Let Me Introduce You…

To some of the inhabitants of this wonderful place where I’m now living.

This is Lucky.  He is usually the first one to meet and greet you.

You can kind of see his shorter, smaller right front leg.  He came to the family with that leg.  Carol’s late husband came in carrying a little red fur ball that he found laying on the country road out close to where they lived. Someone had dumped him because of his deformity he thought. Anyway he was “Lucky” that Butch found him. 

Here is a shot of what is fast becoming the “three musketeers”.  Spud, SueSue and Chloe. Actually it’s more Spud and SueSue.  Chloe is more content to hang around the house with my Cuz and myself… us old ladies. Of course if I’m out and about she wants to be right there with me.

Here is the duo. They are probably waiting for me to throw the ball.  Spud is crazier about chasin’ a ball even more than Suess.  I never thought I’d see another dog more crazy about a ball than my baby girl.

He is just so funny about it.  He will lay the ball down and then crouch down in a ready to run mode… and glance up to make sure you know he is waiting on you to pick it up and throw it then go back to the ball stare down.

You can see him assuming the “on the ready mode” just waiting for you to pull the trigger and throw the ball.

Meet Fluffy.  He is the resident cat.  He lives outside but he is not a feral cat.  He loves to be loved on but we are having a bit of difficulty convincing SueSue and Chloe that he belongs here.   They got used to chasing the cats that wandered in on the ponderosa when we lived out south and east of Noble. We have had several introductions with me holding one or the other of the girls in my arms, petting Fluffy with one hand, then sticking it up to their nose so they could smell him, all the while telling them that Fluffy was a baby (not) and you DO NOT HURT THE BABY.  Yes I lied to my girls but they understand about BABIES and that they are not to hurt them.  It just takes a little reinforcing to remind them of  that sometimes.

Yesterday I was out on the porch and Fluffy was on the bench and I was petting him and telling the girls what a good baby boy he was and he was walking back and forth rubbing my leg.  Chloe got to sniff his butt so she is now pretty much disinterested and Fluffy and Suess sniffed noses and all was well with the world for that moment.  As long as I’m there.  And as long as Fluff doesn’t decide to jump off the railing or the bench… then the chase is on once again.  At least with SueSue… but then you all know how she loves to play chase.

I  took this off the front porch toward the setting sun.  And I’m tired so I’m closing for tonight.  The barometric changes with this front rolling in are doing a job on the fibro today.  Bro and I will go to Ft. Worth tomorrow instead of Thursday so I don’t know if I’ll get photos of the guinea hens that stay around here or of some of the cattle that graze in the pasture behind the house and on down the road but that will give me something else to work on after I get back.  I’m still working on my favorite Christmas post so I will have at least one more post before I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

I hope you have all your shopping done and I know most of you will be getting ready to start cooking the Christmas dinner unless you are as lucky as I am and people know that I’m not a good cook so I just get to taste and make sure things are good.  Hang in… I’ll be back.

Want To Get A Project Done?

Start it less than a week before Thanksgiving when a whole mess of family is coming to your home to share the blessings in their life and a lot of food. I took off last Wednesday and headed south for a visit and to get away from the stress of all that has been going on around here.

This is what the fireplace looked like when I got to Ft. Worth Wednesday evening. In less that 2 hours (we had to go stuff our faces first) Diane, my sis-in-law started doing this:

Give her a hammer and chisel and she is the demolition princess.

Hearth is done for…

I had to bust my hump to keep up with her. Of course I did have to stop and take photos along to record the process for posterity (and a break).

Round and round she goes… and the surround is down.

Cleaning up the excess mortar…

Blowing off the smoke after putting the hurt on the mortar.

Miss Molly is overseeing the job to be sure there is no corner cutting. This was the end of evening one except for the sweeping up and washing down.

Day 2: Sheetrock is cut and installed. This job fell to my brother and me.

The tiles are cut first so Ben and I can run right through mortaring them and getting them up, so we could sit in the floor and get the surround tiled without having to get up and down. He’s been down in his back and I’ve just been down.

Here it is… taped and spaced to make sure it stays in place while it sits up overnight. Thus ends Day two.

Ben had to work on Saturday so it fell to Diane and me to do the grouting and clean-up and I was so whipped out I forgot to take photos but I’ll get baby Bro to send me photos so you can see the finished project.

Molly giving it the critical eye and her blessing for a job well done.

Yeah, some work was involved but it was exactly what I needed to do to get myself leveled out. When I can lose myself in a project I don’t dwell on the things that are not right in my life and when I’m worked to ‘rode hard and put up wet’ I sleep great and everything looks better in the morning.

This is the way that I get my perspective back and start getting healed from a horribly inconsiderate fracas. Now I can start planning to start over next month.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and even with what all has gone down in my house I still have so much to be thankful for in my life. I’ve got my furbabies, I have wonderful sibs and I’m not afraid to start over again.

Everywhere…

You’ve seen a lot of here through my posts of the past and I’ve shown you quite a bit of there through the last few posts. I’m having trouble finding the rest of the photos I wanted to wind up there with so now we are going to everywhere so you can see the blank slate that I am starting with… This is a rental home so I won’t be able to be as comfortable in doing any radical creativity but I can certainly make the place feel more like a home.

Here we go…

The house is on a corner and has this fourteen foot wall in the front yard. I’m already planning on what I’m going to do out here.

There are a few neglected and older shrubs along the about 3 foot wide bed that goes along the walk heading up to the front door.

then the walk is right along the house to the nook where you find the front door. This is looking north to the stockade fence. The shrub on the right is a rose of sharon that was there when we rented. Our rose of sharon that I’ll be bringing is younger and shorter and I will plant it closer to the brick pillar.

This is a crepe myrtle and there is one planted on either side of the drive way and you know that something else is going to be planted in there so it doesn’t look so plain.

This is looking up the side yard from another gate in the stockade fencing. I love the fence, SueSue doesn’t. She can’t see what’s going on in her world except for the occasional squirrel that drops into the yard, the she is on a mission to get that critter. Being the ornery and lazy woman that I am, I’m going to start feeding the birds AND the squirrels. After I need some entertainment to lighten my day occasionally, too. And if she catches one and kills it, I know how to skin them and fry them. I’m not too worried about that happening, because while Suess is fast she is not quite bright. She runs straight at them and you know squirrels can twist and turn on a dime…

This is the back yard. It is pretty large which the girls love, except with the stockade fence they can’t keep track of what all might be going on in their corner of the world.

This is the side of the house that the front is on, just the other side of the fence.

As I do my planting thing, I will take pictures along but I must tell you that Carol’s sister has her ideas about how we should plant the place. She, besides being rapid cycling bi-polar, has got to be ocd as much as she likes and needs order in her life.

She likes things in a row, I like things the flow. When I got to the house I took my babies out and looked around. When I saw a number of plants all along the back fence all in a row and almost exact distance apart. I just got my shovel out of the truck and started working on them… even as boring as she like it. Carol and I have lived together for so long that she know that there is method to my madness and whatever I do usually comes out somewhat unusual. And usually she loves what I do even if I do things somewhat with odd combinations that I enjoy trying odd colors and/or textures. So I know that while I will keep as many plants alive as I can, this will be essentially a plain, basic garden because the riots of color and shapes of a garden that Carol and I both enjoy is like raucous noise to her sister.

So as I get things planted and growing I’ll keep you posted but for right now, besides my life being bland, I’m so exhausted from the moving that I probably won’t be a very interesting blogger. And if I don’t live through this move I just want to say thanks to all of you who have become my friends through this wonderful blogging medium.

THE Wedding, Part Two…

I know it’s awful to put yet another photo of the wedding cake but we are moving on to the reception momentarily… But first… a word from from her parents… (D. Menard)

My brother Ben and his wife Diane after the ceremony… note the big smiles… no words, however, I fibbed about that part... but the picture says a thousand words.  They do both love Tyler and that’s great.  They know he will love and honor Laura and she’s as crazy about him as he is about her.   (D. Menard)

The groom’s cake.  Tyler, besides being a huge OU fan since he graduated from OU and was president of his fraternity, is a huge Red Sox fan.  The  cake was chocolate… and despite his choice of teams (being a Texas Rangers fan myself) the cake was almost as good as the bride’s cake.  Yes, I ate a piece of both.  My job is to share photos with you and to report things as they really were, keeping it real, you know.  (D. Menard)

I think that the kids are having too much fun… which is totally as it should be…  (D. Menard)

Tyler is doing such a good job of  getting out a piece of cake after he and Laura made the first cut. They were so sweet to each other, not shoving the cake in each others faces… (D. Menard)

The toast… now we are getting something to wet the whistle and wash down the cake…  (D. Menard)

Shall we dance? Shall we dance with each other, shall we fly?  (name that movie)  They look so right for each other and so at ease… I think the rest of the world could have disappeared at this moment and all would have still been right in their world.    (D. Menard)

The first dance with Pop.  Bless his heart, he had been dealing with a bad back for several weeks, but he managed to not only walk Laura down the aisle, give her away and pull off  his dance with her.  Brother of mine, you came through for the Baby Girl… (D. Menard)

  The dancing commenced.  The girl in the front green dress is my niece, at least I more than claim her since she is married to my nephew Paul… And is the mother of the incredible Max… I’ll introduce you to him one of these days.  I think they were doing the Cotton-eyed Joe here.   Those line dances fascinate me… probably because I have two left feet.

Mom was boogeying down while getting her cake…

Now get me some iced tea to wash it all down…

Diane and her best friend for many years and my friend that let me swipe some of her photos for these wedding posts, Devonna Menard.  I so thank you for sharing with me, Bonna, so I could share with everyone that wanted to read about this shindig. You  snapped a bunch of good photos and they have sure helped me put my thoughts into the words I wanted to share…

Pop and their beloved pastor, T.C. , in deep conversation at the reception.  I don’t know what it was all about…

But this photo looked to me like the caption should be, “Don’t tell me that it’s not legal!”  Most likely they were swapping golf stories and it was so loud they had to huddle up to hear.

You want to see the most handsome fellow at the wedding? 

The man that stole my heart?

The one I can’t leave out of this joyous post? 

The grand finale?

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We all celebrated and this boy said it all without a word…  He’s Laura’s nephew, Elijah,  just walking good and he was such a good boy during the wedding.  He was dancing around at the church while all the photos were being taken after the wedding and I managed to get these photos and I had to share…

I hope I’m still around to see him grown up, in love,

And dancing at his own wedding… even though it will break my heart that it won’t be me he will be marrying…

TTttthhhhhat’s all folks.  Thank you for letting me share my joy and happiness about this union.

Laura and Tyler walk hand in hand and hand in hand with their Father and his son Jesus so they will have the Great Counselor guiding them through their long, loving, life together.

The Big "50"...

I've been thinking about what I wanted to share with you on this special blog and I think I want to talk about my family for a bit. My father was born in 1903 in Tennessee. Dad loved fun and joking and all us kids teased him and told him he had one leg shorter than the other from walking around the hilly country side in the backwoods of Tennessee.

My mom was born in 1909 in the rip-roaring state of Texas. Her mom and dad had a ranch out in the Texas panhandle around Canadian. When mom was getting up to highschool age, the family moved to Gentry, Arkansas. My father had moved to Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and was going to school at John Brown College. Mother enrolled for two years to earn her teaching certificate. And that's where they met and where a life time love was born.

They married in 1930 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, drove to Oklahoma City and lived in that city the rest of their lives. They had six kids over 17 years, 3 boys and 3 girls, and were married for 62 1/2 years when mom died at 85 years of age. My dad followed her home 2 years later at the age of 92. We always told mom, who was a stay-at-home-mom all her life, that she had a bunch of stars in her crown for putting up with dad. Dad always loved a good joke or a pun, loved to play Rook and was a bookkeeper all of his working life.

Now that you know that I wasn't found out in the field under a Prince Albert can, let's get to the good stuff. I wanted to mark my 50th post with something fun. The necklace and earrings pictured above will be given to one of my many (maybe) readers. You know, one of those bribes we all give to try to reap heaps of comments, praise, salutations and/or adulations.... The beads are pressed glass, iridized to give them a little extra pizazz. I picked the color and strung them in a more informal style because it's fall and also it's almost Halloween.

Simply comment telling me how your folks met, or you and your other half, or you and your dog...you get the idea. Tell me about the beginning of a special relationship in your life. All commentors names will be put in a hat with a little peanut butter smeared on one end of the paper and my sweet Chloe will draw the name of the winner.

Comments will be closed at 12 noon CST on Sunday, October 19, 2008, and the winner will be posted Sunday afternoon, or maybe later if I have to chase Chloe down before she eats the name... Did that sound professional?