Around the Yard

Mom, this one is for you :)

A while ago I told my mom that I was starting to collect pictures from around our place so that I could share our home with her. I finally have some time to put a few up.

This is my pathetic little scarecrow that you see when you come down our driveway. You can see the driveway behind him. Right now it's just a dirt drive, and probably always will be. The scarecrow doesn't like to keep his hat on. He's done a fair job keeping the deer from the garden so far as we can tell from the footprints. 

When you get to the door, my little boys will greet you. But don't worry, they now have shock collars on to keep them from jumping on you.  Duke is the bigger dog, he's the puppy the kids got at Christmas, he's so soft and cuddly. Buddy is the smaller dog, and he's very protective of the house.

 This is "Pier Pon" our garden gnome. He lights up at night to welcome you too! The family gave me this little guy for Mother's Day. I have another garden gnome that is 3" tall, and Jaeden named him "Je Ponche".  Our place has lots  and lots of frogs and toads, so it's fitting that "Pier Pon" has one on his shoulder. This guy below climbed up the back deck to sit on my stairs.

 Next to the garage is an older apple tree. It has lots of apples on it! We didn't think we would get many this year because of the early blossoms and colder weather, we didn't think there had been bees out to pollinate them. But happily there were! And we still are getting lots of big fat fuzzy bees all around the yard each day. I hope they are finding my tomato plants!

 In the back yard, under the deck there is a little nest. When we moved in we took down several nests, so this is a new one, and this little bird in the next two pictures is one of the parents of the tiny little babies that are in the nest now.

I want to point out, that my favorite camera, my Canon 5D is a 12.8 mpx, and the above shot is a cropped image from the picture below :)

 The other morning I was lucky enough to look out the kitchen window and see this little guy poking his head out from the woods and then walk along the mowed section before returning to the woods..


 On the North side of the house we have cemented in a couple of clotheslines that used to belong to Joel's parents. They are heavy duty and solid, not like you find at the hardware stores now days. As soon as they were up some Eastern Starlings decided to set up house inside the holes. As far back as I can remember birds nested inside these while they were at my mother-in-law's house.

 I decided to play with some new flowers this year. I can't even remember what these are called.

 On the North and South sides of the house, the land slopes a lot, so that at the front of the house you only see the upstairs level, but at the back of the house you see both the upstairs and the basement. On the north side they have put up lumber to grade some of the slope. But there are so many gophers and moles the ground is full of holes and this spring when we got heavy rain the sand started washing away, and some of my poor hastas were lost to the cave ins.

 This is Jake with the Buick Electra he bought. He's so cute, he asked me to take his pictures out in the field with it. Next time he wants pictures of him with it while he is wearing his suit. Although, he did show it at the Back to 50's street rod show, and made several changes to it before he left. It now has two black skulls painted on the hood, skull heads as door lock knobs, and a revolver chamber for his shifter knob. These pictures were taken in the field on the south side of the house. .

 

You can probably see that we have a large infestation of  these babies...

For those of you that don't know, these are milkweed. When we found out we had milkweed I was a little hopeful that we would see lots of butterflies. However, we haven't so much and so the excitement has worn off, and been tarnished from finding out that they are poisonous to animals. Huh. So, now, my plans for that being an alternate grazing field for horses is diminished. Also, I had been thinking about getting fainting goats to keep the field clear until we do get horses, but they can't eat them either!

We also have these weeds that make big puffy things to blow!

 There are lots of weird wood fixtures around the yard.

 This building is at the North end of the property, by the farmer's field. He, by the way, is growing corn this year. Last year was soybean. I liked playing with shooting different angles of this tipping greenhouse type structure.

 

 Another weird wood thing in the yard.

 

I love this old time knob on one of the shed doors. So cute!

 

 There are also lots of places around the property with stacked up dirt (maybe a gopher city?) or wood that they were going to burn? We aren't sure, but we will have to work next year on getting it cleared out. We have other projects for this year.  

 The house also has several moose decor on it. This is a bell that Joel gave me for Christmas.

 The house came with several of these moose lights on it. The house decor, when it was staged, was "backwoods" kind of themed. I loved it, and plan to eventually move all our stuff over to that kind of style of decor.

 This cute little planter shelf sits outside of our window. It has little moose cut out of it.

 This is a bush that we have in the flower garden that I'm not sure what it is. We thought it was dead and were going to dig it out, but before we got to it, it had developed leaves and these pretty pink flowers on it. If you know what it is, let me know!

 This is a flowering tree that is at the edge of the woods, I was wondering what it is too. It's not a buckthorn, although it reminds me of it, but it doesn't have the thorns on the end of the branches.

This next tree ended up being a mock plum tree (I suspected it was, but Joel wouldn't believe me). It has a disease called black knot. We have to trim some more branches from it and spray it. Black knot is a fungus.

 I just had to ad this because I liked it. This is looking East over the trees between the house and the rail road tracks.

This is a shot into the field on the south side of the house. I took it from the driveway while I was waiting for Jake to pull his car into it. The arch in the middle of the field was what caught my interest. It turned out to be a raspberry plant, and I got a surprise when I zoomed in!  Can you tell why this is the last of my cameras and lenses to be sold?

When I get a chance I have more pictures to play with. Hope you enjoyed seeing some more of the yard!

Still Hurts

It's still hard to think about Roger and not cry. I wonder how long it will be before I don't choke up every time I think of him being gone.

He was a really good man. So nice and friendly to everyone. So patient. So super patient. I felt so bad that his body was giving so much trouble at the end of his life.

He spent a lot of time with our family, coming to the kids games, family trips to the apple orchard or the Audubon Center for maple syruping, helping Joel with projects around our house, or just hanging out on his deck while we visited.

I have a couple of memories I love to think about. One is when Joel and I were first married we bought a little house 5 blocks from my in-laws. Roger worked on the other side of the neighborhood at the golf course. In the winters when he couldn't golf, he would play cards at the golf course. I thought this was cute. Many times during the summer, when we grew a garden, I would glance out my windows and find Roger in my garden having a tomato. Just like an apple.

One year his school had a reunion. I'm thinking this might have been their 40th . That night he stopped by the house late in the evening. I greeted him at the door and told him Joel was already gone off to work. He knew. He stopped by to visit with me and tell me about his reunion before he went home. I'm still puzzled by this visit, but really enjoyed that he stopped to talk to me and tell me about it. I enjoyed the times we spent with him.

He's left a big hole in all our hearts. I'm so glad my kids were old enough that maybe most of them will remember him when they grow up.

The last week has been super hard on our family. We lost Joel's dad to a heart attack on May 31. That evening Jacob watched a police officer be forced to shoot down an armed man in front of my mother-in-laws home. I've been really worried about him and his psychological wellness since that happened. Maybe time is the best medicine. Maybe also moving out of grandma's house and getting out here to the country will help him too.

My happy medicine is nearly out of my system, I've been off it for 3-4 weeks. I can tell a big difference in how I feel and it's not fun. We started a new health insurance plan on the 1st, but they are excluding pre-existing conditions, so I have to wait until my student money comes in, to cover my doctor visit.

We might have a buyer for our home, but that will depend, I think, on them getting financing. They don't want to take our terms, and want to get financing through a bank instead. I'm not sure how that is going to work for them, but I know they'll be paying a much higher rate than we are offering. They asked me today if I knew of a bank that finances mobile homes. I hope they can get financing! It would be nice not to have to sell it through a CD.