Colorado Visit

We were in Ft. Collins from April 22 to May 2 while Alexa and Aaron were in Scotland. Here they are arriving home. Brynnan loved riding the pony. Donovan was teaching her to dance.

Settled In???

It's been almost a year since I've posted. Nana and I have been very busy settling in to Northwest Arkansas. The folks up here decided to have the coldest night on record, most snowfall (24 inches) on record, and the most snowfall in the winter. But we loved it and got to see many things we would not have seen. Spring is about to blossom and we're looking forward to it.

Moved Our First Load

Travel by truck is tiring -- packing boxes, loading the truck, driving 500 miles, and unloading. We stored our first load in Jimmy and Ashley's garage. Nana and I walked through the house today looking around once again. We were shocked with all the plumbing work that was being done. It turned out that someone had turned the water back on to the house and without any heat running, the pipes froze and busted. So a plumber was called in to find the leaks and fix them! We head back home on Thursday.

New House in Arkansas !

Well, it's been a month since my last post and life has turned upside down. I took Nana to Arkansas to stay with Jimmy and Ashley (well, really to stay with Caleb and Madison), while I drove onto Kansas for 4 days to deliver a workshop. When I returned to Arkansas to pick up Nana and return home, she had found a house she wanted to buy. I went to look at it and agreed we should buy it to be near grandkids. So we made an offer on the house and now will buy in on April 19. We had not expected to sell the house in Texas yet, so we have a lot of do to pack this place up and sell it.

I Might Be Back

It's been over a year and 3 months since my last post. In October 2008 my laptop computer (which I used for blogging) crashed. Then during 2009, we might say I was busy. It's interesting that my business income in 2009 was 1/3 what it was in 2008, but I seemed constantly busy. Blame it on a passion for gardening and canning with Nana during the first half of the year. Blame it on getting involved in church activities (preaching, teaching, newsletter, recruiting, etc. after the ministers left in June) during the second half of the year.

Anyway, I've wanted to get back to blogging because it documented incredible things that I had seen - snakes, coyotes, fish, etc. Only I wanted to make it more about what I've done than what I've experienced. Let's see if I can do that.

Currently, Nana and I are still trying to make the New Year's resolution to lose weight actually work. We're watching what we eat, doing yoga (thanks for the tape Jason), and lifting light weights every other night. I've dropped 4 pounds since the first week of January and want to continue losing 2 lbs. a month. Let's see what happens on that.

Strange But True

We've had coyotes in our yard since one got our white duck. I had a 22 rifle and shot 3 times at that one. On another night the dogs were barking at midnight. I took the rifle out and saw a huge coyote eating pears that had fallen from the pear tree. I took one shot and he ran so fast I could not even get another shot off.

One afternoon there was a huge wolf spider in the wellhouse. I took the handle of a shovel and smashed her. Hundreds of little spiders took off running in every direction. Amazing. We have a crop of wolf spiders for next year.

Nana and I went out into the field at about 8:00 pm to see the space shuttle fly over tonight. It was bright and fast. Makes you think about walking in space at hundreds of miles per hour.

Nana got a cheap weekend fare to go see Madison and Caleb last weekend. Boy howdy, did she have fun. Rumor is that they did too.

I finally finished with the tractor's rototiller and removed it. I had tilled up the orchard and put out 50 lbs. of oats seed and 50 lbs. of rye grass seed. Let's see if it'll rain, if the seed will sprout, and if the deer come to eat it.

I changed out my worm bins and put new paper and leaves in both. I put in a couple thousand starter worms in both piles. The last month I've harvested about 75 gallons of worm castings which have gone in the garden. I've also got three old "cooler" nurseries going to breed new worms for next spring.

Up the Poudre River

We had fun in August on our trip up the Poudre River valley in Colorado. I wanted to post a couple happy pictures with Donovan. As we were driving up he was saying, "I'm bored. I want to go home." Then we went to a fish hatchery and stopping at places as we came back down and he didn't want to go back home as he yelled, "I'm not going home. I'm staying here."