From July heat to October chill in September

It got really hot and sticky Friday evening and I had to turned the AC back on. Saturday morning it was still miserable. As the day progressed, the humidity increased.

After breakfast I started playing with my bottle brush trees. Over at The Misadventures of Mama and Jack, I learned all about stripping the color from the trees and dying them. I want to make some Halloween colored trees. I did one tree at a time, by adding bleach to hot water in a glass. It wasn't an instant thing. You have to dip and soak the tree. It probably took about 10-15 minutes to bleach them to what looks like the original color.

Now I need to get some Rye dye. (Sunday I tried food coloring.) Orange, I have a light colored tree now, but I will pick up some dye on my next shopping day. Oh and I need more trees, bigger trees. However there are none to be found in this one craft store town! Shucks!



BT finished restoring his brush hog and tried it out behind the house. He now has plans for cutting some of the smaller trees out of the woods. This would be winter project. The brush hog and tractor would fit better between the bigger trees. I can see another park in my back yard! Here he goes for the mowing. (Be sure and stop the music on the side bar, so you can hear the tractor sounds.)




Bob and Rita came to our place about 6:30. It looked like it would rain about anytime as we drove into town. Ria's Restaurant just opened a month ago. It is a beautifully decorated Greek Restaurant. We had about a 30 minutes wait in the bar. From there you can see into the open kitchen as the food is prepared. They need to improve their timing with the food. However the food, once received was excellent. BT had steak that looked Yumo! I had Lasagna, Bob and Rita went Greek, Gyro and Vegetable Pita.

While we were inside the rains started. They would continue until late Sunday morning. I got up several times during the night to see how much it had rained. It was predicted Ike would dump 5 to 7 inches on us. This is our lake early Sunday morning as the water was rushing over the top of the dam.

Saturday it was 88 degrees, Sunday morning it was 77, and by noon it was 66. We went from miserable humidity to almost needing the heat turned on. For dinner I found a new soup recipe. It was pretty good. I love potato soup but BT won't eat the kind my mother taught me to make because of the milk in it. Here is the recipe for the new one.

Sausage and Potato soup

1 lb. sausage, brown and drained

1 lb. hash brown chunks (I grated fresh potatoes)

3 cans chicken stock or broth

3 stalks celery, diced

1/2 onion, diced

2 can cream of celery soup

2 pinches of red pepper

Parsley

Basil.

Cook potatoes, broth, onion and celery until tender. Add sausage, soup, and spices. Heat thoroughly.

9:13 PM 61 degrees.

A few days off.........

Monday I worked on the last of the 6 quilt blocks I had gotten from Mom. I also had the grandson's for a couple of hours, including dinner.

Tuesday, the boys came early. We left for Fulton mid-morning and picked up the motor that was finally repaired. We stopped at the Concrete plant for the boys to watch huge cranes moving big concrete blocks. Back in Jefferson City we took time for lunch inside McDonald's. Two more stops and we would be home. Gma had to have thread.

Speaking of thread....another change has come to Coats and Clark. Not just the price increase, but the spool has changed again. You know I'm an old dog when it comes to new tricks. However this one I like. The top of the spool pops up. Remember the old pink hair rollers called "spools"? That's what these are like. You can now pop the top and wrap the thread in there. It will sure keep your thread drawer clean. When pulling these spools out for the picture, I thought you'd get a kick out of the price increase. The little wooden ones cost .15 cents. The new pop a top one was $3.99 at Hobby Lobby, however I had a 25% off coupon.

Wednesday, today it has rained all day. When I emptied the rain gauge at dark, it measured 2 inches. Today I finished the last of the baby quilts for Mom. Hopefully I will get a picture posted of them when the sun comes out and I can hang them outside. The rest of the afternoon, I spent printing off my journal pages.

Dinner tonight was to have been a BBQ on the river bank with family and friends. Since the rain shut that one down, I made some sloppy joes and slaw. Colten's Dad came over and he and BT worked in the Blacksmith shop making some deer stand brackets.

Tomorrow I am going to treat myself to a pedicure. Unlike my blogger friend Zoey who treats herself to manicure. We are just the opposites. It then grocery shopping and I have to find some new slacks for our annual meeting at work on Friday.

74 degrees 9:50 PM

A rainy day to visit Fulton Missouri

This is what we woke up to this morning. That's correct 4 inches of rain over night.

So I worked on quilting quilt #2 before I took off for Fulton. I had to take a motor there to be repaired for BT. It was about a 30 mile drive, on a nice cloudy day. On my way I called an old friend to wish her a 2-day early 61st Birthday. (Happy birthday Betty).

After I dropped off the motor, I drove through town and came upon the

Winston Churchill Memorial . The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury twice destroyed by fire, located at the corner of Westminster Avenue and 7th Street, is part of the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library in the United States. Dating from the 12th century, it was redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 after the Great Fire of London. Left in ruins by World War II, the architectural masterpiece was saved from demolition by the bold idea to move it to the Westminster campus where it was reconstructed and restored.

I stopped just past a no parking sign and snapped this picture of the Berlin Wall.

One year after the November 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall, President Ronald Reagan dedicated Breakthrough, an 11-foot-high by 32-foot-long structure sculpted from 8 sections of the Berlin Wall by artist Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, as the centerpiece of the Cold War Memorial on the Westminster campus.

I made my way to the Wal-Mart and found they still had a fabric department. After adding a few groceries to my cart and dealing with a check-out clerk who didn't know what he was doing, I was finished.

Arriving home I decided to drive around the lake behind the house. However, the bridge was under water, so I could only go one-way. You can also see the dock has broken loose and is floating freely in the lake.

It was dinner in the early evening, our walk to the lake and back to quilting, I have almost finished machine quilt quilt #3.

10:14 66 degrees.

Almost time to build that Ark

March 18th, it's been raining non-stop since yesterday morning. When we got up this morning, according to the radio DJ, we had 2 inches of rain. I put out my rain gauge at 8:00 AM and by noon, I already had an inch. Total is now 3 inches.

So when I left about 3:00 this afternoon, I took the following pictures from my car window. After all a girl can't get her hair wet!

It's almost bedtime and it looks like there is another 3/4 to an inch of rain in the gauge. AND it's still raining! Anybody have Noah's phone number?