Deer Babies

These are the new additions to our backyard family .... we'll enjoy watching them grow. Lea was able to get some footage from the deck early this morning. Turn your volume up high on your computer so you can here the sounds of nature :)
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Last Night

3 minutes from our 1 hour backyard fireworks show. The rain stayed away and it was beautiful. Already looking forward to next year ....

I Do Take Requests

By request ... here's a little video of Alex playing poker with Lea. A flashback to 2 years ago in our motorhome at Lake Tahoe (our last summer as it turned out) .... we were easily entertained .... hmmmm .... guess we still are :)


Fast forward to now .... and here's a little video I did this morning when I got up .... I don't think I'd even had my coffee yet but I was sooooo anxious to show off the additional fireworks we got in Mountain Home yesterday ....

Power Has Been Restored!

After a day and half with no power and a day and half with half power .... we are now back on the grid! Here was the $310.00 culprit ....


We thought we had done all the major "preventative maintenance" stuff be we never thought of an old house's main circuit breaker.

Ahhhhhhh .... how I do love thy air conditioner so :)

Old Barn Wood and Bugs .... but not together :)

We were able to score some old barn wood last week .... our intent being to make small boxes out of it and sell on Etsy. My first project, however, was to make a small table to sit next to the recliner in the living room. We had a long table there but when we got the new window it just had to go so here's a plank the wood being sanded and the finished table ....



I do as much sanding as I can outside because it's such a fine dust it gets everywhere in the shop ..... but whenever I'm doing little projects on the shop/basement porch it seems I always have company ... be it dogs, deer or bugs. Here's a couple unusual bugs from last week ....



We were without power for the past 2 days and right now we only have 1/2 of the electric working .... unfortunately the air conditioner is one of the missing :( ..... we had a powerful storm move through and it caused a lot of widespread outages but they were pretty quick on restoring power .... however .... for us the fuse blew in the transformer so we were left in the dark. They replaced the fuse yesterday but the storm damaged our breaker panel box and only one side is working .... being that there are two 120's coming in. Anyway .... we might be lucky and have it repaired tonight .... local electricians are very busy right now. I realize that I could never live on an island void of electricity ..... I really love my electricity and internet and I missed it. I really appreciated my Apple device car charger!!!!!!!

Alex and Fireworks .... but not together :)

I've gotten some emails asking about Alex our parrot .... he's just fine and highly opinionated as usual. Here's his opinion of one of the Snow Peas from the garden .... be sure to have your volume up ....


Some of the salad ingredients last night .... fresh picked from the garden ...


Yesterday we went to the Fireworks stand under the big tent in Hardy. If you like looking at fireworks (pre setting them off) then here's our walkthrough ..... I love buying them as much as setting them off :)


We tested a few last night so we'll be heading back this week to buy more. Here's what we've got so far ....

Plates, Windows, Doors, Friends and more ....

In Arkansas you can't just mail in your payment for your car registration ..... first you have to go to the Assessors Office .... so they can tax you a few bucks on your annual property tax I guess ... anyway the Dept. Of Finances (that's the motor vehicle dept) is right next door so it's easy to then pay for your annual tags. What we found out was that since we have a fish and game plate and we pay $35. a year extra for it (it goes to fish and game) we can get a different one every year if we want ..... for One Dollar .... is that cool or what? So here's our old one (which we're going to hang on a wall in our house) ....

and here's our new one ....

On a little side note .... we didn't know that you had to do the car assessment every year until Lea's brother in law, John told us that when he was at the assessors office last week, the assessor said "hey you need to let Lea and Marlene know that they need to get in here and have their car assessed" ...... small town stuff ..... oh and hey Diana .... the assessor said "Hi".

So we ordered a new living room window, a new kitchen window and 2 new sliding glass doors about 3 months ago .... well our job finally made it to the top of the list and now we have beautiful new energy efficient glass in at least part of our house. The old window you couldn't see out of and the sliders leaked water and the wind blew through them enough to blow the curtains .... kinda non energy efficient and they were really hard to open and close. So here's some photos ...



and some before and afters ....
old window

new window


one of the old sliders

new sliders


We're happy .... and Millie got her new chair

and a new friend

That is Trukha ... Marks Husky puppy who's about 4 months old now

I'll end with a photo of the Cucumber plant .... tonight we're having a fresh cucumber in our salads .... there's a nice ripe one in the middle of all this .....


Saturday we're going to buy our fireworks .... I love being able to have the classic back yard fireworks for the 4th of July!