Life on the farm

Technically William’s birthday was yesterday, but we were able to spend the day with him today. Of course before we could go, the snow that blew in last night has to get moved out of the way.

Cleaning the yard before we headed out to see William today

It’s just crazy this year. You get the yard cleaned up just in time for the next snow storm to roll in. And what are they predicting for Monday? Winter storm warning. Yea, who would have guessed? So when the sun was shining this morning it was time to make our escape and head south to wish William a Happy Birthday. Our plans were to take him out for dinner. So that’s just what we did. Kyle, Jude (William’s girlfriend) and also William’s roommate were able to join and that made it even more fun. The place we wanted to eat at was packed, but that gave us time to catch up with everything that the kids were doing. William had a really busy week with some big tests and I think he said he went to 3 job interviews. He was just beat. So we knew that this visit was going to be a fast and quick one. He looked like he just wanted to crash someplace. But after a great dinner we headed back to the dorm so Kyle could see the room before he leaves for Korea. Kyle hasn’t had much chances to visit William at school so we wanted to take any opportunity when we can to get the boys together.  After checking out what the kids did to rearrange the dorm room again, it did seem to give them more room. Next year they’re planning on living in an apartment so that’ll be even more room!  After dropping off the muffins and bread that I made yesterday, we found ourselves heading back home. It sure doesn’t seem like 20 years could actually have gone by that fast could it? I mean, wasn’t it just yesterday that we were bringing William home for the first time? And now here he is at college and starting his own life. Humm.. I know that I’m supposed to support the kids growing up, but no one ever said that I had to like it!

Happy Birthday William!

It’s Valentines Day today and I had to laugh to myself how things change so much as you get older. What I mean by that is this. William is hanging out with his girlfriend in Ames, Kyle was hanging out with some friends, Daryl is still in Illinois for work, and me? Well, I’m home alone. Now a couple of years ago I couldn’t imagine thinking that I would be OK with that. But honestly? It wasn’t bad at all. I got Chinese take out for supper, picked up a bottle of wine to go with it, and had complete control of the remote.Life was good but next year on Valentines Day it will be even better!

My Valentines Supper

The dog and cat kept me company while they were sleeping on the blanket in the living room for most of the night… well until Little Kitty got kicked out when I blamed her for the gas problem coming from that part of the room. But other than that not much else going on around our farm. I snapped a quick picture of the moon. Tonight’s full moon is also called the Snow Moon. February’s full moon is called that according to the Farmers Almanac because of  all the heavy snow fall that we usually get this month. Man I think they called this one right!

Can you spot the full moon in the picture?

Full moon in February is called the Snow Moon

We decided this morning to head over to an omelet breakfast that our local Catholic school was putting on as a fund raiser. Not only having someone cook you an omelet for breakfast sounds like a great idea, but it’s also going to a good cause.

Then after a breakfast of omelets and cinnamon rolls, off to town we went to get some groceries. I took a turkey breast out of the freezer to thaw for Monday night, but it sure seems like I can get in kind of a slump when it’s time to plan for meals. So I was hoping to be inspired today while I was walking down the aisles. I also decided to start clipping coupons again. I was really faithful with it about a year ago and then I fell off the wagon. I seem to spend more time organizing them just to throw them in the recycle bin lately. At the store I wanted to buy some things for the bathroom – toothpaste, antiperspirant, soap, you know stuff like that. There are always coupons for those things and I was able to fill my zippy bag full of them. I also wanted to pick up a couple of other things and it didn’t take long and I thought we were done. Then I remembered that I wanted some spray paint. Daryl hung out by the apples and off I went. I said that I’d be right back. When I came back with my spray paint Daryl looked really worried and asked what I was going to use ‘that’ color on. I should have said our kitchen chairs or something just to scare him, but I said that I wanted to paint my new shelf for the scrap book room. And since this room I can make as girly as I want, I decided that this color would work really well. See my walls are yellow and I think it’s going to look really good. I ended up taking the shelf down in the basement to spray it and holy cow it sure smells in the house. It’s got a pretty good chemical smell going on, even upstairs! I’m planning on putting the second coat on tomorrow morning before I leave for work. As long as the house smells, why stop now?

Before pictures of my new (old) shelf

First coat of paint on

As for the rest of the day I worked on getting some pictures organized and also organizing Daryl’s folks’ things that his family still needs to go through. I had a chance to check out some of the things when I was putting them in the totes that I bought this morning and I came across some really old papers. The papers were from 1855 and in the 1860’s when his Mom’s family bought some land. We were talking about that tonight and Iowa became a state in 1846 and the Civil War was in 1861. So the papers were signed before the Civil War. How crazy is that?

And to end the night one of Kyle’s friends dropped him off after a bunch of kids got together for the weekend down in southern Iowa. He said that he couldn’t believe how many accidents that they saw on the highway yesterday morning when they were driving and even though it was snowing, we couldn’t understand why they would have seen so many. Then on the news tonight they said that there was a 30 car pile up on that highway. What?!!  I am so glad that we didn’t know that yesterday! I think I worry about the kids too much the way it is.

Oh well, we’re all getting ready for bed and tomorrow we’ll start the week all over again.

What is tonight’s activity? Well it’s to try to get organized in all of our paperwork. For some reason it seems like our paperwork just kind of grows and grows. Now it’s not really stuff that we have to keep, but I’ve been keeping it .. well…. just in case I need to refer back to them. Now that’s kind of dumb I think. I had quite a pile to go through to even start my task tonight. So the first thing that I did was to get some notebooks lined up. A friend of mine from work is probably the most, OK she IS the most organized person that I know and she is successful using notebooks. So that’s my 2014 plan. My first notebook has information on the community project that I’m helping with. This one was easy. I only went to two meetings so far 🙂 Then the second notebook has all my passwords in it and also my Mom’s computer passwords. This one wasn’t too bad, but was getting a little bit more complicated. The third one? Well that one had my ‘to do’ lists. I usually write them down on scrap pieces of paper and this way maybe it’ll help keep me motivated. The last one was the big one. This notebook has a working ledger of our expenses and other financial information in it. Now I know that it’s not going to be perfect, but I think it’ll help us to keep track of stuff better. I guess time will tell right? Now just to figure out where to keep all my notebooks.