JailBird No More

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

This morning I served my time "behind bars". I owe a HUGE
Thank You

to everyone who donated money to a great cause. With your help I was able to raise over $700 for MDA. YOU ARE AWESOME!


Comedic Relief
1500 acres down...about 1000 more to go. Some comic relief is definitely needed since it continues to rain :(

Here's the 411: Madison loves to play on the swingset at Grandma's. Fluffy (the cat) loves Madison - where ever she is, he is. Now Madison continues to amaze us each time we see her. She's learned to climb up the ladder to the slide and slide down all by herself (under grandma or papa's watchful eye). It seems that the cat has also taken a fancy to playing on the slide. They race up the ladder, Maddy slides down, and then Fluffy slides down. I didn't really believe it until I saw with my own eyes.

Not the greatest videos...but I can't not share them (how's that for a double negative). The whole event was captured on three short video clips and unfortunately the last is sideways - hopefully we can catch it on one good video sometime soon. I'd recommend turning the volume off; it was a very windy day and there is a lot of noise.




Batter Up (Or Something Like That)

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

After last week's post on harvest, my mom thought it was funny to send me the line up for working at home this week. Believe me, that is quite a crew. No "position" designations, although it looks like Nathan may be getting the short end of the stick. I hope that means he doesn't get stuck driving the Red Pete (more to come on this later this week, let's just say no one but dad likes driving that semi).


That's guite an employee organizational sheet isn't it? You may also notice that dad remembered Monday is mom's day to babysit Madison....see how easy this method works to revamp plans on the fly?


Timber !

Monday, November 10, 2008

Bright and early Saturday morning, Steve from Burnett's Tree Service called and said they'd head our way to remove the trees we'd talked to him about earlier in the week. For those of you that haven't seen our neighborhood, its in an older part of Champaign with well established trees. We have 4 pine trees in our backyard. They're old, they shed a lot of needles, and they prevent any sun from getting back there to let very much grass grow.

We decided at some point we'd like to get them taken out. It would give us a little more room in the backyard and Abbey really would like some more grass back there. Never fear, there are still plenty of pine trees in the neighbor's yard.

Any way Steve has been in the neighborhood cutting some other older trees down and after getting a great quote, we moved tree cutting up in our home remodel schedule as well as the budget.

I ran out and got some before pictures before they came on Saturday:




Steve brought in his bucket truck, several people, and even a tree climber. While the trees came down pretty fast, they'll be back today to clean up the trunks and any remaining branches. I'll post some "after" photos tomorrow.





Happy Birthday Dawn!

Saturday, November 8, 2008

It's Dawn's birthday today...and despite the stresses of finishing her PhD, she has lots to celebrate - a new job and recently engaged. Here's to having a great day!


Jamie, myself, and Dawn this past summer at softball


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