Monday, May 26, 2014

May 26th - Light Rain Today

Nothing exciting here today. It sprinkled, on and off, most of the day.

Doug & Anthony painted at Kelsey & Andy's again today. They are returning home to Indy tomorrow and taking our guest accommodations (their travel trailer that has been parked here) with them.

Kelsey & Andy both worked today. Lydia stayed with Kathy, and entertained all of us.

I "finished" my weed eating. Spent 3 hours at it this morning and another hour this afternoon, in addition to the hour I spent on it last Saturday morning. Thankfully I only do it once every two or three weeks. I love my Stihl weedeater.

May God bless you and yours.


Sunday, May 25, 2014

May 25th - Kelsey's Birthday

Our granddaughter turned 25 today. She spent her birthday working on their new (new to them) house. Doug & Anthony arrived here Friday evening. They, and Kathy, have worked on the house the past two days with Kelsey & Andy. Lazy Gpa Bert helped today. I washed the deck and then Kelsey, Andy & I stained/sealed it. (It is a big deck, took 3 gallons of stain and we could have used another quart.)

Kelsey has a photo of the house on Facebook. If you are interested you can see the realtor photos, with the previous owner's furniture, plus information on the home, at:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/300-Anderson-Lake-Rd-Centertown-MO-65023/102938935_zpid/
Their house is across the road from the pond/lake, but they have access to it.

This is a copy of the photo Kelsey put on Facebook. The house is a lot bigger than it looks in the photo. The basement "walks out" to the left side of the photo. The side of the basement on the left of the photo is unfinished "garage". There is a single garage door and a man door to get into the basement.

Their property is outlined in the photo below. The "lake" is in the middle of the photo.

The lake. The road on the right side of the photo goes down to Kelsey and Andy's. The rock area on the left is the driveway for a house at this end of the lake. It was a beautiful day here today, as you can tell by the photo. It was a little warm and humid in the late afternoon, but not bad.

Kathy fixed prime rib, baked potato & a salad for Kelsey's birthday supper and Doug fixed some asparagus on the grill. The food was awesome.

Time to do a little reading and then off to bed. It has been a long day.

May God bless you and yours.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

May 20th - Rest Day

It has warmed back up here. It was in the mid 80's yesterday and high 80's today. This is after we had light frost Friday and Saturday night. We had the wood boiler fired back up for four days. Today we have the AC on.

One of last Thursdays tasks was assembling this swing set.

I did have a lot of help. Almost every time she is in the shed with me she gets into a toolbox that has a lot so small wrenches in it. She had to carry several of them down to the swing set to help.

Trying out the glider, with help from Grammy.

Trying out the swing.

All the brush piles have been burned. Time to make some more. We have done more cleanup by the pond. We spent most of one day clearing out and burning over there.

Yesterday I cut down a 30' tall dead tree, base about 15" in diameter. It is all stacked in the building that houses the wood boiler. I split some of the larger pieces by hand, I still don't have the carburetor gaskets I need for the splitter engine.

Today I took the day off.

May God bless you and yours.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

May 14th - Another Day

We have been receiving decent amounts of rain over the past several days. I dumped an inch out of a rain gauge yesterday and it has been misting rain today. Puts a damper on outside work but we need the rain.

I had a regular Doctor's appointment this morning. All is well. Blood test results were good. My A1c, measurement of blood glucose levels, dropped from 7.0 to 6.3 over the past 4 months. Also, I substituted generic fish oil for the Lovaza, which is VERY expensive, I had been taking; and switched to a generic fenofibrate instead of Antara, which is also very expensive. Both of those are supposed to control cholesterol and triglycerides. My triglycerides dropped to the lowest they have been in a year and my cholesterol stayed about the same. I think, and the Doctor agrees, that most of the improvement had been because I have been getting a LOT more exercise since mid-January.

We had cut all the bamboo off the back side of the dam a little over a month ago. There is much less of it now but it has already grown to the point where a lot of it is over 6' tall. Yesterday I cut it down again. I think I am going to us grass/brush killer on it as soon as it starts coming up again.


Sunday afternoon I did some brush cutting after Kathy cleared out the smaller stuff. I finally got around to getting the brush picked up and loaded on the trailer. I've got burn piles in 3 places.

This afternoon's entertainment plan is putting together a swing set we bought for Lydia. Nothing fancy but something we hope she enjoys.

The carb on the log splitter was leaking gas so yesterday I tried to get new ones. I ended up ordering them but the guy said they were "backordered" and he had no idea when they might come in.

The weather really cooled down here yesterday. Our porch thermometer said 90 Sunday afternoon. I don't think it got above 65 yesterday. It was down in the low 50's overnight. I've fired up the wood boiler for a few days. We went from running the AC one day to running the wood boiler the next. MO weather stinks.

Kathy fixed prime rib for supper last night, it was Andy's birthday. Kelsey made him a German chocolate cake. His folks came over for supper. We had an enjoyable evening.

Guess that is all the news from here. It is quiet here today, Lydia is at Andy's Mom's <grin>.

May God bless you and yours.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

May 8th - Back in Missouri

I drove back to Missouri yesterday. A long, uneventful trip. I had a good time in TN. Probably won't be able to make it back there until mid June.

This morning I went in for a routine blood draw, I have a routine checkup next week. Kathy went along with me and we went to Perkins for breakfast after the blood draw. After that we went stopped by the Tractor Supply. Surprisingly they had the part I need to put my new hydraulic pump on the wood splitter.

We spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon doing yard work. Kathy planted some tomato plants and cut down bamboo shoots while I ran the weed eater for over 3 hours. It was a good days work.

We got some rain in the late afternoon, which we need. Fortunately it held off long enough that we had finished our yard work prior to the rain. (We weren't done with yard work, we just got tired and said "Enough for the day.")

May God bless you and yours.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

May 4th - Sunday

The weather has been beautiful while I have been here in TN, and it is supposed to stay that way through Friday.

Thursday & Friday we cut, split & stacked wood for a total of 5-6 hours. Tom & Mary Lou's wood pile is slowly growing.

Also on Thursday and Friday I did some work around our place. Friday afternoon I borrowed a lawn tractor and aerator from Tom. I drove around our lawn poking holes in it so that I could then reseed the bare spots, again. Some of the seed I planted last time I was here had come up, but we still have some large bare spots; where the ground was to hard for the aerator to penetrate before. After the recent rains the ground was softer this time. I hope to get grass growing over most of the bare areas this time.

Our neighbor Dewayne did some brush clearing before he and Theresa left to go back to the Dakota's. It looks really nice. The area shown in the photo below used to be dense brush between the pines. The rock drive on the right is the driveway going back to Dewayne & Theresa's. The right side of the driveway is close to the property line between us. The road on the left is Allen Burgess Road.

Below is a before photo of the front of our property. Dewayne's drive is just off to the left of the photo. The rock at the bottom right of the photo is our driveway.



I have cleared a little more since I took the photo below. The pile of brush is much larger. I still have quite a way to go. So far the only negative with the weather is that it has been to windy to burn the brush pile I have made.

Saturday I did a load of laundry and then went into Crossville to do some errands. Other than that I've pretty much just lazed about over the weekend.

This morning I went to church at Cumberland Fellowship, where we normally attend while here. I don't care for their contemporary Christian music but I really like the Pastor's messages. They are growing by leaps and bounds. There average Sunday attendance during April, which is inflated because one of those Sundays was Easter, was over 1,000. The Pastor didn't say how many attended the Easter service but did say that Easter Sunday attendance was up by 20% this year.

After church I stopped at a Mexican restaurant for lunch, one that we had not been to before. I had a chimichanga enchilada combination plate. It was good, but not awesome. I would go there again. It was a lot of food, but I managed to eat most of it.

Plans for Monday are more wood cutting and more brush trimming.

May God bless you and yours.