and I just need to bite the bullet and get out to Dallas every 3 to 6 months. I'm so very close to Mr. B and it tugs at my heart to not be as close with Aimee. But that's life -- and I know most grandmothers go through the exact same thing these days.

I really need to get a new photo of Mr. B. He is growing as fast as Miss Aimee! And - drum roll, please - he is officially READING. Yay! All those letters and sounds finally fell into place for him, and he can pretty much read through any Easy Reader now. I'm crossing my fingers that he has my love of reading. He's doing well in school (which will be out for the summer in just one more month!), and has made some really wonderful friends. Last week a friend asked him over to play -- and it was his first official time going alone to a friend's house to play. I swear, driving him there was as bad as taking him to preschool for the first time. But we both survived, and he enjoyed himself enormously.

Life is good.