Happy Saturday everyone!  I hope you are having a great day.  Today has been very nice here.  Temperature has been about 68 all day. Amazing!

And getting some MUCH needed rain.
So for days like today I love to light some candles. 

Today the girls and I cleaned house and tried to decide what colors we wanted to use for paint in the sitting room.  I think we have decided but will wait until it is done to show pictures.

I guess that’s all for now.  Enjoy your day and God bless.

Hello everyone.   So some of you know the story of what happened with our gas logs and some of you do not.  For those of you who do not know, here is the rest of the story.

When George was hospitalized before his passing, something went wrong with our gas logs.  Wood is our major source of heat.  The gas logs were our backup heat source. Anyway the flame wasn’t exactly right or something and it put this BLACK film all over everything.   And I mean it was on literally everything.  Dishes, light switches and reciprocals, floors, walls, ceilings.   You get the picture.  Everything! Even upstairs!

So many friends offered to come help us with the clean up however at that time we were not up to a major project.  So the girls and I have worked on it a little at a time.  Yesterday my friends, Steve and Bev, came up and he started painting the ceilings.  He started in the living room as it was the worst. That is where the gas logs were.  You will notice I said WERE!  Right after this happened, Dave came over and took out the gas logs and replaced them with a wall mount gas heater. 

Steve was able to do the Living room and the sitting room ceiling.  I love them.  They look so much better.  Now on to picking out wall colors.

Hello everyone.   Another busy day for me and the girls.  Another building done.  YAY! This is the after picture.

This is what it looked like before.

We took 2 truckloads of trash to the dumpster and had about 1/2 truckload to donate.   

We all love this old truck!

One of the reasons we did all that work on Saturday was for this.  I wanted to set this room up as a place to can and cook using the propane cookers.   It is usually too windy here to use these outside.

I have lots more I want to do to make it prettier.  I want to paint the walls white to brighten it up.  I also have to figure out how to run power up there for a light and a fan.  I know it looks dark and gloomy right now but it is a work in progress.  I am hoping it will not be too hot.  As you can see the room has one window.  I want to put a valence of some type there.   In the meantime it is totally functional now just not as pretty as I would like.  However, pretty will come later.  The goal right now is to not heat up the house.  

Just in case you were wondering what was cooking in that pretty green kettle. Fresh picked green beans.   YUM!

I hope you all have a good day and God bless.

This is one of the many swings we have in our yard.  I love sitting and resting after a hard day’s work.  And today we worked hard.

Our friends the Horns came over and helped us clean out one of our buildings.   Before–

After! Another before picture– 

And after

Last ones.  Before

After!!

It was a long HOT day but we got it done. Now I want you all to know that I hesitated a lot about putting the before pictures out there for everyone to see but my blog is about real life.  My real life.  So there it is.  

God bless.

We had a really fun day yesterday with our friends the Horns.  We went to Grayson Highlands State Park.  It had been a long time since we went there to picnic and hike.  We got there somewhere around 12:30 and the temperature was low 70’s.  When we left at 5:30 it was mid 80’s and we never hiked up to where the temperature drops.  It is a beautiful place.  I highly recommend visiting there if you get the opportunity. 

Good friends just hanging out.

Time to eat.  Good picnic food.  Hamburgers, hot dogs, chips and macaroni salad. 

Then off on our hike .

It was a beautiful trail.

It was filled with these little ponds.

And then the grand finale!!

We spent a lot of time here playing in the cold water.  So refreshing.

The water was cold and felt wonderful on hot feet.  

It was such a nice day and reminded me how much I enjoy hiking and how much I have missed it.  Hopefully we will go again soon.  

Enjoy your day and God bless.

For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you know we have quite a lot of wild life around here.  Well last night we had a coyote right here in this section of our yard.  Of course, it was gone before I could get a gun.  Hopefully he was just passing through and won’t be back.  We have a lot of coyotes here but normally they are out in the fields not this close to the house.

I thought I would share a few morning pictures with you all.  I am the first one up here every morning.  Imagine that!  Anyway, every morning I go turn all the animals out. The girls put them up at night so I let them loose in the mornings.  Good system.

The sun hits our yard very early.  I love that.

A few garden pictures

As I was making this post, I looked out the window and this is what I saw.

A beautiful cloud.  How blessed am I to live here!!  God is SO good.

We spent the day yesterday getting new frames for John Luke.   This boy has had a terrible time getting glasses that work for him.  Some of you may recall that first he got these frames  

Well these just didn’t work out for him.  He kept pulling them off his face .  That in itself is not too bad but he would pop the lens out and you would have to go searching for it where ever he laid it down.  Then he started popping the lens out and putting them in his mouth so Jess decided that was just too much so now he has his new ones.  Well he doesn’t have them just yet.  She picked out his frames yesterday and they will get his lens put in hopefully by the end of the week.

So after the eye appt we had some fun. I used to take Julie and Grace to this same playground after Grace’s eye appointments. This is a great playground. We ate our picnic lunch first then time to play.

John Luke loves to slide.
And being the good big brother that he is, Daniel was always there to help him him get down.  The only problem was, it was just too hot to play very long.  

It was a good day though.  I hope yours was too.  God bless.

Hello everyone.   Not much going on here.  I am sitting on my green swing enjoying my morning coffee playing with Ezzie.  The birds are singing so pretty.  The temperature is nice-low 60’s with a good breeze.  I love it!

Not a lot has been going here this week.  Just normal everyday stuff.  Yard work, garden, house cleaning.  

Our butterfly bush is very pretty this year.  I have noticed though not as many butterflies as usual.  Maybe they are just a little late in coming this year.  

Well that’s about all for now.  As I said not a lot going on.  God bless. 

Good morning everyone.  I hope you had a great weekend.  Ours was very nice.  On Saturday, Grace and I worked in the garden.  Julie was having some trouble with her ankle so she did inside work.  We pulled the bean vines and picked all the beans from them in one of the raised beds.  Then we planted more beans back in that bed.  We also planted more corn, cucumbers, squash and zucchini in some empty spots we had.  I’m not sure if the corn will make before frost but I wanted to try.  

We planted flowers along the fence.  Look how pretty these sunflowers are!

The tomatoes are looking good.  I can hardly wait for fresh tomatoes.  

Yesterday, we spent some time in Christiansburg. Lots of fun just looking around at stuff.  Grace got a few art supplies and Julie got a new book. Today is yard work day.  It takes us about 4 hours to do the yard.  Grace and I mow and Julie does all the weed eating.   We seem to have a pretty good system worked out.  

 I will leave you with a picture of our beautiful moon I took last night.  Most nights, I step out on our deck for a little while before bed.  Last night, the moon was so pretty.  

Enjoy your day and God bless.