TGIF & Almost 5 as well

Last night Nick came home on his way to Lacrosse... the first words out of his mouth... Hi... Hello... How's things going? nope... "Holy Computer! I knew you said it was a 17" screen on the laptop, but I didn't think it was that big!" Yeah I think that's because men are so used to thinking that 4" is 8"... they visualize 17 as 8.5....

I'm so glad it is Friday! I'm very much looking forward to a beverage with the ladies! This will be the biggest group of us all to get together in quite awhile.

So about an hour or so I was about to do my usual route of taking all the product samples down to the next department in order for them to eventually go live on our website, and I'm thinking about what I will be ordering for a beverage this evening... It's really past the weather for a mojito. I'm not sure I'm in the mood for a martini... but maybe. Or maybe I'll just fall back into the comfort of my ever faithful friend Jack. That sounds good too... hmmm. ummmmmmmm, ya, just realized I'm half way to the elevators with an empty cart... I went & got the cart and did not stop back at my desk to pick up the samples that I was taking down.

Did I mention Fratello's Special... FRIDAY- LADIES NIGHT- ALL LADIES $1 RAILS $2 CALLS 8PM -CLOSE!!

the love of the criters...

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the deck reading a magazine in the late afternoon and I could tell Booger was in the backyard by her signature half meow/chirp thing she does. I vaguely made note that she was coming closer and up the steps of the deck as her chirps got closer. When her she rounded the corner of the table towards the loveseat, I lowered my magazine to say hello. This would be the exact moment that she began to crouch down to jump up on my lap and I began to scream "no - No - NO - DOWN! NO!"

You see, ever since we've found homes for the last of the kittens, Booger has insisted on still bringing her latest kills to the house. This one happened to be in her mouth and still very much alive and thought she should share it with me. When I declined her very generous offer, she merely dropped it where she was, walked a few feet away and stretched out in the sun.

With the very large, still breathing, yet traumatized mouse laying between me and the patio door.... I used my cell phone to call Mike in the basement, telling him he needed to "Get Up Here Now!" As he opens the door, my displeasure is evident by my pose.. legs and feet curled up under me while watching and pointing at the poor creature left as a sacrifice before me.

His sympathetic "the poor thing!" was followed by the crunch of it's skull reverberating through the deck as he stepped on it's head! "AH! that's so gross!" was the only thing I could muster as he wheeled it off the deck onto the lawn. Booger did not even bother to lift her head to take notice of the entire transaction. I did, however, notice Vinnie playing with the remains in the back yard later in the day, to which I thought, at least it didn't go to waste.

So what is the object of this tale, to which I expose you today?

It just so happens that this very morning, as I'm going to put the dogs out, I'm trying to reach the cable on front porch by reaching over the dead chipmunk left at the back door last night. ...Which is laying next to the dead mouse from the day before. ...Which also reminds me that there is a dead mole by the patio door from some point earlier in the week...

....texting Taylor right now... "please removed the carcasses from the deck and front porch today"

Always running...

Last night's kickball game ended in a tie. bummer...

It was cold by the time we finished and I was glad to get in the car & turn on the heat! I picked up the sandwich makings on my way home for the Freshman football game in Waterloo tonight. As I pull into the driveway I see the dogs managed to pull a shovel from somewhere into the middle of the driveway, so I get out of the car to move it.

Of course the dogs are jumping all over & getting their cables tangled around my ankles, so I grab a hold of it to let them off and put them in the house before I pull into the garage. After I get back into the car and as I grab a hold of the steering wheel, I realized that they had dragged their cables through dog crap. I've got it on my hands & now on my steering wheel as well...

Yes - I did scrub my hands before I made the sandwiches....

This has been/will be sports filled:

Monday - JV Football in Green Lake
Tuesday - Rylee's Soccer in Lodi
Wednesday - My Kickball in Oshkosh
Thursday - Freshman Football in Waterloo
Friday - Varsity Football in Green Lake
Monday - JV Football in Deerfield

(knock on wood) - don't think there is anything on the schedule for next week Tuesday!

Catching up.....

The last couple of weeks have been hectic, Nick heading back to Marquette, Taylor getting geared up for High School, football practice and games. My kickball league started last week, lots of stuff going on at school. .. here I thought fall was going to bring a slower pace than summer had been!

The JV Phoenix are off to a great start with 2 demonstrative wins. Our Kickball team seems to have our act together so I'm looking forward to a good year. However, win or loose it's always fun!

I got to go climbing at Devil's Lake again this fall, I'm hoping to get back there one more time this year - I'll have to see how that goes. I'm hoping to do a biking/hiking trip to High Cliff sometime this fall yet as well.

This weekend my girlfriend Brenda & I are going to Madison to the Badger game with Chris and his roommate Ryan and spend some time in the Mad-City.

Work has been crazy as well, with the economy the way it is, donation requests are up so that's been taking more of my time it seems than the art portion of my job! But good news is we had our all time record high day in sales one day last week - so things must be getting better - right!

Issues...

Yeah, I've got issues, who'd have guessed right?? Well, the one I'm specifically talking about it that my skin is super sensitive to random things.

When I was little I remember mom saying she had to wash our clothes in something specific so that I didn't get a rash. I eventually out grew that, but I'm also leery about changing the brand of my detergent because Tide works for me & I really don't want to be in the situation that after being at work for an hour my skin feels like it's on fire because I washed my clothes in something new. (Please disregard all mental images of me running screaming thought the building tearing off my clothes - LOL!)

Direct contact with most cleaning products will end up with me losing a layer of skin on my hands. So yes, I should own stock in the company that makes the yellow cleaning gloves.... & if you know of a brand that is a bit longer, goes farther up your arm - that would be great too!

When I made the birdbath for Relay for Life, I had hauled everything up to the sand pile by the barn to make it & had forgot the gloves. Yes, going back to the house and getting them would have been too easy, so I, of course, just used my bare hands to mold the mortar mix. That resulted in something like a chemical peel up to my wrists.

The point, Cheryl... have you got a point to this story? Yes! This morning I realized that a couple of my fingers are peeling. Not my whole hand.. at least not yet, but I have no idea what the hell I touched this time... It will sometimes take a day or two for the peeling to begin, so I am mentally retracing my steps for the last two days and can't come up with a single thing out of the ordinary.

I'm so hoping it isn't some new twist... oh... wait - I washed dishes at the pond on Sunday....maybe?

& my wrist is looking better as well - who knew volleyball was so dangerous?

Camping this weekend was a little cool. Seems like I had most of the clothes I took with me on the entire time. We did have a great time though.

The kids did a lot of jumping the bikes off the pier this weekend... this probably wasn't the best jump, but the best one I happened to video.

BTW - the reason the bike is wearing a life vest is they found out two years ago that when the bike sinks in 10 feet of water - getting it back out really sucks.

Also note the really hi-tech jump they built...

Weekend Stuff

Last weekend was for the most part a 4 day weekend. I only worked a couple of hours on Thursday and I was off Friday.

Friday was a day of running errands and getting stuff rounded up for Relay for Life on Friday night. We had a great time - Right up until they cancelled it because of the incoming storm that never really came. We all had matching shirts that were a pretty big hit, especially when we were all walking together.

Friday afternoon our Fabulous neighbors, the Doro's, came to bale the hay for the horses. There is no way around it - baling hay sucks, putting in the mow is even worse. All of the kids pitched in and really helped a lot - I really appreciate that.. otherwise I might still be stacking hay bales in the mow dripping with sweat & hay chaff... pretty picture huh?

Saturday was one of those days where we had a dozen things on and not enough time to get to everything. Mike went to Cash's Birthday Party, I went to Mr. Beavers party - had a really nice time at their house on Castle Lake and on the boat. By the time I was leaving there everyone had already left the b-day party, so I went home & crashed... we never made it to the Rodeo Saturday night.

Sunday was mostly recovery from a long week. I watched the gang shoot trap for awhile on Sunday and caught up on a bit of house hold stuff. I washed my car - again (PS Armourall window wipes SUCK!) Nick washed the big tractor..... seriously! Washed the outside, vacuumed the inside, cleaned all the nooks and crevasses in the inside - he did a great job. Pretty sure that was a first!

Realy for Life

Sugarland Concert was really nice last night. Sleeping in this morning was great as well. I got up late, had coffee, walked all over the country side chasing Perdy. One of the neighbors called, he saw her going down the road with her tie out cable dragging behind her, but they couldn't catch her. She avoided Chris & I continuously, but after Nick passed her in the car, he got out & walked right up to her. The cable wasn't broke, so I'm not sure how it came unhooked.

After that I wandered about my flowerbeds, taking picture of some of the flowers. I'm trying to gather inspiration for this years Chalk Art festival in Green lake. I finished up my birdbath/feeder/garden decoration this morning that I'm giving as a silent auction item for relay for life tomorrow.

Some of you know we lost my grandmother several years ago to her second battle with breast cancer..... that is why I relay. If you would like to donate you can do so on-line at http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayForLife/RFLFY09MW?px=9241302&pg=personal&fr_id=15978 Click on the Make a gift link in the purple box.

If you will be around Princeton Friday night - stop in an walk a few laps with us at the high school!

Beach Reclamation Project

I didn't really think that hanging out at the pond for an afternoon with Stacey & the kids would turn out to be another work detail. But we have Grandpa Severson's blood coursing through our veins, so you certainly can't just sit back and watch the kids play.
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It all started pretty simply with Stacey pulling some of the floating uck away from the pier.. then it moved to the seaweed... then we both had rakes and so did the kids and everyone was pulling up some sort of wet slimy muck out of the water. We cleaned up what we could reach around the pier and around the old bridge. (We left the big nasty pile of Raccoon poop on the old bridge for someone else to enjoy - under close inspection, the kids decided it looked like it ate a lot of berries!)
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Then we turned to pulling some of the weeds that had grown up around the beach area. Then digging out a few next to the pier. We'd kind of left it at that, but I went back down last Saturday to work on a few more things... like turning the sand box back into a sand box instead of a weed garden. I really wish the first weekend we went to clean up that I would have taken a few pictures. I almost wanted to turn and walk away it was so bad you didn't know where to start. Not only was so much of everything overrun with last summers flooding, but an entire year of neglect and no use also meant that weeds had grown up where the kids playing and normal traffic would have kept them from growing.
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After reclaiming the sand box, sitting on the edge of the timbers looking down at the pond.. I just still didn't like how the beach looked. So shovel and rake in hand... I plodded down. I dug. I pulled. I carried. I sweat... As I dig out the overgrown mass around the pier, I realized that there was a good foot of the pier being covered with dirt & plant roots - I dug it out... now there is a good 8 inch drop from where the grass ends to the pier... ya that's not going to work. So I continue to dig and carry dirt, grass, and sand until I've got the hill dug out & sloped down to the pier from about 4 feet away. I filled in a bit around the opposite side of the pier to keep that cleared from weeds as well. Then I dug out some of the weeds growing on the far side of the beach...
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After all is said & done - this project has been vaguely reminiscent of the year that Chris was a baby. The shore was too steep for him to sit and play, so I dug out a small swimming area for him to play in the water along the edge of the pond. You can still see where that was, 21 years later...
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Two years ago I bought a water trampoline for the kids - perhaps a few adults - to play on, I was wondering what I'd bring down this year, but I think a big ol' pile of new sand just may do the trick. A few phone calls and promises later, they'll be delivering the sand sometime in the next week.....
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What we don't do for our kids... nieces and nephews..