Not to keep my faithful readers in the dark, I’ve got another (lengthy) blog entry, so hold on! Things are going pretty good. A couple weeks back now, Susan’s folks came down… and brought more of Susan’s stuff with them (I thought we had gotten all of it, but apparently there’s even more). This weekend they had planned to come down and see Abby in her dance recital and would stay with us for the night. Before heading down to Jackson, we stopped in Quizno’s and boy was that exciting. After placing our order, we found a table and each of us had gotten a cup for a drink. Susan decided to get some lemonade well that was a bad idea. The valve wouldn’t close all the way after filling her cup up, and the lemonade continued to spew out everywhere (yup she broke it 😉 ). The Quizno folks seemed to know what to do and got the situation under control. The rest of our meal went unhitched, until we got outside. Susan’s dad noticed a bird that was hanging upside down from the inside edge of the roof. We all thought that was kind of weird, why would a bird hang upside down? Upon further investigation we noticed the bird wasn’t looking so good, in fact he was pretty dead (we did hear some chirping and thought it was him). Never thought Quizno’s could be so much fun, huh? We made it to Jackson, had dinner, and were soon off to the recital. Abby did a really good job and the rest of the recital was okay. Afterwards we went to The Parlor. This is an ice cream shop where you get massive amounts of ice cream. Last year I had ordered a banana split (I’ve got a picture of that somewhere…) and managed to eat the whole thing, it was stacked pretty high. Everyone was disappointed I didn’t get the Dare to Be Great. It’s a 21 scoop ice cream sundae with toppings… if you finish it in an hour, it’s free and you get your name on the wall… someday mine will be there…

Memorial Day weekend was nice and sunny, and we got to enjoy it (well I don’t know about enjoying it, but we did get a lot of sun in). With a three day weekend we decided it would be a good opportunity to get our lawn started and the forecast looked good. I wanted to get a roto-tiller from the start, but getting some advice we were told raking should do the trick. Raking probably would have worked, except the top layer of dirt was so hard it was quite the chore breaking through. After spending a few hours getting a not very big section of the front lawn done, we decided we needed… More Power! Using my internet skills I soon found a few places that rented roto-tillers. The first one on the list, Home Depot was only about ten miles away. I called the guy to see if they had any roto-tillers to rent out, he said they had four to pick from. Not having a truck yet I asked which ones (if any) could fit in a car. Two of them could and he asked what I planned to do… which was till a decent sized yard. He said his mid-tine tiller would do the trick and I asked again if we could get this in the trunk of my car (he said it would…) We knew the road Home Depot was on and figured the bright orange store would be easy to find, and off we went. We turned the wrong way on the street and had to turn around. After traveling awhile I figured we better call the number (still in my phone) and get directions in case we were really off. When I finally got a hold of someone, the store was in sight… and I still asked for directions… We found the tool rental area and there was a different guy there then the one I had talked with on the phone. I told this guy I needed to rent a mid-tine tiller… he went and got it and I’m looking at it thinking no way that’s gonna fit in my car… it didn’t, we went out and looked and the guy said it wasn’t going to work. Not wanting to do more back-breaking manual labor, I asked him what we could do. He said they had a truck we could rent (for a relatively small fee… and didn’t have to pay for gas…), but it was out and wouldn’t be in for another hour or so. We told him we’ll be back in an hour to pick it up. After coming back we decided to go all out and get the rear-tine tiller (this thing’s a beast, see the Picture of the Day). The guy started it up and loaded onto the truck for us. He then claimed it was in gear (three speeds) so it wouldn’t move around. After pulling out onto the road and coming off a stop light, I saw the tiller go from near the cab flip up and roll to the tailgate (I thought we were gonna lose it for sure!) That was scary, but not as scary as unloading it. As I mentioned, this thing’s a beast. We pulled into our driveway which has a slight slant to it, put the ramps on the back of the truck (decent size about 8 foot), and I could just see this was unsafe. In fact I told Susan it didn’t look to safe to unload it like this and she said, “Yeah, you should put shoes on…” I wasn’t really worried about my feet, but being completely runned over by this thing. Needless to say I managed to get it off the truck and ended up almost in the middle of the road (without getting runned over, wOOt!). I wouldn’t say using that thing was fun (okay at first it was!), but it was definitely better than doing it by hand. I managed to do the whole front yard and back three times over in about ten hours (and got one heck of a sunburn…) At times that thing would actually drag you along when it caught the dirt just right, luckily I didn’t run into our house or accidentally till our neighbors yards! Our yard was so tuff it actually sheered one of the tines on the thing. Bringing it back wasn’t too exciting, I made sure it was in gear and made the guy at the rental place unload it (who did the same thing I did, but slammed it into the ground a lot harder… guess that’s how you’re suppose to do it).

We had picked up some seed and fertilizer for our lawn and realized we needed some hay (at least that’s what we thought we needed). What we really wanted was straw, but there’s a good story at Lowe’s with Captain Helpful (this was before getting the tiller). We went into Lowe’s (which by the way I use to be a fan of until now… Home Depot all the way) to pick up some flowers for Susan’s big planter. Passing by a very small bag of grass seed we thought, maybe we should get a couple bags of it to seed our lawn. Doing some calculations in our head we realized it would take more than a couple bags that size to plant a lawn at our house. Putting it back, we managed to spot a 50 lb bag of seed. This seemed to be more promising and we picked up some fertilizer to go with it (we already had a spreader which was nice and we managed to get a sprinkler from our neighbors across the street). Recalling what someone down the street had done, we knew we needed something to put over the seed once it was planted (some sort of mulch). We went looking for hay and when we couldn’t find any we asked someone to help us, aka Captain Helpful. We asked him if they had any hay, he said no… I then asked him if he knew where we could get some, again he said no and that he’d ask someone if they knew (I think he might have actually asked customers), and about 10 minutes later he came back telling us no one knows, maybe a farm, but you can’t get it yet… I then asked him what we should put on top of the grass, he said the fertilizer was all we needed (gee thanks…) After filling up with gas I asked the cashier if she knew where we could get hay, she pointed me towards Pat’s. Pat’s didn’t have any hay, but they did have straw. Which if you didn’t know is different then hay, hay is food and straw isn’t… there’s a more technical difference but that’s good enough for me (yes… I actually looked it up…) Having a full trunk of seed, fertilizer, a vacuum cleaner, and other stuff I told the guy lets put it in the back seat (hah!) As you can expect that made a pretty nice mess in my car, luckily a few minutes before church with the shop vac got it looking fresh and clean again. Planting the seed was interesting, our spreader doesn’t have a way of stopping the seed from coming out the bottom, so as I was filling it up, it was making a nice mound on the ground. Seeding is actually pretty fun (and easy) once you get started (and have something to cover the hole before filling up the spreader). We just got the front lawn seeded, mostly because it was going to be a hot week and we didn’t feel like watering both the front and back yards.

This past weekend we managed to get the backyard seeded (finally), fertilized, and strawed. The rain came this weekend, which was what I was waiting for… and our front yard actually started sprouting up this morning (sweet!) Saturday, we went to see Mr. Brooks in Midland, which was one of the better movies we’ve seen recently. This year is definitely the year of the sequels and we went to see Shrek the Third and Pirates. Shrek was alright, and Pirates was pretty good (a little slow-gowing at the beginning), but Mr. Brooks was better than both. It’s about a schizophrenic serial killer (it’s not all that gory and a pretty darn good movie).

As you might have seen, I’m running Linux now… Fedora Core 6 to be exact. It’s been time consuming trying to get everything working good, but I’m hoping I can really do away with Windoze. My job’s been really slow… I’ve got a good job lead that might work out, I’m really hoping… until then I’ll sit and be bored as can be at Dow, trying to find any excuse to get out of the office. Such as the 47 Building brick giveaway. This building was the original Dow headquarters and was really three buildings in one. I managed to take home a piece of history with a pretty fancy plate (on a not so fancy brick). I also saw the Blue Planet Run kickoff which is pretty neat. You should check out their website to learn more about it. Basically it’s a 15,000 mile, 95 day, around the world run for safe drinking water… the runners are from various Dow locations and will be running 24/7 (in shifts). It was pretty exciting to watch the first runner take off through the streets of New York. The runners will be passing through Midland on August 25th and there’s all kinds of stuff planned. I also managed to pickup some Loons tickets (minor league baseball feeder team for the L.A. Dodgers) for when my folks come to visit. Getting them was no easy task. I emailed the lady who was selling them and after a few emails back and forth we planned to meet at her building at 2:30 PM. Silly outlook decided not to send me a reminder so I forgot about it. She sent me an email and I emailed her back asking if 3:30 PM would be alright. No response, I thought maybe she was waiting for me still and took off. She had given me directions and it seemed pretty easy to get there. Well it wasn’t and I ended up in the wrong part of the corporate center. I stopped into security for directions and he said, “Whoa you’re way off!” He sent me on my way and I managed to find the door we were meeting at. She wasn’t there, but another lady was on the look out for me. She called me over, called the ticket lady for me and I finally (after about 10 minutes of waiting) had the tickets in my hand. Never thought something so simple could be so complicated.