Happy Birthday Stephanie!

Today is our niece Stephanie's 20th birthday. It is hard to believe that you are already 20!

(you're not a teenager any more)

Steph is the lead singer in a band. She has been part of the band for the last five years. Singing is one of her passions. She has a great voice and she knows how to use it.

This is a picture of Steph with her band Midas. They are part of the Infinity Performing Arts Program. To find out more about this program click HERE. To find out about her band click HERE.

This picture was taken in downtown Jamestown during Lucy's birthday celebration.

Happy 20th Birthday Stephanie!!

We are so proud of you.

Shopping Spree!

It's not Laurie,

It was ME this time!!!

I went to LOWE'S today to get a few things. I had quite a big list, so I invited my Dad and his truck to join me.

I bought 12 cupboards, counter tops, a dishwasher (yes Mom I finally bought her a dishwasher), linoleum, a ceiling light and some lights for under the cabinets.

Both of our trucks were full (we even had stuff in both of our passenger seats).

Now it is all in our living room and dinning room.

I have to finish painting the walls and scraping the floor tomorrow. We will be spending our weekend installing the upper cabinets. Hopefully I can get the flooring down on Monday and start on the base cabinets and the dishwasher.

Wish us luck.

Day Off!

We took a day off yesterday. We didn't do any work around the house. We (all 6 of us) went to moms for a picnic.

Chris cooked burgers on the grill.

We had too much food as usual. Kim and Tabatha brought two dips (chicken wing dip and spinach dip) Chris and I brought burgers, hot dogs, rolls and "homemade" black olives. Mom made potato salad, a fruit bowl and "homemade" pickles.

Baby J. is having a hot dog and bits and pieces of everything else.

After dinner we walked around moms gardens and took a few photos. (actually we took about 125 pictures for the day)

Look what we found in one of the gardens. This definitely is a flower I would pick.

These Pansies are ruffled on the edges.

After walking around the gardens we had dessert. We had 5 different ice creams to choose from. We had a nice relaxing time. We both felt rested and went back to work today. Me back to Wally World and Chris back to the darn kitchen floor.

Memorial Day!

A hero is someone who has given his or

her life to something bigger than oneself.

~Joseph Campbell

This is a time for remembering all those who have given of themselves for our country...A time to reflect on the blessing of our liberty and the sacrifices demanded to keep it...A time to give special thanks to veterans.

Not A Normal Sunday!

I haven't been working in the kitchen on the weekends, but since tomorrow is a holiday, I thought I would do some work today. I finished with the 2nd coat of primer on the ceiling and walls on Friday.

Today, Laurie and I decided to take out the old flooring. (bad idea) There was 2 layers of linoleum and what looked like a layer of tar paper under that. We had to scrape the tar paper to get it to come off.


I cut the linoleum into pieces and pulled it up. (with a crowbar since it was stuck to the tar paper)

Here is Laurie with a wood chisel scraping up some of the tar paper.

Here she is using a razor blade scraper. It was a lot of hard work to scrape all of it off. It has been there since 1936, so it was really stuck to the wood.

Underneath the 3 layers is hardwood flooring. We don't know why someone would have covered them with tar paper. (Maybe they used it as a vapor barrier back then) We had thought about refinishing the hardwood, but the tar has gotten into the wood grain and we aren't sure if we would be able to get the finish to look good. It looks like new linoleum will be going down.

We are off to watch the race now. (Our normal Sunday activity)

Go Jimmie #48 & Kasey #9

Colorful!

Click on Photo Hunters button to visit other participants.

Hometown TV Legend Remembered.

It's the hometown of a TV legend and this weekend fans are flocking to Jamestown for a big celebration.

Three blocks of third street in downtown Jamestown are shut down to set up booths and rides. There are many food and craft vendors lined up on third street. We have a lot of activities that go on downtown during the summer so we have to try to remember dates or we may not be able to get through downtown.

Windstream is our phone company and had a huge display set up.

Check out all the Colorful rides for the kids. Do you think they make them so bright to get children's attention?

We went to the Lucy ~ Desi days in the early evening before everyone got out of work, so there wasn't much going on.

There are a lot of activities going on this weekend for Lucy ~ Desi Days. Check out the website by clicking HERE.

Not What We Thought!

It turns out that the things we found while we were weeding aren't what we thought they were. We thought that they were some kind of a beetle or June Bug.

We found a few of these in the soil while we were weeding last weekend. Click HERE to check out the "weeding" post.

They are a Noctuidae Pupae, and will turn into a moth of some kind. The Noctuidae or Owlets are a family of moths that includes more than 35,000 known species, possibly 100,000 species altogether. Most have drab fore wings, although some have brightly colored hind wings. There are usually few differences between the sexes. The overwhelming majority of noctuids fly at night and are almost invariably attracted to light. Many are also attracted to sugar and nectar-rich flowers.

Click HERE to find out more about them.

Cherry Trees!

Here are some pictures we took on a short trip we took to Allen Park. We try to photograph these trees every spring.

Click on pictures to enlarge.

A couple of the trees lean to one side like this one. They must have leaned towards the sun when they were smaller and never straightened back out.

A picture looking up from underneath one of the trees.

The blooms don't last very long. They seem to be very delicate once they open.

Isn't it amazing how bright pink the buds are, but once the flowers open, you really don't see much of the pink?

Sweet is the air with the budding haws,

and the valley stretching for miles below

Is white with blossoming cherry-trees,

as if just covered with lighted snow.

2 Chicks!

We picked up our niece from daycare today so her Mommy and Daddy could go golfing together. Since Baby J.'s mommy said we haven't posted Baby J. in a long time, we thought we had better put her picture on. It sure is harder to take her picture now that she is crawling and moving all the time. We had her for a little over an hour.

We tried something new for dinner tonight.

Laurie found this at Wal*mart. It was marked down to $1.50.

Use a 12 oz. can of your favorite beer or soda, pour out half the contents. (Chris drank 1/2 the can of beer) Place the 1/2 empty can inside the "Chick-CAN" rack. Place the chicken over the can onto the rack. Stuff a small potato or onion in the neck cavity to seal in vapors. Place on a grill. Cook chicken on low-medium heat for 1-2 hours or until skin is golden brown and crisp. You may have to adjust cooking time if your grill runs out of gas in the middle of cooking and you have to take the tank to be refilled. :-(

This is the uncooked chicken. Chris put a spice rub on it a couple hours before he put it on the grill. (garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, adobo, and Canadian Steak Seasoning)

Here is the chicken about 2 hours later.

It was so juicy and flavorful. The skin was spicy and crunchy. (kinda like a Thanksgiving turkeys skin) We will definitely be doing this again.

Thank you to everyone for all the wonderful anniversary comments.

A New Favorite!!

Chris did the grocery shopping last week and decided to bring home a new flavor of ice cream.

The flavor, Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream™. It is a decadent melting pot of vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and a caramel swirl. It’s the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth.

It is the yummiest vanilla ice cream ever. The caramel is sooooo.... creamy and the fudge covered waffle cone pieces are crunchy and delicious. Have we talked you into buying yourself a treat yet? You can visit their web page by clicking HERE. The web page will tell you where the closest store is to you that has it.

Our 13th Anniversary!

We don’t know how it happened.

We don’t know exactly when.

But somewhere between

our wedding day and today,

“you” and “I” became “we.”

We went to dinner last night at our favorite restaurant. We have gone to LaScala for our anniversary dinner 11 out the 13 years we have been married. The only problem is our anniversary seems to fall on prom weekend. Laurie usually has problems at dinner, especially when there are 25 prom girls there all wearing perfume and all their dates wearing dads cologne. (she has chemical allergy's and she sneezes non stop from all the perfume.) This year we decided to something different. We went on Sunday night instead. What a difference.

We only go to LaScala for our anniversary. We really don't know why we don't go more often except that our dinner is really special then. Take a look at the special board. It isn't because it costs too much. They always have great specials. We had crab stuffed mushrooms, salad, fries and Prime Rib (the prime rib melts in your mouth!!) and the bill wasn't even $30.00!

We didn't take many photos. It is lit mostly by candle light in the restaurant, so we didn't want draw attention to ourselves. We had a nice dinner.

Weeding!

My rose garden has NEVER looked as bad as it does (did) this year. I have never had so many trees sprout up like they did this year.

There are so many maple trees growing that you can't even see or find my roses.

I finally got a nice day to weed. I spent at least 4 hours weeding. After Chris got the deck furniture out and washed the car, he came out and helped me. Thank goodness or I would still be weeding today!!

I have very sore fingers and hips today!!

Doesn't it look better? We pulled out all of the rocks and weeded in between them.

Look at how full the wheelbarrow is.

I found this when I was weeding. Any ideas of what it may be? It only moves the very end when you touch it.

This green bee came to visit us while we were working also.

We hope you had a good weekend.