Blogs

I love reading blogs! Every morning while waiting for my coffee I check my daughters blogs for news on the babes. Failing to find news, I move over to Facebook to see what is going on in my little world. I realize this is a huge responsibility for the Mom's to feed my insatiable desire for more and more news. Any news is good -- has Madi moved on from Cheerios to Coco Puffs -- that is a joke. I have thought of threatening the daughters that failing to feed my need for baby love from afar I may darken their doorsteps on a more regular basis, but I am not sure that will get the desired result. How did this addiction happen? How did I go from looking forward to phone calls to this desire for regular tiny drips of news? I blame it on my IPhone.

For some reason the Moms of my oldest grandsons have escaped this responsibility. Partially it is because the oldest is on Facebook and from time to time I get to read his thoughts. I don't alway understand this thoughts, but they are alway interesting. I love his new picture! No -- now that I have said that don't take it down! The next two guys provide less input. Perhaps because my addiction started after they reached puberty and beyond they have escaped my desire for daily updates. But a word to the Moms - you should consider starting a blog. I miss my news.

Is there a quid pro quo required? That is a weighty question. Just how much news do I have to share that would interest my off-spring and their partners? My neighbor - albeit 10 years younger and a hunting kind of guy - is aggressively working his bucket list. He was off hunting in Russia last month and is in training for a major hike/hunting trip to Alberta after the first of the year. Now that is news. My news has a much lower wow factor. The bushes are all trimmed, the house is decorated for Halloween. The pumpkin head man has been stuffed and is sitting on the porch. Note to Peter - he is still wearing your cast off pants, flannel shirt and holding his bloody hand. The candy is purchased and hidden from view to protect it from the big people. No trips to the pumpkin patch but I did bring home some mums to put in the cauldrons on the porch. Now it is time to start thinking about Thanksgiving.

Question for discussion -- is it worth the trouble to make the turkey stock for the dressing and gravy or should I take the easy way out and use boxed chicken stock?

Thank you

In September, Mike moved down from Virginia while job hunting. It was a huge change to leave the area he has lived in for the past 25+ years. And to tell the truth, we had some trepidations having a son move in without a clear plan for moving out. But I have to say thank you to Mike for everything he has done to make the transition easy and to help us while waiting for one of the jobs to come through.

In the last few weeks, he has trimmed all the shrubs - a major task at our house. Cleaned the garage, built shelves and put stuff where it belonged. He moved the lawn stuff out of the garage and under the deck so Bruce could get in the garage and eliminate the car shuffling in the driveway. This week he tackled the project of fixing the gate under the sun porch. It is a really wide wooden swinging gate that sagged, cut into the drain pipe (leaving a hole) and could not clear the grass without gouging it. It was one of those projects that nagged at me. So he took it off, cut it down and built a new frame to protect the drain pipe and lock the gate. Then he moved the 12+ 2foot square concrete slate pavers that we saved when we had a new sidewalk installed in the front and put down a floor. I now have relatively dry storage under the sun porch. And to finish off the week he pressure washed the deck eliminating 4 years of grunge.

Now I know this won't keep up, that he is burning off energy and some frustration waiting for one of the jobs to come through, and when he goes back to work these all day labor intensive projects will seem a little less interesting. But WOW - I plan to aggressively priortize my wish list of projects too small to hire someone and too hard for me to do and leave it laying around in the kitchen, maybe stuck under a magnet on the refrigerator door.