Invaded by Japanese Beetles

Japanese beetles are swarming our yard and doing damage to plants and leaves. We're not talking a few beetles, we've got them by the hundreds! We talked to our landscape guy, Scott, and he sprayed. Didn't phase them.

Went To Earl May Nursery today and came home with a Japanese Beetle catcher and boy does this contraption ever work.

Caught hundreds in just several hours. Keep checking the bag every couple of hours and it just keeps filling up. Amazing!

We'll be Enjoying a BLT Real Soon

It's been a long wait, but we finally have a couple of tomatoes turning red. We have two plants in containers on the deck for our summer gardening project. One thing about it, it'll be a manageble size crop!

Early Morning Ames Storm Damage

Trees completely uprooted and pulled from the ground in our north Ames neigborhood.

Trees were snapped off like broken toothpicks up and down the streets of our housing development.

This large limb from a tree in the green space behind our house ended up in our backyard. We feel quite fortunate that the large trees in our yard came through the horrendous straight line winds with very little damage.

What's Your Opinion? Should the Pledge of Allegiance be Changed Again?

The Pledge of Allegiance is a promise of oath or allegiance to the United States and to its national flag.


1954 to Present:
" I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."


1923 to 1954:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."


1893 to 1923:
"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."


1892 (Original Version):
"I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all"


Should the Pledge of Allegiance stand as is or be changed again?

Voice your opinion by voting on my sidebar.

What do you have when you drop your cell phone into your cup of coffee??

A Dead Phone.

The Framer has a friend that for purposes of this blog we will refer to as John Claude.

John Claude hates technology.

He gets on his soap box periodically to wage his "one man war" against all of the following:

• Credit cards
• Debit cards, ATM Machines & Electronic Banking
• Automatic payments of any kind
• Automatic payroll deposits: "Not going to happen in his lifetime"!
• Computers, in general.
• DVDs. He had a perfectly good VCR that is now obsolete. They will go without watching any more movies at their house as he's not buying a DVD player. He's just not going to do it!
• The conversion of television broadcasting from the analog to digital. TVs all still work and he's not going to hook up a converter (even if they do give out coupons). They'll just listen to the radio. And, it won't be satelite XM radio either!

It hasn't been easy for John Claude to adapt to mobile communication technology and if it wasn't necessary for his work, he wouldn't even carry a cell phone. However, he had gotten use to the three year old phone he was carrying with 250+ numbers programmed into it. And then about ten days ago, John Claude's world fell apart. He dropped his cell phone into his cup of coffee.

The cellular store couldn't get it powered back up and all the phone numbers were lost. Worse yet, he had to replace it with a more modern phone and has had to learn how to operate it. He worked for days to locate and reload lost phone numbers. He still owned his previous cell and was able to retrieve some data from that phone. Some numbers were lost forever. Hates the new phone, too. He is now planning on buying yet another back up phone and have it pre-loaded, in case there is another coffee incident.

The Framer and I suggested instead of buying another phone he could simply upload his contacts into Microsoft Outlook for backup. That went over like a lead balloon. Upload, download, nothing but "overload"!!! Remember, John Claude has no time for computers either. And, if he needs something from the internet he has the Framer get him the information. The Framer's computer skills are nothing to brag about either but he can at least "find" the internet!

No matter how hard he fights it, it's a war he can't win but no one can even come close to convincing him otherwise. It's all tremendously funny and very, very entertaining! We laugh so hard our sides ache.

Side note: John Claude is also boycotting the Wal Mart store. That's a different topic and another post for another day.

What do you plan to do for your sweetheart for Valentine's Day?

The Framer and the Quilter each came up with a list of ideas of what they might do for the other this Valentine's Day.


The Framer's 5 Best Ideas for the Quilter:

1. Buy a nice card from Walgreens. Or, just send an e-mail. (Boring. Come-on, Framer, you can do better than that!)


2. Take the Quilter's vehicle in for an oil change and also run it through the Touchless Car Wash. (It does need it!)


3. Fix a nice dinner for the Quilter. Menu limited to either "chili" or "goulash". (The Framer likes to stay within his culinary comfort zone)


4. Clean the house! (WOW! Is he serious? If this includes "dusting", no woman in America would turn up their nose on this one!)


5. Clean out his coat closet and get rid of a few things (Not sure how this benefits anyone beyond the Framer. The Framer definitely reached his quota for good ideas with #4!)
   

The Quilter's 5 Best Ideas for the Framer:

1. Pay to have the Framer's vehicle cleaned and detailed on "the inside". Not sure if they require me to provide the shovel!


2. Conduct a basic "How To" computer class for the Framer. Class will emphasis "how" not to indiscriminately change computer settings and delete things you do not understand. The general theme will be, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"


3. Agree to do some mending for the Framer. (I will regret this one. No, Mr. Framer, mending does not include reconstructing and shortening 5 pairs of pants. They do, in fact, sell your waist/inseam size!)


4. Pick up a nice carry-out meal on my way home from work. The Framer gets to pick the type of cuisine.


5. Help the Framer clean out his coat closet by bagging up those items he needs to donate to Goodwill (I, like the Framer, reached my good idea quota at #4).

Stay tuned.

What do you think will actually happen on Valentine's Day at Sydney's Place?

The Wheels Just Aren't Turning

Many months ago several of the girls from my quilt group decided
to do a scrap fabric exchange for the quilt pattern, Buggy Wheels, by The Buggy Barn. It's a beautiful scrap quilt. I love playing with "value" only with no regard to color.

We planned to make all the half square triangles using triangle paper so I figured out how many total Dark/Light HSTs and the total Dark/Dark HSTs everyone would need based on the total blocks in the quilt. I divided it by the number of HSTs we'd get from the triangle paper for each and figured out the size and number of pieces of fabric we each needed to exchange. It's simple math. It can't get much easier than that. Or, so we thought.

Everyone that was participating cut fabric like crazy, we exchanged it all and starting making HSTs, by the hundreds. I worked on these fairly steadily for awhile and thought I had most of them made. Then I threw this quilt project aside for awhile. I pulled them out again recently and started sewing them into the blocks. There's a combination of 64 total 2 1/2" squares and HSTs in each block as shown above. We are each making a king size quilt which requires 36 blocks. I didn't like the contrast in some of them so threw some out. Of course I didn't keep track so had to do a recount of the HSTs I'd made. During the recount I discovered a shortage in the neighborhood of 510 Light/Dark HSTs and 231 Dark/Dark HSTs. A bit more that a minor math error! Good grief!!!

The girls took it pretty well when I broke the bad news as they aren't anywhere near where I'm at with this project. It would have been awhile until they, too, discovered the problem. The others now seem to recall that we figured the exchange based on only enough blocks for a queen size vs. king even though we all decided later to make the larger size. That would certainly explain the deficiency and does make me feel a bit better! Needless to say though, this project has now been brought to a screeching halt. I'm back to making half square triangles again. I don't think we'll be sleeping under this quilt anytime soon!

Sydney and Us

We've had Sydney with us since she was about 6 or 7 months old. She's three now. When we rescued & adopted her from the pound several years ago we weren't quite sure what we had gotten ourselves into as she'd had a pretty rough start in life. It took some effort but we worked through her behavior problems and fortunately managed to bond with her fairly quickly. It didn't take long for her to become part of the family and make our place hers. This is "contentment". . .