It's Here!!

The hutch is finally here. It came last night in the middle of us getting packed for Richmond. Didn't take long to get it stocked up though!

Norman Bollinger on April 18th 2008 built and signed this for us!

And the "Lotus Blossom" walls look superb! (if i don't say so myself)

We're off to the races this weekend. Jim Cantore and friends are painting a pretty bleak picture for this weekend weather. We'll see. It seems like it rains for the spring race enough that they ought to just call it a Sunday race. We're always coming home waterlogged. I just wish there was some way we could get to "The Rock" this weekend too. Thank you Andy Hillenberg for bringing back such a wonderful track.

Oh, still haven't gotten those plants in. We've had almost 5" of rain in the last 10 days and with the nasty clay ground we have here, you can forget putting a shovel in the ground.

Greenhouse

We went to the Amish greenhouses yesterday. Got pretty posies for the garden and the hanging pots and the container pots that we put on the upper patio. Didn't get any of them planted. Big storm came though last night. Tremendous lightning and thunder boomer. You know it's bad when you can hear the lightning and you just have time to cringe waiting for the boom to come.
Next weekend is the our first race of the season at Richmond. We'll do our normal routine of driving to our favorite Flying J on friday night before meeting up with others on saturday morning and heading off to the track. Funny, you need to be at the track by 7:30am to be there in time for a good parking place for a 7:30 pm race. Go Jr! After the race, Butch cooks up something on the grill, and we eat that and drink a beer and go to bed. There is no point in trying to get out to go home then. So, we get up sunday morning and head out when there is no traffic.
On a side note.....Go O-ri-o's!!!

Spring Sprang Sprung!

Okay, be patient. This is for Lydia, who could find her way to my house, but there's no way in hell she'd be behind the wheel. Here are some pictures from around the yard as spring finally decided to show up.

Weeping cherry tree and rocks

Cherry blossoms to the back of the house

Two peonie bushes that originally came

from my grandparents farm.

They've been growing in Lydias backyard since the late 60's.

This is the first year they've spent in PA

Scratched around in the fern bed and look what I found!

Little fern nubbins!

yeah, yeah, I know, I know, we need mulch!

Just a side note, dem O's are playing the evil empire this weekend.

Go O's beat them Yankmes!

Minnetonka Mocs

I love my mocs. If it is cold and I'm home, I have on my mocs. My mocs ran away from home sometime last summer, I guess. I had them last winter. Then fall rolled around this year and my toes went EEEK put some damn shoes on woman! Couldn't find them. Searched high. Searched low. Searched at least two other peoples homes for them. (don't ask why I would wear my slippers at someone else's house-I did) I finally gave up when I was getting ready to go into the hospital and bought a pair at Target. These cheap imitations of my favorite slippers shed black fuzzies every where. They just won't mold to my feet like my mocs. But this weekend......TA DAAAH! I found my mocs, and now I have happy feet. I'll never tell where I found them. It is just too stupid, and it is a place I looked at least 80-11 times and even Butch looked after he got tired of my whining. But I'm happy now, they've come home...(I think they were wintering in Florida) in time for spring and me back to bare feet. Figures.

You can tell by the worn down toes how much they've been worn!

Pinks

Here it is Tuesday night and we just finished putting on the third coat of paint. The battle was fought, and while it held on valliantly, the pink is gone.

Here we have the stove pulled out. I did leave a square about 2x2 of pink behind the stove, just as a reminder never to think you can paint over something that strong without Kilz-especially with a light color.

Ollie Ollie in FREE! You can come to the house and not be handed a paint brush, so you're safe!

But if you missed it, we do have this house renovation we're getting ready to do......

Painting kitchens

We built our house....well, it will be 5 years ago on tax day they started to dig the hole. The next day it started to rain, and rain, and it rained until mid June. I had started telling people that we started out to build a house, but like the idea of an inground pool better. Butch and I painted all the interiors of the house on Thanksgiving weekend and the weekend after that. Lowe's thought they hit the jackpot when we went in and bought like 10 gallons of paint. Of course, a couple of the colors were not what we had exactly thought they would be. That is how we have a family bathroom that is the color of cotton candy. Only problem, it was supposed to be a coral color. We only forgot to get paint for one room. It wasn't like we'd never be back to Lowe's or anything. Hell, we knew the people in the different depts by name. So anyway, the color Butch picked out for the kitchen was supposed to be "Dusty Rose" and it was...but it was a lot of color in a fairly big room.

Making another apperance is the lovely V and the wine man R. This was taken just before Christmas as you can see the tree peeping around the corner of the breezeway.

But this was the "dusty rose" color that we painted the kitchen. For some reason everyone assumed that I had picked out this color. They couldn't believe I would pick pink for my kitchen. Didn't take long for me to set them straight on who picked the color.

Do you see the corner just over Butchs' head? Well that small white cabinet was just not cutting it. We wanted to get a hutch for that corner but the problem we had was that between the French doors and the wall it is only 15". Most hutches are 18". Figures. So we have ordered one that the Amish are making for us. It is supposed to be finished around tax day. (again with april 15th) So "we" decided that it would be a great time to go ahead and paint the kitchen.

After much nashing of teeth we decided to go with a buttercream yellow. It is called Lotus Blossom. Well, everyone thought it was too light of a color and got me doubting the choice. So when we get to Lowe's, Butch starts with looking at colors again and talks me into getting something that is more yellow. So we give the guy the new color and he makes it up for us and off we go. Until this weekend when we started to paint. (see, sooner or later I will get to the point) I look into the paint can and it is not very yellow. I looked at the can and the dumas in Lowe's has actually given us Lotus Blossom instead of the more yellow color. We never even gave him that paint chip. He only had the new one we had picked out. Guess it was just supposed to be. So it is Sunday night, my neck is sore from the ceiling painting, and Butch is snoring from the living room while Hank Hill rambles on.

Oh, and we're not done. We didn't think that we needed to put kiltz on the walls to get rid of the pink. But the pink is not done with us yet. oh, no. It's not leaving without a fight. We ran out of paint. Where we got a second coat on the wall........it's not enough, the pink is fighting back.

Okay, this is turning into a book that I will have to finish next time. I need some Rum and Motrin. Don't look at me like that-you know I ramble.....

How jealous can I be!

This is Bobby D on his last day of work.....

The little man does the Hula, and says "Retired and no longer takes any crap" how perfect is that? I'll miss him much.

He worked at the same place for 42 years. Unfortunately, knowledge and experience is not valued anymore. You shouldn't screw with someone with options, cause they can walk on out the door. He's too young to retire, but he's not to young to take a pension and go be happy. "The Dense" just don't realize what's going on, cause they don't have to deal with it until something blows up and then they act like they don't understand why things aren't working. Those of us who have to figure out this crap, need to find another line of work. Dooced.

Still sick and quite busy

So, you know how your other half gets sick, and as much as you try not to get it, you end up even more sick than they were? Well, for the first time, I was sick first. Usually, Butch gets a cold and comes home and is better in like a day.....then I get it. I'm sick for weeks after that. But, anytime you see the doctor, they won't prescribe anything before you end up with bronchitis. Then they're all like-"Why didn't you come in?" ......well, why waste my money, you're not going to do anything except tell me to take tylenol and drink fluids. Sorry, got on a rant there, but you know what I mean.
This time however, the cold, had been passed around my office several times. I'd been lucky and not really had it, until now. I have now used enough decongestant to knock an elephant to it's knees, and blown a river ...........um sorry, you really don't want to know that. The point is, and there is one, this time, I got Butch sick. We're like crack whores with the vaporizor. They do look at you funny when you go through the check out line with a case of tissue. (while you're ripping one of the boxes open) I guess I could say we're getting better, but that's a relative term. I'll let you know how that's going in a week or two.

Last Saturday evening, being well stocked with tissue in every possible pocket, we went to see a show at a local university. We saw Jeff Dunham and his little people. (oh, stop, not a "little person", he's a ventiloquist) The 7pm show had been sold out and they added a second show that we were lucky enough to get tickets. Started at 9:45pm. He does an old man named Walter, and I'm telling you, Walter is hysterical. One of Walters rants is about his wife and getting married. He says that he didn't know that when they said "til death you do part" that he was setting goals. That was one of the many things we were giggling about when we got married......we were "setting goals"!