Category: Home Life

This post is mainly for family who have not seen our place yet. It’s a nice day outside so I thought I’d take a few pictures of our place to show you around a little. Enjoy!

This next one here is a picture of my garden. The zucchini plants have really taken over. In fact, that is what’s mostly in this shot. I made a makeshift fence out of chicken wire after I planted to keep the critters out. The idea was courtesy of my friend, Gale.

Another picture of the garden. The lighter green patch is my lettuce. I was all excited about it until one day I fixed a salad, having washed each leaf carefully (or so I thought) and David found a caterpillar on his lettuce. The excitement of my lettuce has since dwindled considerably…

Here is a picture of my tomato plants. I’m so excited about these! No bugs have gotten to them yet and if things keep going well I’ll have lots of tomatoes!

This is a picture of my rhubarb plant. I’ve picked some already and made a strawberry-mulberry-rhubarb pie. It turned out really yummy! I think I may be able to pick some more rhubarb here pretty soon. It is growing my a tree stump, kind of protected and out of the way a bit in our back yard.

A picture of my other rhubarb plant (and weeds…). I have not been able to pick any from this plant yet. I’m not sure how well it will turn out.

This is the mulberry tree in our back yard, where we picked the mulberries for the pie. There are quite a few on this tree and our neighbor said the kids could come and pick some from her tree as well. It brought back memories!

This is our shed behind our house. The picture is sideways but you get the idea. It’s nice to have a place to store stuff.

And now to introduce you to a friend of Miriam and Isaiah’s. This is General Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller. The family we bought the house from left him for the kids to have. Miriam and Isaiah have fun riding on him.

Here is the back of our house. I restained the back deck on Friday. It was looking pretty shabby.

Here is the front flower bed. I have no clue what all is growing here but it sure is pretty! I know that clematis is growing up the trellis and on the far right is a day lily.

And there you have it! That’s pretty much the outside of our house. I hope you’ve enjoyed the pictures. I’m excited that I actually figured out how to put these up! Come on out for some zucchini! I am going to have tons of it.

June 15th was the 9th anniversary of our first date! Sigh. I can’t believe it’s been 9 years already. David was only 21 back then and I was 19! He used to tease me and call me a teeny bopper. Take a trip back with me if you will to the summer of 1999…gas was dirt cheap (as low as $0.75/gallon on Fort Riley), the economy was good, and I was on cloud 9! That was probably the best summer I’ve ever had. Who knew six months from that time we’d be hitched? On our first date, David picked me up in his Nissan Stanza. That car had definitely seen better days. :o) It leaked some sort of fluid all the time and couldn’t go too fast without being really loud. But it got us from point A to point B most of the time and that’s the important thing! I was SO nervous that day and my stepmom was trying to calm me down a bit, to no avail. Anyway, he picked me up and we went to Subway and then after that to the park to eat. I was too nervous to eat anything, only taking a few bits of my 6″ sub while David snarfed down his 12″ sub! It wasn’t until I got back home that I realized how hungry I was. After that day, we slowly got to know each other more, a lot of the time staying up way too late talking on the front porch. That was so fun. And that was the very beginning of our relationship. It truly has been a blessing all along. Of course we’ve had some difficulties, but David loves me so much and shows me all the time. He loves our children as well and is a good daddy. I am very thankful for him. It is fun to think about that first summer we were together. It seems so far away but just like a blink at the same time. When I was dealing with fussy babies, changing diapers, teething, sleepless nights, tight finances, and all that, sometimes I would wish to go back to that time when I didn’t have all the responsibility that I do now, all of the cares and issues that accompany being a mother and a wife. But, I can’t go back, and there really is no use in thinking those thoughts. I strive to be content with the day that God has given me.

And that’s all folks. Until next time, adieu.

People talk about the weather a lot and so I’m not exactly looking for this blog to be Lisa’s Official Weather Spiel, but springtime in Kansas has been giving me quite the sudden and long-lasting surges in adrenaline of late. We had gotten home from church a little bit late last night because we ended up going to Dairy Queen afterwards (waffle bowl sundaes rule!). We also hadn’t eaten dinner before church because I made a stew and my potatoes weren’t quite done yet. So after a very late dinner (after 10pm) we bedded the kids down and I was looking over some coupons I’d just received and then went back into the kitchen to do some last-minute cleanup when…the sirens went off. I ran into the kids room, grabbing socks and shoes for them, trying to rouse them. I kept telling them they needed to get up, very loudly in fact, but those kids were out! Isaiah especially. After a few minutes of me breathing rapidly, my husband trying to tell me to calm down, and the kids dazed and confused, we managed to get ready to head over to the storm shelter. David told me to go ahead and go as he was trying to cram some blankets in his bag. I grabbed the kids’ wrists and started to run. The storm shelter is just across the street so it wasn’t a very long run but one of them managed to fall down twice. I was probably going too fast and the fact that I had a vice grip on both of their wrists probably didn’t help either. But I was trying to save their lives…they’ll thank me later. Anyway, we got to the storm shelter, dodged some bugs that were hanging out by the light, and found out we were the first ones there. Someone wisely put a radio in there so i turned it on to hear…weathermen excitedly telling folks to head for a shelter because the tornado was in Topeka…NOT! They were still playing music. I was trying to find a station that had the weather report and finally found one, only to hear the man say that the city of Topeka would not be affected by the storm. Huh? That was a bit frustrating. We walked back outside and headed back home. The sirens started to go off again when we got across the street but the radar showed the storm to just pass us to the west. Of course, it was not easy to go to bed after all that. I ended up staying awake until after 1am. Unfortunately, I heard this morning that the town of Chapman was heavily damaged. That town is pretty close to where we used to live and we actually know some folks there. As far as I know, they’re okay and so is their house just barely as the tornado destroyed houses just a couple blocks away from them. The tornado was 1/2 mile wide, pretty big. According to the weather folks, we may have some severe storms today, tonight, and tomorrow. I am thinking we should just camp out at our friends house for the next couple days. They have a basement (here we come, Cara!).

I need to go get some lunch underway. On a side note, I am listening to the kids talking to each other, if you can call it that. They are pretending to speak in a different language and some of the words they are saying are very…interesting to say the least. On my next post, I hope to go into some detail about my CVS Pharmacy shopping trip the other day. It was fu-un!

Note to self: Next time I decide to tiptoe through the tulips in a tank top with the goal to get a tan, knowing that my pasty, white Anglo-Saxon shoulders have not seen the sun in years…wear sunscreen! Zoinks! It hurts!

This evening has been good. I actually got off work at 6 and dinner was already in the crockpot. Have I mentioned that I love my crockpot? So, we ate dinner, even dessert (Ben and Jerry’s ice cream! yum!) and got done before 7! That’s like a record for us, especially because we have two very slow eaters. They apparently liked what I fixed (chicken and sausage gumbo) because they gobbled it up quickly. I’ll have to remember that recipe.

Short post tonight. I have a busy weekend coming up. We’re going to my Mom’s tomorrow after work and I would like to have a reasonably clean house before Sunday. We’ll see how that goes!

Our breakfast-for-dinner meal turned out pretty good…all except for the pancakes. I am not exactly sure what happened there. I had made them before, and the pancakes were awesome. The recipe came from the Taste and Tell recipes from Sue Gregg’s website. You can buy her whole collection if you want to spend the money, but she also has a sampling of her recipes as well for free. Anyway, her buttermilk pancake recipe was so good the first time I made it. This time, I had made the batter up on Saturday afternoon and put it in the fridge until yesterday evening. Maybe that had something to do with it. The pancakes turned out floppy and dense. I had to lather mine with syrup to make it palatable. I am not giving up on the recipe though. They are excellent if you make them right.

For dinner tonight, we went to Hardees. I hadn’t been there in probably a couple of years. I wasn’t really in the mood for anything too fatty and was looking for something chicken-y. I found two grilled chicken sandwiches and one crispy chicken sandwich. Everything else was beef, beef, and more beef. You know, I think it’s kind of ironic that McDonald’s has gotten so much publicity and flack for their menu items being so unhealthy. Um, hello? Has anyone stepped into a Hardees? Come on, now. They have all these sandwiches loaded with all kinds of good stuff (cheese, bacon, cheese, more bacon, at least two patties of beef, did I mention cheese?) that has no place in your arteries. When it comes to healthy options, I would much rather have McDonald’s. So, at Hardees I ended up getting their BBQ chicken sandwich. The other grilled chicken sandwich option had bacon on it which is good but not what I was interested in. The verdict on the sandwich was…it was great, actually was the best chicken sandwich I’d had in a long time! I like BBQ sauce but don’t fix BBQ’d things very often because David doesn’t like it that much. Maybe that’s why Hardees can get away with fixing such unhealthy things because the quality is so much better, whereas when you go to McDonald’s, you know you’re getting…well…McDonald’s.

In other news, we got our Lumina out of the shop today. Our poor car had to be towed to the repair shop because it wouldn’t start last week. What happened was the ignition switch needed to be replaced. The weird thing was that we had the same problem last year and got it fixed. Thankfully, it was under warranty so didn’t get charged for the labor or parts! We got our air conditioner recharged and that was the only thing we had to pay for. Because I was without a car for almost a week, I wasn’t able to go grocery shopping until today. It had been nearly two weeks since I went grocery shopping so things were running a little low (I usually do my grocery shopping weekly). It was kind of fun, though, to see what I could come up with. I think we probably could have gone another day or two. We were out of some staples like milk (although I do have powdered milk in the pantry but who wants to drink that?). So, I loaded up today on groceries. I’m going to see if I can go another two weeks without shopping. I may have to get some milk as we will probably run out of that before the two weeks are up, though.

I’m going to wrap this up for now. It’s getting late and I went to bed too late last night. I am noticing that I can really ramble on here. I was just starting to write about something else when I realized that I could go on and on. So, until next time, good night!