SUGAR, SUGAR AND MORE SUGAR

This is what we did tonight while Reagan, Amy and Zach were away on goat business. We made two dozen cupcakes, each one different. The insides were white with swirls of pink, blue, green or purple. It was just cake mix and two cans of frosting and about 10 kinds of sprinkles - nothing 'from scratch' about it, but we had fun. Actually, we should have made powdered sugar and milk icing. It wouldn't have been sticky and messy after it dried.

DUAL TRAGEDIES LETTERBOX

Mathieu has become my #1 letterboxing partner now that he is older and has the stamina to stick with it. Of course, MY stamina has greatly lessened since the days I took Zachary and Shabree much farther away, hiking in the woods and hills and brush of state parks and wildlife preserves when we letterboxed. We used to travel a few hundred miles in the course of a day. Now I stick much closer to home, and the 'hikes' are short walks.
This letterbox has quite a story - tragic, but also deep in family bonds and perserverence in the face of that tragedy. All families have tragedies, but some are forgotten over the generations, while others survive as lessons and illustrations of virtues and qualities that make up 'the sacred in the ordinary'. As one author - Michael D. O'Brien - says, our stories as a people or as a family define us. The telling and retelling of our stories firm connections between us and between the generations long after those past generations are gone.
This is Keith Petrus' letterbox and it is really a good one. In the clues, he gives part of the story, and at the end of the search, not only do you find out the rest of the story, but get to look over memorabilia of it.

SMALL GIFTS

Mathieu, who frequently brings me little treasures, brought me these pine cones from the row of pines that separates his house from mine. Three of them are the perfect size for some of my dolls.

LETTERBOXING - DOWN THE HATCH

I took this photo of Mathieu yesterday when we were out letterboxing. A friend has taken pity on me...or else gotten tired of listening to my whining...and started placing letterboxes in the area. 'Down the Hatch' was a great letterbox - the spot was ideal and the stamp he carved was really a good one. Today we are going to go look for another one of his.
Mathieu's letterboxing name is 'Garden Gnome'. The name was given to him by Zachary ;) when we went letterboxing or geocaching over a year ago. He just used his fingerprint as his stamp, and I added a gnome hat, facial features and limbs to it to make it look like a little gnome character. But now that he is more mature ;) he wants a different name and stamp. He is thinking about 'John Deere' or 'Horse Runner' or something. We'll see how that goes.

HYDROPONIC GARDENING

This may be what my fall garden will look like. Stewart has been urging me to get into hydroponics since our ride home from the airport a few days ago. It seemed way complicated at first, but I've been reading quite a bit about it online, and I think it just might be do-able for me. The 'no weeding' and the higher level of the plants does have its' appeal.
He said he absolutely doesn't want any set-up like this. Nothing put together with crap, discards or anything like that. He knows me pretty well.
Although I don't see what is so bad about this one that uses 2 ltr. plastic soda bottles.
He might not mind me having something like this, but I agree that the first one - his prefered set-up - looks better and is probably easier, although surely more expensive. Actually, I am pretty intriqued with the whole idea.

Stewart is really doing a lot around here while he's home. He has installed lots of things on our new computer, and is working on our old one to try to get it fixed for us. He put his fairly newly acquired house on Craig's List to be sold and moved off his property, contracted to get his land cleared, and our highway property along with it, and is now redoing my art studio. He and Zachary have been clearing all the stuff out of it, rewiring it, installing an air conditioner and will add insulation and new walls tomorrow. He also plans to put a cabinet and sink in there for washing paint brushes, etc. I absolutely can't wait until it is done, so I can use it! Hopefully everything will get done before he has to return to Baghdad. He sure is good to his mom. :)

100 DEGREES IN THE SHADE TODAY

... and it's been that hot for at least two weeks now. I've been doing other things besides blogging lately - gardening, online games, disk golf, etc. But today I went out and took some garden photos.
These are the zinnias I planted around the corner of the laundry 'house'. I love tall, large zinnias. I think they are about my favorite (non-wild) flower.
This is the other side of that corner. Patti-Jo or Carl has another big hole dug there. I had two rows planted, but they've just about eliminated the row nearer the wall with their digging. I try to keep pots or lawn chairs or something put there overnight to deter digging, but sometimes it doesn't help, or I forget.
Although it is turning brown and curling up now, despite all the watering it gets, this tomato plant started early in the season and produced a lot of tomatoes. It is still producing, although at a slower rate, and with smaller tomatoes. I don't remember what variety it is, but I am pretty sure it was just a hybrid of some kind from Walmart. There's also a Chinese Tallow tree coming up in the pot. I need to pull it out while I still can, but thought Mathieu might want to try transplanting it.
This is a German Queen heirloom tomato in a pot on the northeastern corner of the house. It is just now starting to produce, although it was planted within a week of the other tomato plant. The basil that is planted with it, has already gone to seed, as did the other basil plants all around the house. The red you see, is half of a soon to be (I hope) ripe tomato. The tomato has bulging quadrants and two of them are red, while the other two are still green. It looks funny divided exactly in half by color.
This is part of the area on the south side of the house, between the studio and the old gun shop, that I had - still have - covered in black plastic to kill the bermuda grass. I needed to plant pumpkins now if I wanted them for Halloween, so turned one end back a little, even though it was a little early for all the grass to be dead yet. Bermuda grass is almost indestructible. But I got the seeds planted, and they are up now...the ones the dogs didn't dig up with their hole digging. Today, I hope to cover the ground around the pumpkin hills with cardboard to help keep the grass out and preserve some moisture. Moisture is hard to come by here lately. The rest of that area is still covered in the plastic, and will be until Fall.
Then there is the artemesia. I think it is pretty chancey here anyway. Even though this only gets morning sun, it is dead. I am leaving it, and still watering it, in the hope that it may come back from the roots in the fall, but I'm not counting on it.
This honeysuckle went belly up just two days after we got the cattle panel trellis up and put it in the ground. I'm still watering it with a slow drip for long hours every couple of days. And I added cow and horse manure 3 days ago, hoping that might enable it to come back eventually, too.