Save the lettuce and Museum Day!

With the 4th of July being on a Saturday this year, both the companies that Daryl and I work for are closed on Friday. SCORE!!!

So what to do with the day right? Well first things first, since I saved the peas in my garden, I wanted now to move on to the rest of the vegetables. I wanted to see if I had any lettuce left. I really like fresh lettuce out of the garden and for some reason when William planted it in the past years he had everything come up. Me? Well I’m not as lucky. Or maybe the weeds choked it out. Yea, that’s probably the real reason. Oh well whatever happened, it was todays job early this morning to see just what I have left (if any) and try to save the lettuce.

I’ve been trying to only spend only about an hour a day pulling weeds and tilling the garden ad so far so good. For today’s job, I was able to find a few scrawny stems. Well it’s better than nothing and now to see if they will grow better without all their friends the weeds.

After catching up with things around the house, Daryl and I have been talking about going to the John Deere museum for sometime now and today looks like the perfect day for that. After some other errands in town and of course we went out for dinner, we finally made it to the museum later in the afternoon. And to say that I was impressed is an understatement. The museum is beautiful. OK, that’s kinda weird to say that about a tractor museum,  but from the second you walk into the door you know that these guys spared no expense to make it look expensive and awesome. They did really cool things with technology and it was fun just to see how they not only set up the place but also how much stuff was in it. Man oh man, if we could just get our little store in our town to look 1/10 this cool once a year for the Irish Fest that would be awesome!

On to the next museum. The next one was the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum & Grout Museum of History & Science. Whew! Just looking at the title you know that there’s going to be a lot going on in there right? And that’s an understatement. This museum looks big on the outside but once you get inside you know that if you want to see it all, you’re going to be spending a couple of hours inside it.

The Five Sullivan brothers

I’ve learned quite a bit these past few weeks about the Sullivan brothers and the one thing that it really interesting is that one of the reasons all five of these brothers signed up for the war was because of a friend from a nearby town of ours was killed at Pearl Harbor. This made the boys angry that their friend had to die and they wanted to do something about it. Now I know that this was a time when most all young guys were signing up for the war, but seriously having 5 sons and all of them heading out at once? Then the story goes that the boys who wrote home all the time all of a sudden had their letters stop. But the parents neighbor who’s son was also a sailor wrote home to say it was too bad that the Sullivan’s boat went down. How crazy hard that would be wouldn’t it? Yikes! And they just had to wait until someone gave them to formal word. I can’t hardly stand it if one of the boys are traveling somewhere and I don’t a text that they made it OK safe and sound. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t handle this situation very good that the Mom and Dad had to go through!

Because this museum is also a Veterans Museum there are artifacts and history of all the wars. There was one place in the museum that we really wanted to go visit and that was the Korean War. Now I wanted to go see this not only because my Dad was in this war but also because we had heard that Daryl’s uncle was in a picture in the museum. If I remember the story right, his uncle said that they were visiting the museum with their grown kids and one of the kids turned around and saw a picture of their dad (Daryl’s uncle). Seriously how cool it that? It might bring back some memories that have been put away for awhile but it would be something to see if you were his wife and kids. It didn’t take us long and we like we found Morris. Check him out! I don’t think they knew this soldier was from Iowa, but even so, there was 8000 Iowa’s in the war and around 5,720,000 people sent over to serve, how crazy it is to see Morris standing there !

Well that pretty much ended our day for today. We thought about getting our bikes out for the first time this year  – but it only was a thought for now 🙂