Sunday blogging

Holy yard work, batman!! Memorial day weekend is upon us, and today was spent in the following manner:

Slept in, and was woken up by someone ringing the doorbell around 10:30. The fam was at church, and I was in a just-woken up stupor, plus in my pajamas, so I didn't answer the door. I tip-toed down the hallway to see who it was, but whoever it was walked away before I could get a good look. Plus I was still rather bleary eyed, so I doubt I would have been able to see anyway. Ha.

Enjoyed some home made chocolate chip banana bread (reason # 1,345 I'm glad to be living at home for the summer), and then read several more short stories out of my Mark Twain book. I'm over 3/4 of the way through it's 480 pages, and still loving it. So great.

The fam got home from church and we ate lunch. The dinner table conversation drifted into a serious discussion of what various items we wanted to achieve in terms of home maintenance/improvement over the summer, specifically in terms of yard work. I grabbed a notebook and we came up with close to 20 items, from small, one person jobs like clearing up a pile of branches along one of the fence lines, to bigger projects like organizing the north shed and painting all the gates (we decided on a nice red color, which I strongly approve of). After discussing, we said a prayer, asked the Lord to bless our plans and our work, and then went to it. We grabbed wheelbarrows, pitch forks and shovels and headed for our goat pen, adjacent to the north shed. It hadn't been properly cleaned out in... well... really not since we'd gotten goats. There were several layers of hay and poop on the ground, all packed tightly into probably a 2-3" deep mess. It was incredibly heavy, soggy, dirty, and smelled utterly horrendous. We did that until it started raining (it had been threatening to since we started), accomplishing about half the job.

Of course the rain stopped as soon as we had got everything put away, but we were all tuckered (and grossed) out, and moved on to lighter work. I used the electric hedge trimmer and shaped up our shrubberies along the front side of the house while Elise, Julia, Mom and Johanna all worked to pull weeds in the various flower beds, rocked areas and shrub lines around the house. We worked from 3ish until close to 8pm, and got quite a bit done! There is now a rather substantial pile of hedge trimmings, overgrown weeds and dried out logs, sticks and twigs in our fire pit. It'll make for a great birthday bonfire in a couple weeks. :)

Post-yard work we had a great supper and then had a hilarious time playing with gummy Peach rings. The game was to tilt your head back, put the candy on the top of your forehead, and then try to get the candy into your mouth without using your hands. It was hilarious, because the best method was to rapidly and fervently raise one's eyebrows up and down to get the peach ring to slowly but surely make its way down the forehead towards the bridge of the nose, where it would inevitably fall into one of the eye sockets, covering the eye. Then, it would just be a game of chance, whether the contestant would successfully corral the candy into his or her mouth by use of tongue and gravity, or whether it would fall off the face and onto the floor, from which it would be hastily retrieved to do the whole thing over again. Watch for a video on facebook soon (hopefully). It was hysterical!!

Tomorrow being Memorial day, I'm guessing we'll spend most of it outdoors doing more yard projects. The weather looks promising for said activities, so I'll be rather surprised if anything else happens. Yay summer!