Damn, I didn't get all of the summer projects done

and the sun is quickly setting further south. I noticed today that the shadows that were only half of the yard are now the full width of the yard. That only means one thing...Summer is ending and fall is near. I love this time of year because it is so fun to anticipate the leaves and the colors that will cover this big earth. I also like that my body temperature is more easily regulated once the temperatures start dropping. Saturdays will soon be filled with raking leaves and uncovering the pile of compost that has been decaying all summer. Soon the end of yard work as we know it will be over. We won't need to mow or water. The smell of earth as it cools is one of my favorite. I love that in the mornings I feel the need to put on a fleece and that I want to snuggle down into bed. That is not something that comes easy to me but on a cool morning those snuggles feel soooooo good. Here's to a great fall.

Another trip around the sun

Yeap that's right. It's my BIRTHDAY! Off to another great year.

Happy Birthday Sky

On August 3rd Sky turned 4. Here are a few shots from cake and ice cream....

Spoon, Knife...FORK

Henery's Fork that is. We spent the weekend in the Uintas. We had so much fun watching the wild life and enjoying the company of our friends. The boys kept us entertained by building a fort and we worked hard to cut our permits of lodge pole down. I think I will start selling poles and spend a weekend harvesting them. It was a nice get away and a quick reminder that cold weather is fast approaching. By 6:00pm we were heading in to put on long sleeves.

Congratulations Ian & Steph

Pole dancing

With tipi poles that is. We spent the weekend in the Uintas cutting down tipi poles and having another great weekend camping. On Thursday it seemed that 20 poles would be nothing to cut down. On Sunday morning 20 poles seemed like a LOT.
Good thing we started working on Friday cutting down tipi poles. It took some work to saw them down but the most work came from pulling them out of the forest and back to camp. You see, 30 feet of tree is a lot. In the forest you look up and have to imagine ME standing on my shoulders 6 times and then you have to find the straight ones. No wobbles needed for tipi poles. Then comes the easy part. Sawing the tree off the stump. Once the tree is detached comes the hard part. You have to drag the poles out of the forest with the butts heading out. ( I guess you don't have to but it is the easy way) the hard part comes when you are trying to figure out how to down the tree so that you are positioned for the easy drag out of the forest. Next you hope that the tree makes it down to the ground with out hitting other trees or getting hung up on other trees. Then the hardest part. We started stacking our cuts in a pile in the forest so we could keep cutting and then work on getting them out of the forest to camp. That's tricky you see because everything starts looking the same. Even when you think you find a place that you will never forget once you go back out hunting trees it takes some work to find your pile again. Then you have to haul all of your cuts out of the forest. This requires a lot of ziging and zaging while dragging usually two 30'+ trees on your shoulders (that's how I do it. If you are as tall as Doug you can just carry them in your hands near your side, but when I tried that it took me twice as long). This becomes known as pole dancing. We only got a few poles stripped while in the woods because we didn't want the whole trip to seem like work. Look for an upcoming post about what we did while we were not pole dancing.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy

Root Beer that is!

My sisters were in town a few weeks ago. We had a sleep over at my house. It was so much fun to be together as sisters. We went to lunch, a movie and made ROOT BEER. This makes for two times this summer. Funny that we don't really drink that much root beer at our house but we seem to have a lot of the supplies to make it so.... Here you get the inside look at making root beer.

Carefully adding extract. I know I thought it would be fun to add my own spices together to make root beer only to find out that in the US of A you can not get your hands on sassafras root. It causes cancer and the FDA finds it to be "unsafe" So I resort to using extract that could also cause cancer but the FDA has chosen to allow it.

Here is the real scientist, Lori carefully measuring and figuring how to convert milliliters to ounces to gallons. I quickly turned this activity over to the two of them. I was reaching for my phone to call Gene (my Dad) when the math words started flying.

Paige was the master mixer. You see she missed rootbeer making last month so we did this night just for her. It was tons of fun and we are glad we made more.

This was late in the night probably around 10:30pm when we were silly sisters that we are so used to being. Bottoms up!
We soon made our way to the spare room and piled all three of us on the bed to laugh and visit LATE into the night.