Troy sneezed and blew his nose all through the night last night. At 3:00 am when he was blowing his nose I woke up and asked him some random question about the peas growing in the garden. He instantly answered the question like he'd been laying there thinking about that and a million other things all night long and he was glad that I asked. Then I pretended like I was asleep again, because I don't want to start any conversations at 3:00 am. I'd stayed up waiting for Kalyn, who was in Joplin with a friend, until midnight. So I was pretty tired myself. I bet he didn't sleep at all.

Alina did manage to squeeze in a couple ballgames and practices this week between rain showers! She's just beginning kid pitch, and getting the girls to hit off the pitcher at this stage is a big deal. She did last night, so she feels pretty good.

It's a hit! Practice this morning.

I met with my fellow teachers, Glenna and Jennifer yesterday in Girard and got to meet my newest teaching partner, Renee. She is young, energetic and very friendly. When I met her she informed me that my husband made the tractor seat bar stool for their party barn and she shared a picture of it with me. I don't remember it, but anyone with a party barn is okay with me!

We were all excited to get together. We had lunch at Dalton's Back 9 on the golf course in Girard and had a great time. I even ordered bacon, maple ice cream.

photo of bacon maple ice cream courtesy of Renee's cell phone

I walked Camo after Alina's game because I am feeling like he needs much more activity than he gets. He doesn't pull me around so much anymore when his nose is interested in something in the bushes, but he does occasionally just get really excited and start jumping around in circles while we're walking. He grabs the leash with his mouth and tugs on it and jumps up like he's trying to get me to play some game that I'm not familiar with. It's embarrassing. But I was proud of him because when we got home he parked himself underneath the glider where I was sitting on the patio and after awhile he just got up and walked into his pen and went into his dog house. I have never seen him make that choice on his own!

Yes, you're a good dog!

Yesterday afternoon I went to Joplin with Carrie, Tina and Shirley. We ate lunch and then went to Oasis Day Spa and Salon where a girl showed me how to make it look like I have more eyebrows.

Kind of a creepy picture. 

I asked Troy later if he thought they looked good and his only opinion was "they looked fine before".
I'm someone who doesn't wear any makeup at all, so caring about whether my eyebrows are thin but unruly doesn't really fit with my personality. But I do kind of care.

While I was at the salon and waiting on our girls who were getting massages (Shirley and I just did our eyebrows), I was watching the girls who work at the salon. I always watch employees at any work place, because even after I retire from teaching I don't think I am finished working. Like my dad, in his retirement he works at a convenience store. I don't know where I will work, that's why I watch. Anyway, I think the girls are all required to wear something black, because they did all look alike in that way. And, there seemed to be a lot of getting together and whispering and I wondered if it was the clientele or fellow employees causing that. I'm a little nosy, probably.

I think working somewhere that involves a lot of pampering for people might be fun, it seems like your clients would mostly be relaxed and happy. But then, I also think I would like to be a full time cattle rancher so try to reconcile those two differences in my personality. A cattle rancher who wears no makeup but has perfect eyebrows.

I am going into the school this morning to meet with our brand new teaching partner (who I have never met!) and the old one's too to discuss planning for the coming school year. Because I actually do still have a full time job!

Look what Troy planted in our front yard. It's a Catalpa tree. Nobody plants those,  but Troy has a fondness for them. And also an allergy to them, we think, that makes him miserable this time of year. And a mental blockage or attention problem or something that prevents him from connecting those dots or caring about it. Whatever, I'm okay with those trees and we needed something there. It's all good.

This is the one across the street, with the pretty blooms right now (that make Troy miserable).

Kalyn, who waitresses at Chicken Annies, brought home a bunch of fried chicken the other night! We ate some, but there was a lot left over. My mother-in-law told me one time that she freezes leftover fried chicken to use later so I pulled off the meat and made chicken pot pie filling! Enough for two pot pies, one that I just took out of the oven.

And tested a little sliver to make sure it was good. It was!

The excitement yesterday here was Camo, our dog, who ran off the other day when Troy was mowing the yard. He does well usually when we let him out to run around in the yard, but he waits until no one is watching and sneaks off to talk to our neighbors. When this has happened in the past, he's come back within an hour or so. But not day before yesterday. So Troy drove by the little "dog pound" area where they keep delinquent animals and found him there, whining to get out. So we paid our $20 to get him out of jail and another $10 for a tag that makes him an official city of Frontenac pet and brought him home. He needs to run, it is sad that he has to stay in his pen like he does.

Bad dog!

It is raining again! Ugh!! I hope Alina's game isn't canceled again tonight! Would like to see some ballgames this summer. We only have the month of June, and she already will miss two to take a trip next week.

C'est la vie, that's just the way life is. :-)

It is a beautiful day here in Southeast Kansas! Stuff is gonna grow!! We have had a lot of rain, and now the sun is shining.

Twenty some years of summers at home now, and I still have not mastered time management. All through the school year I have plans that get pushed back, thinking summer is the time to get it done. My theory is this, the busier your schedule, the more you can accomplish. I only have a 45 minute planning period during the school year and I can run an errand and make 2 important phone calls during that time. And get home at 6:00, make dinner, go to a ballgame or grocery shopping. Any one of those activities seems to require a lot of thinking in the summertime, then I make lunch, and then maybe I'll get around to performing ONE of those activities around 3:00 pm. With a glass of wine.  Because I'm done for the day. I better never retire.

I made a chocolate swirl cake last night. Kalyn made this a couple weeks ago for a school celebration we were having and it was delicious. She has been enjoying making and decorating cakes lately.

Here is mine. Mine are not for looking at, purely for eating. This is what I've learned about boxed cake mixes, if you replace the water with sour milk or sour cream, and be VERY liberal with the oil, and maybe also throw in a package of vanilla pudding, it is TO DIE FOR!

So if you are trying to lose weight (like I should be) and you are counting calories, you have to figure that there are people out there like me who GREATLY modify recipes and all bets are off on getting an accurate count on calories in home cooking. The icing has a whole stick of butter in it also.

I can not get motivated to lose weight anymore. It's not just harder as you get older because of the slow metabolism, it's also harder because what do you expect a 45 year old woman to look like?
In my 30's it was easier to say to myself "I should look better than this!" Now I look in the mirror and say "I look pretty good for someone as old as I am!" My health will have to begin declining before I decide to eat healthier, I think. It's sad.

One more thing today. Alina is at ball practice this morning, but we are going to measure some of the art work Kalyn brought home at the end of the year from art class so we can get some cheap frames for them and hang them in Alina's room. Kalyn doesn't proclaim to be an artist, she's not even taking art her senior year, but we really like her stuff! All the bright colors!

Perfect to hang in Alina's room! It must be nice to have a kid sister admirer.

Well, I just wasted 30 minutes blogging and it's almost lunch time. This is the only thing I've accomplished today. Oh yeah, I'm still trying to get up at normal time to try to keep things pretty normal. That's admirable, right? Got a call to pick up Alina, be seeing ya!

We got shafted.

I sat outside on my patio steps this morning encouraged by the gray skies. Best chance for rain our local meteorologist had seen for a while.

Never happened.

You can't take these things personally. It's weather, for goodness sake.

But now I am pouting, which may not be the weather . It may be my uncertainty about whether we are taking a jeep trip next week or not. Or maybe the impending school year beginning in a couple weeks.

Ugh.

Guess I'll go water my plants.

Vacation!

 Can you guess where this picture was taken? Can you guess when?

 I don't see any real clues to give away the year, or decade. Not sure what those pants say.

But this is definitely the Grand Canyon. Troy and I were very lucky once, a number of years ago, to take a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. On paddle rafts and rafts with oars. Not motorized rafts. We did the upper half, in a week's time. It was thrilling.

Now, do the glasses help give the decade away? 1989! Troy and I had been dating a couple of years and it was our first real vacation together. It was perfect for Troy because it involved the outdoors, hiking, camping, archeology and geology. We have done several of these type of vacations over the years, but never quite to the scale of the Grand Canyon trip. It was our Grand Vacation.

I dug this picture out because Kalyn bought a pair of glasses similar to these the other day and I wanted her to see me wearing them 23 years ago. It is now my profile picture on facebook. And tonight while watching tv I heard someone mention Winslow, Arizona, which made me think of an older (than us at the time) British gentleman who was on this trip with us who was from there. I dug out our photo album and journal from the trip to see if I could find his name. I found that I didn't talk much about the people we were there with in the journal, which surprised me because I have thought about them several times over the years. And conversations with them are what I remember most about the trip. We always meet interesting people on vacation, doctors, teachers, other people interested in geology, people who have traveled all over the world.

Taking out the photo album prompted a conversation with Troy about the trip, and all the similar type trips we have taken since. How Troy always volunteers to do the risky stuff, he's very adventurous.

And there is always plenty of adventure on a rafting trip.

And then Kalyn jumped in on the trip down vacation memory lane and dug out the Slovenian  scrapbook. And then we talked about that trip for a good part of the evening.

 Oh, how I long for another one of these trips.

It was 103 degrees here in Kansas today. One of many, many 100 degree plus days this summer. A vacation would be so nice.

And I have one planned for next week, for me and Troy, if the small business owner gods will smile down on us and let us get paid for something in time for us to go. School starts exactly 3 weeks from today.

Fingers crossed!!!