Alina and I were eating lunch today at a local Chinese buffet (mmm, coconut shrimp) and Alina noticed the t-shirt one of the workers at the restaurant was wearing. It said "I (image of tornado) Kansas".
She said "What does that mean? I tornado Kansas? It doesn't make any sense."
I said "It's like I "heart" Kansas but with a tornado there instead of a heart because they are both a little funnel shaped and Kansas has a lot of tornadoes. And we love it anyway."
She skeptically responded, "Maybe it means we love the tornado victims in Kansas because we do not love the tornadoes!"
I suspect, like her mother, it will be many years before she will appreciate our stormy weather here.

Later, I was out at Troy's mom's fishing (witness the bass I caught, my one and only catch today) and I felt a sudden cool breeze. I looked up at the sky and saw this:

Now I ask you, is there any wonder why people in my part of the world are so obsessed with the sky? It is so huge and busy!
And then the breeze got a little stronger, and these more gray clouds moved in:

When I got home, Kalyn agreed to go driving around with me looking for wild flowers. And this is what the sky looked like:

Awesome!!
I didn't take this picture, someone posted it on facebook. A bunch of people took pictures of it and posted them. But I pulled over to look at it and Kalyn did not understand what was so interesting about it.
Really??

These are the flowers we cut as we drove around:

I know the wild roses (Troy calls them feral, which means formerly domesticated, but I looked it up and wild works for that definition too. Yes.....our conversations about nature get THAT technical) and also the faux Queen Ann's Lace, but I'm trying to find out what those white bell shaped flowers are. They cover pastures here right now. And also those dark pink orchidy looking things, I don't know what those are. They are a flowering vine.

I love having a wild flower bouquet! The tiger lilies, which Kalyn tells me are not actually tiger lilies, according to a knowledgeable friend of hers, are not quite ready yet. I have seen a couple, but I won't take any until they are in full bloom.  And I just missed the Spiderwort, otherwise known as cow slobbers. Is that enough flower geekiness for you? I could go on......
No? Okay.

Perhaps I should just go to bed now?........Alrighty.

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.