Odds and Ends

September is always such a busy month. Lots of little things that keep me running. Mainly these two little things.

I feel like a glorified chauffeur lately. Taking them to school, taking them to Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts, church and school events. It's been exhausting but they are having fun and learning lots so it's all good.

Sean has been wanting to fix up a milling machine that he purchased several years ago and has been sitting in pieces in the back of the shop. Well to fix it up he needed several parts. Then, about a month ago, he found someone selling their milling machine on eBay. It was a good price but it was in Chicago. So after quite the ordeal (I'll save you the details) it has been shipped to us. He was able to get a trailer and pick it up at the shipping dock. The nice part about getting it here is that we now have something to unload it with! The mill weighs 2000 pounds and normally it would be unloaded by hand and engine hoist. Which really sucks. But now we have a skid loader! Yay! Sean had it off the trailer in less than 2 minutes. Pretty cool. So now he has all the parts to make a really nice milling machine that he plans to CNC.

Poor Sean stays pretty busy with projects around the house....some of which I create for him. For instance when I mow around the koi pond and get a little too close to the limestone rocks around the pond, suck one up and shoot it out at the open garage hitting my car. Funny thing is I didn't even know I shot a rock out until I was walking by my car and saw the carnage. Thankfully no kids were outside.

Do you remember those adorable little fluffy chicks we got a few months ago? They are now free ranging with the older hens and are nearly full grown. Crazy how fast chickens grow. They are 16 weeks old and could logically be laying eggs in four weeks (unless the shorter days cause them to wait until Spring). They are still small enough to squeeze through the wrought iron fences (unlike the older hens) and I routinely find them scratching around the dog pen. I don't think they know the dangers of free ranging in the dog pen and I have to check the pen each and every time I let the dogs out to go potty. Crazy chickens don't realize the quick meal they would become.

A couple of years ago my Mom gave me one of her tropical house plants. She and my Dad travel a lot and she thought it might stay alive longer if she gave it to me to take care of. It's kind of a special plant because I remember helping her plant the three baby plants in that pot when I was just a little kid. It's probably close to 30 years old. The plant has been in the same pot as long as I can remember and it's a healthy thriving plant, especially when it's outside all summer under our big oak. This summer I decided to re-pot it since it's root bound and was able to find a pot even bigger than the old one (I wasn't sure I could find a bigger pot but I did). It looks so happy in it's new pot. It's going to come inside soon because of the cool weather coming and I'm a little worried about how I'm going to move it. Perhaps it needs wheels.

The Skid Steer

 If you remember, last weekend we brought in 15 big round bales to feed the critters, and I was complaining how difficult it was to move 1000 pounds with nothing but your hands. Well fast forward to today. We bought a skid steer to help out with all the heavy duty projects we do around here. We like the idea of a tractor but a good tractor with a front end loader is more than we want to spend right now, but skid steers....they can be quite affordable.

Sean found this one for sale and went and picked it up on Friday. It starts right up and runs like a champ. It's a diesel with a ton of hours on it that has been used at a stone retail shop but will be perfect for us to move round bales, put gravel on our driveway, clean out the horse pen and countless other projects we do. We're pretty excited about it.

Here is a video of Sean unloading it. He did great considering it was his first time driving it! The trailer we rented was an awesome hydraulic lift trailer. It raises and lowers with a switch, which was great for unloading stuff like this. 

Osprey Nest

I found this on my camera and thought I'd share. When we were in Idaho
visiting the Mesa Falls we were told there was a osprey nest on the other
side if the waterfall. I decided to find it and use the zoom on my
camera to see if I could spy the chicks. My favorite part of this video
is the zoom out at the end....it was pretty far away!

Round

School is back in session and I have the house to myself once again. It's nice to slow down after a pretty hectic summer wrap up. I'm ready to gradually get back into sculpting full time as I took the summer off for a change. It was nice to focus on the kids and making fun memories....and we made many this summer.

Ever year around this time we fill up our shop with hay. Enough hay to keep all the critters fed for a year. We always get small square bales because they are easy to handle, stack and store. No big machinery needed, which is a plus since we don't have any. My regular supplier of hay is my friends aunt. This year she decided to do her whole field in big round bales instead of the small square ones. No big deal, I'm up for a change. So Saturday morning I took Sean's Jeep and rented a heavy duty trailer from the local rental place and headed out to the field. The Jeep has a tow package on it allowing it to haul 6500 pounds. Each bale was around 1000 pounds so we loaded up three per trip, making 5 round trips. It was an hour round trip to the field and back. Needless to say it was a long day.

We'd unload the three bales and I'd take off for the next trip leaving Sean here to man handle the bales into a row. Round bales should be stored in rows going North and South and they should be placed as tightly together as possible to keep rain and snow from entering the sides (we did our research). Sean did a great job getting them moved but was pretty sore after manually moving 15 of them. We decided a tractor or a skid steer might be in our future and have started shopping for one...especially if round bales are happening every year from now on.

Grand Teton Vacation part 3

This is the last post of the trip. On the last day together we decided to go north and see the Mesa Falls in Idaho. A nice lady at the grocery store told us we should go see it and so we did! There were some nice hiking trails near it with lovely views of the falls. The kids loved the hiking! We were hopeful we'd see some wildlife but saw nothing except a dead porcupine on the side of the road (is it sad that I got excited over seeing that?!).

Then we drove down to the lower falls area and there were boardwalks around the actual falls. It was really beautiful! If you are ever in south east Idaho I recommend seeing the Mesa Falls.

Family Reunion 2016

Granny Randi is about to be surpassed in height.

Now if you asked my children what their favorite part of the trip was I'm pretty sure they will tell you it was the hotels. They love hotels! Watching SpongeBob, swimming and all you can eat breakfast. It's the simple things for them.

Grand Teton Vacation part 2

After doing a bit of research and finding out how busy Yellowstone is this time of the year we decided to just roam around the Grand Teton National Park one day while we were there. For us it was more about the family reunion aspect rather than the National Park aspect. One day roaming the park was enough for us. Grand Teton National Park was spectacularly beautiful. It really was quite a sight.

The park itself was different. There were two main roads traveling parallel to the mountains and every few miles there was a turn off to a parking lot where you get out and walk down to one of the lakes or hiking trails. What was frustrating about this was all the parking lots were filled to the brim. People would end up parking along the road and walking back to the lake. There wasn't anywhere to park in 2/3rds of the parking lots. This was the Teton's, not even Yellowstone. We couldn't imagine how busy Yellowstone would have been. Sean's brother went to Yellowstone and he said it was stop go traffic throughout the park and an hour wait to see the attractions. Several attractions had signs up saying "Come back in a hour". Perhaps August wasn't the time to see these parks. They say May and September is the time to see them.

But what we did see of the Teton's was really beautiful. The first lake was Jenny lake.

Lunch time came and we packed a lunch but, again, couldn't find a parking spot so we just pulled off the road and had a picnic on the side of the road. It was fun! 

There was an old chapel in the park that we decided to see and at the parking area there was a small trail leading down to Jackson lake. That was probably the most fun of the day, seeing this beautiful lake without a soul around. We had the whole beach to ourselves.

We stopped to get some pictures of the park on the way home.

To get back to the cabin we had to go over Teton pass, a 10% grade pass. It was steep to us flat landers and nerve wracking the first go around. By the time we left we'd gone over it four times and it was super easy. We stopped on the summit to get some pictures the first day and a nice gentleman offered to take our picture. He was traveling to each state's tallest peak and this year was Idaho's. It's fun meeting people and hearing their story along the way.

Wesley got a tablet for his birthday and really enjoyed taking pictures and video along the way.

First day!

We are back to school folks! Phew! Mama is ready for a little down time. :) Wesley started 4th grade today and Greta started 1st grade. They were excited this morning, something I'm always grateful for. I am happy to have a quiet house again for seven hours and get back to sculpting.

4th grader

1st grader

Grand Teton Vacation part 1

After 2500 miles and 43 hours in the car we have returned from our big vacation of the year. We were due for a family reunion on Sean's side of the family and decided to meet somewhere this year instead of all heading to New Mexico where his folks live. We settled on the Yellowstone/Grand Teton area. Back in February I started researching places to stay. We looked at small cabins inside the park and they ran $200+ a night per family. There were four families and that became pretty expensive pretty fast. Plus there were no kitchens so food would have to be eaten out too. I ran across AirBNB which is a site where people rent out their homes to travelers. I found several beautiful, huge cabins in the Yellowstone area for around $2000 a night. Still too much, obviously. So my search got broadened. I ended up in Idaho on the other side of the Grand Tetons and found a lovely cabin in our price range (it was $450 a night). It slept 16 people and was a massive 4500 square foot house. It was a good hour and a half from the park but decided, for the price, that would be fine.

It turned out to be a lovely, well kept house. All 14 of us were able to spread out, each getting our own bedroom and bathroom and were able to cook all of our food. Best of all, this was the view out the back deck.

It was so nice seeing everyone! We had some great laughs and all the cousins got to play together. And play they did! My children are still exhausted from the sheer amount of running and laughing they did in those four days together. They all shared a bedroom and I'm not sure they got to sleep before midnight each night. So much giggling. They really had fun.

Probably the nicest thing about getting a house was the ability to cook each meal. We had some lovely meals together. Each family was in charge of cooking one night, so no one person was doing all the cooking. It was also nice to be able to pack a lunch when we went into the park.

Rich and Jeremy hauled their bikes with them so they could rack up some miles in the mountains.

Here is the epic cabin we all stayed in. What a fun and memorable family reunion!

 

 

Myriad Botanical Gardens

When I was researching things to do in downtown Oklahoma City I found the Myriad Botanical Gardens. Turned out they were directly across from our hotel, so it was a no brainer to walk over and see it. It was hard to miss. How often do you see a giant metal cylinder full of plants?

Mind you it was 102 degrees outside so I was pretty excited to go inside where I thought it would be air conditioned. It might have been air conditioned but the humidity was so high you couldn't tell. It was, after all, a rainforest on one side of the cylinder and a desert on the other end. It was very neat and they had some awesome plant specimens inside.