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May 7, 2010

IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

First of all, happy Mother's Day to all you moms and I hope you have a great day. Mother's Day is always celebrated with three birthdays thrown in around here. My daughter's birthday is May 11th; one granddaughter's birthday is May 12th and my son-in-law's birthday is May 13th so there is a lot of celebrating going on.

Well, the Blazer season is over. They needed to win that game last Thursday, but they couldn't quite pull it off, so we're officially on summer vacation. We're still proud of the team. They had so many injuries this season that most teams would have just given up - but they didn't. They took Phoenix to six games in the first round of the playoffs, but I guess they just ran out of gas. Still, it was a good run and we got an extra three games added on to the paycheck!

It was another busy week. We started off on Saturday with Wheeler's annual clean-up day. The Park and Rec committee sponsors it, so I was right in the middle of the project. People brought trash and whatever they wanted to get rid of to the City Hall parking lot. We had two dumpsters for the garbage and a trailer full of assorted cans for recyclable things. There was a list of people who had stuff to get rid of but no way to get it to the drop site, so Dave and a bunch of the other city council members hauled our big trailer around town and picked up their trash for them. They really did work hard all day long, but the only picture we got was when someone snapped this shot of Dave doing what he does best - drinking coffee and talking! In case you're wondering, Dave is the one in the red hat, not the other guy!! It was an awesome day and in spite of the rainy weather we managed to fill up the dumpsters. We even had "Scrapper Bob" come and haul all the metal stuff away for recycling. We had also collected a bunch of metal from our "clean-out-the-church" project for him, but his trailer was too full after the town clean-up, so he made a special trip during the week to haul our stuff away. He had another trailer full just from our place! Anyway, as a result of the clean-up, the little city of Wheeler now looks a lot nicer.

Burrrrrr! It has been so cold around here and we even had a couple of thirtyish nights. Some days haven't even made it out of the 40's for high temperatures and we're well into May already! I was hoping that all the April showers would bring May flowers but so far it has rained most of the time. We even had a few hailstorms thrown in and some snow up in the hills. You have to love these "La Nina" years! The weather is always crazy when this happens. I haven't even begun to plant any of the annual flowers that I bought over a month ago. They are nicely tucked away in my greenhouse until I feel more confident that spring is really here.

We had our final garden club workshop on Monday to get ready for the BIG plant sale on Saturday. There were a few last minute baskets to plant. The weatherman has forecast sunny skies but he has done that in the past and it never happened. You just can't trust those weathermen! I have my fingers crossed! Anyway, today I will help haul all the plants over to the sale site and get everything ready to open the doors at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. The usual lines will be forming around 8:30 a.m. because everyone is anxious to get the best selection early at the plant sale. We made over $5,000 last year in about four hours.

I have been diligently keeping my bird feeders full, as there have been quite a variety of visiting birds. The little Goldfinches are my favorite. I spotted a newcomer yesterday that I had never seen before, so I had to look him up in the bird book. It was a yellow-headed blackbird. We get a lot of blackbirds but I have never seen a yellow headed one before. We are still overcome by pigeons that swoop down in large numbers. I can look outside and there must be forty of them devouring the food as fast as they can. I get so frustrated because they seem to know when I am not around, and that's when they attack the feeders. I wonder with pigeon tastes like because I am about to try one for dinner one of these times. We also have had a young raccoon trying to take advantage of a free meal at the feeders too. Dave got out his trusty B-B gun and shot a couple of rounds at him to run him off. Hopefully that will discourage him from coming back. I still bring my feeders inside each night because the raccoons will drag them off. Dave found one of my missing suet feeders under the floorboards in the church during the remodel the other day.

Speaking of the church, it is still a work in progress. I cleaned out a little room in the front entry and organized it so that we can store some things we seldom use. It looks like we will make another run to the dump soon as we have another load in one trailer. We took a bunch of wood down to the burn pile, and that other trailer is already about half way to another run. As I mentioned last week, the guys discovered that the north wall was going to have to be rebuilt. They hadn't counted on that - they thought it would be OK - but when they opened it up, a lot of the wood was rotten on that side too. So, they have to repeat what they did on the south wall - jack up the roof and make repairs to the wall to make it strong enough to support the weight of the building. We thought we were going to get by with fixing about a quarter of the building, but by the time we're done, it will be more than half. If we had known that at the start, we probably would have just burned it. And speaking of opening up the walls, we've had all kinds of surprises! This picture is kind of hard to see, but it's years worth of bird nests built up between the studs in the wall. There was a hole in the outside wall and the swallows built nests on top of nests each season. This one was about three feet high! There have also been rat's nests - we pulled another one out of the ceiling yesterday. It certainly keeps the project interesting!