A Wet Saturday

Better than a snowy Saturday!  We looked at what happened to Denver on the news tonight, and are so grateful that it is not us!  I am going to go back in time on this blog tonight and see what it looked like a year ago today here.

Today is my little sister's 60th birthday!  She is spending it quietly at home, since her oldest grandchild turns 3 tomorrow, and Omaha DID get hit by snow, and the birthday party cancelled.  On Monday, my dear brother in law Bob turns 73, so we have a spate of birthdays in a row.  I can't believe we're as old as we are, it seems like just yesterday we were chasing each other up the back stairs at our family home, and slamming doors on each other.  How long ago it was... it's scary to say "fifty years ago". 

This is Chris, Kathleen's son, whose birthday always fell near Easter.  He was like my third son, and lives in Omaha now, so we don't see him very often.  He has two wonderful little girls, and a very nice wife, Jill.

And since I'm wallowing in nostalgia, here I am at 18 with my oldest son Jim, who was about six months old in this picture.  It's one of my favorites, even though, believe me, it was a baby with a baby.  That was my favorite shirt I was wearing, it was a "Ben Casey" shirt... remember those?

We didn't take pictures back then like we do now, so the few pictures I have are precious to me.

This was what Calamity Acres looked like today:

Yes, that's mud behind the little henhouse.  UGH.  You can't even see the boards I have dropped there to stand on, they have mud on them.  I was extra careful not to slip... a fall would be horrible to imagine.

The lineup on the drainboard this morning.  If I wouldn't eat a dirty egg, I don't expect people getting our eggs to eat one, either.  If you look at the carton at the back with two eggs in it, those two are DIRTY, and those of you with chickens know what I mean.  So every Saturday morning, I clean the eggs if I have not cleaned them during the week as I bring them in.  Then into the car they go, and down to the Good Shepherd.  Our thrift store/food pantry suffered a blow last night, in the rains yesterday a city water main leaked, and both the thrift store and one of the manager's houses behind it flooded.  The downstairs was closed off this morning, and they have not assessed the damages yet.

I try to vary the eggs in their cartons, large and small and  I think kids get a kick out of the green ones, so I always try to include one.  Today our girls gave us 15 eggs!  In the middle of winter!

After looking at the latest Mother Earth News, Keith went to Home Depot this afternoon in the drizzle to figure out what it would cost us to build a homemade hoop house for the garden, and when he got back, I was so happy to hear that it will be around 20.00 for the hoops, and then a plastic covering and Keith's estimate is less than 150.00 dollars to get started. We are planning to put it in an open area and then plant our tomatos and peppers inside it.  It will be around 21 feet long, and around 10 feet wide. I have long wanted to try gardening with one, and am glad we are going to do it this year.

Here's Keith with his nemesis, Fancy, tonight as we did chores:

I just love this little rooster and the person holding him!

And here we are tonight, all set to watch the KU - MU game!

We're having brisket tomorrow for Super Bowl Sunday, and the brisket is marinating in the refrigerator tonight.  Tomorrow long before church it will go into the oven to bake slowly for the day.  Then we'll have brisket sandwiches on good sourdough buns.  I'm making some other goodies for us to eat during the day, too.