Grandkids, Fourth of July and misc. other stuff

Hubby and I had a great time last weekend babysitting our grandkids up at their place while our daughter, son in law and his mom made a trip to Detroit for a Tiger's baseball game. (I think Jeff's dad probably had to work or he'd have gone too...) I'd been somewhat unsure how things were going to go since Bryce (not quite 2 yet) hasn't been around us all that much and Jenn had been giving us warnings that he's reached the Terrible Two stage a bit early. As it turns out, he was a perfect little angel, no fussing (except when Emily decided it was ok to tease him... she was soon corrected on that count) and wanted to be with Grandpa all the time! We had great fun watching movies, playing outside, setting up their Slip and Slide - which had a hole in it that Grandpa fixed (well enough to be usable) with some duct tape. Emily asked what duct tape was and after telling her that it was good for fixing a lot of things, she proceeded to point out various items in her room (a picture frame, her dresser...) and ask if they broke, could you fix them with duct tape. Yes, but they probably wouldn't look very good and wood glue would probably work better. *giggle* She picked up so quickly on the Handyman's Helpers many uses!

I'm starting to get excited about going out to cousin Mary Lee's for the Fourth. We've decided that we'll go out Sunday and stay 'til Tuesday morning. I just hope that the weather will cooperate and not be unbearably hot or rainy. Hopefully we'll be able to set the tent (or tents) up in the backyard to let them air out before we go. Keeping Scot from packing our entire kitchen is going to be a bit of an issue. He's decided that since we have electric available, we should take our extra drip coffee maker since "it's faster than the percolator." I'm not so sure about it since the carafe is glass and that just doesn't seem like a good idea to me. (Now if he wanted to take the one we use every day with it's metal thermal carafe, I wouldn't mind nearly as much). At least he's agreed that our battery powered camping lights will be good enough for reading "in bed". I'll just put some new batteries in my book light for me. Happily, both sunblock and insect repellent are on sale this week, as I'm going to need both! I'm hoping that I can convince him that we can jury rig a shade structure with one of our many tarps and the extra tent poles we have (we don't throw those out when a tent becomes too old to use unless the poles themselves are broken) and that we don't need to spend money we really can't be certain we can afford right now on a quick set screen house. We still have no idea when we'll be getting the State tax return or when/if he'll be getting any money from the student loans overages (or even if there will be extra this term) and we have to keep in mind that we have a $120 license plate to buy before the month is out! And this is the month our garbage bill is due for the quarter. This one really ticks me off since we're paying the same high price as a customer who has a larger bin that they fill to overflowing every week yet our smaller bin is generally not even half full. I really wish I could find a provider who charged by volume rather than just a set rate! Oh well...

I got a nice amount of raspberries off the bushes this morning, about a pint or so, I'd guess. The bushes are loaded again this year and again, there are far too many that I can't get to. Scot deciding that the area that I had used as the path to some of the inner bushes was a perfect place to dump a bunch of scrap wood means that I now have no way at all of reaching the inner berries but since he's the big raspberry fan, it's his loss! I also did the tiny bit of planting that I'm doing this year. I had pepper and bean seeds left from last year and started the pepper inside. I put a couple tiny seedling peppers in yesterday (I'm holding out the other two that came up until they're a bit bigger) and planted a row of beans this morning. I seriously doubt that we're going to get much off them since I'm getting such a late start (although the beans should do well into the fall as long as we don't have an early hard frost). I'd given up on doing an actual garden since we never got around to thinning out the berry bushes, removing the dozens and dozens of excess Rose of Sharons that are making a jungle of the garden plot or cutting down the numerous "weed" trees that are trying to take over the fence line. On the other hand, I already had the pepper and bean seeds and couldn't see letting them just sit around another year. If they grow and produce veg, fine. If not, it was still good exercise for me.

Misc: Incongruous occurrence for the day... listening to the guys doing construction a couple houses down singing along with Brittany Spears. o_O