Yes, it's time for me to update!  So much going on here.  Lots of people coming and going.

A trip to Science Central,



                                            


 


snapping beans with great grandma, fun look alike vests for grandpa Jim and Josiah, Fun visits with the grandsons, enjoying an extended from a young French gal here for 3 months, a few trips for Jim, 2 Central Africans visiting with us for 6 weeks, lots of traveling for Jim, putting the garden to bed for the winter, getting the wood room stocked for the fireplace and woodstove,  thinking about pumpkin pies and turkeys, watching the deer in the driveway, trying to stay away from the flu, enjoying my girls in Youth group and keeping up with the housework and cooking.  I made a fun vest for my daughter in law for halloween, so she could be a superhero, finished up another couple of little sewing projects and am enjoying putting all my sewing stuff away in my almost finished new sewing room!  The fall colors were so pretty this year, and though I'm not enjoying the bare trees, I do enjoy the leaves on the ground and looking at their beautiful colors closely.  We also went to Chicago and saw it through the eyes of a Central African and a French girl.   If you look closely, you can see that this is NOT a plant!  It is two amazing seahorses, their faces are to the left.  So fun! After seeing all the diversity at the aquarium, Marcellin commented very thoughtfully, "How can anyone say there is no God when you see all that He has made and all the colors, all the different ways they have of living, all the ways they breathe and eat?"  He was just in awe.It was fun!

Yesterday was just a beautiful day!  I, too, took a picture of the clouds.  Ata and I must have been out at the same time, looking up! Today is actually cool enough that I may shut the windows.  My garden is slowing down some now, I think I'm ready for that!  Today I'm going to freeze peppers, make salsa, freeze corn, and bake zucchini bread.  At least, I think that's what I'm going to do! I hope I can do it! I keep thinking that next year, I may just plant a flower garden and have a ten foot square food garden. . . .  Then, my sweetie and I are going on a date to Amish Acres Round Barn Theater and watch Oklahoma!  That will be fun.

It's summer!  Yes, I know, it's been summer for a while.  I just really have been enjoying the beautiful weather, though.  The other day, I just sat on the porch swing with my ice tea and read a book.  All afternoon!  I have so many things that I can be "busy" with, that I just needed the afternoon off.  I loved it!  I sat there remembering my school days, how I absolutely loved the summertime then.  I'd chase my puppy up and down the streets when she got loose, rode my bike everywhere, played kickball in the street with the other kids on the block, swam in our 3 ft. tall pool set up on the concrete driveway, eating ritz crackers with peanut butter.    Vacations in the wonderful backwoods of West Virginia with relatives.  Staying with grandpa at his mother in law's house way back in the hills, plucking geese for feather pillows, getting stuck in the outhouse because a copperhead was blocking the way back to the house, shooting dad's cigarette packs out of trees for target practice, making mazes in the hayloft with the bales of hay at my aunt's house with my cousins, jumping on an old spring mattress outside under the apple trees, riding the cow, just fun stuff!  Swinging on Aunt Norma's swing that went higher than any other swing in the world, picking plums as you went back and forth. 

Memories.  I'm making new ones now, but I sure enjoy the old ones!