Curfew and getting so much done!

Who new an 8pm curfew and riots could keep you at home more than Covid19 stay at home! Mpls and St Paul were a mess this past weekend. Fire, riots, protests, covid-19, tear gas, rubber bullets, national guard, boarded up and closed stores, destruction, sadness, Black lives matter, and the list goes on. It's been a lot for everyone. Even harder for minorities. Can we all just stop and do the right thing, be kind, be considerate, don't hate. I don't even know where to go with all that's happening right here in Minnesota and across the world right now. I'll just concentrate on what I can control and do.

We made more progress taming our wild back yard. Got all the branches broken down for fire wood, mulch is all in (not in photo), and we put some black dirt and seed down to start growing grass!

mulch done under our deck! The next big project is painting the deck rails and sanding the deck board, then staining. It's looking better. So far we've washed the back of the house, washed the windows, put down mulch, mowed the grass two times, planted herbs in the garden, seeded the lawn, sprayed the weeds and added some dirt to tree roots sticking out of the ground. Still more to go! 

Our fire pit and lawn needs lots of attention. I'll be digging out the fire pit, adding more dirt and seed a little at a time. Zoey won't have any where to run in the yard if I do it all at once. 

We've had some nice bonfires and had a few drinks while on curfew. 

We made some street beef taco's and my crackers!

We did another purchase splurge for camping and had to try it out! 

 We bought this gas portable grille for cooking breakfast when camping. It works pretty good at home too! Pancakes, eggs all at once.

Steve and I even went running in the mornings. He was up for 1.5 miles of running! Adding a little more every run! 

It's Friday!

Our nice warm weather is gone! Back down to the 60's for our high temperature of the day. Burr.. I liked the humidity and hot air. 

It's Friday! No work of course. All these non work days are running together. Does it really matter if it's Friday? Every day feels like the next. I do have plans for the day. I need printer ink at Walmart because Target didn't have any that I needed.  We also have more mulch to finish in our back yard. At 2pm we are all going to look at new houses in Chaska. I do like having a plan for the day and it filled up with things I'm looking forward to doing. I do miss those days of having more fun plans scheduled. We just can't do much of that with this virus and staying home.

I sold our canoe last night for exactly what I wanted $400 in cash! It took three days and lots of emails with various people but it sold to a really nice family. I bought the canoe for Steve's birthday years ago and we used it with the kids when they were little a few times. It mostly was just stored in our back yard under our 4 season porch and never used. It weights 90 pounds, not light weight! Once we got the kayaks, no one ever wanted to use the canoe. So it was time to sell and get rid of it. I did see they are going for $800 now, we purchased for around $325 years ago so made a little money on the deal. 

Almost Done with this!

We did a lot of mulch yesterday on the back yard. Two trips and 2 truck loads of mulch and we still aren't done. We have a big area to cover!! We started putting mulch down under our 4 season porch to freshen it up that took an entire truck load and then on to the burn. We hardly made a dent since it's such a large area and we haven't been maintaining that area in years! It will probably take at least two more truck loads of mulch!

I have some fun news, Friday I'm going to look at more houses with my kids. We are looking for decorating ideas/ selecting lighting, flooring etc for Kendra's new house. They have another neighborhood out in Chaska / same builder. We all love looking at the houses and its great decorating ideas since all the models are all done up! Makes me want to get all new furniture!

Wednesday hump day!

It's the middle of the week! Going fast already! I didn't mind having Tuesday without work. I'm getting use to the new normal of workless days. I some how manage to fill up my day. Yesterday, I made more of my yummy crackers and then some fried rice.

This was the most productive thing I did all day, baking and cooking. 

When Steve got home from working I had planned on getting mulch for our back yard. We were expecting storms, so we decided to just pick up bags of dirt for the front yard and put down some seed. Wow, Menards was busy! Probably not the best time to go there but at least everyone has on masks (store requirement!). We just grabbed the dirt from the outside yard and left asap! We didn't get enough dirt to fill in the area's where our maple tree roots are exposed. We will have to get another 20 bags and seed more of our front lawn. It did rain a whole lot last night. I really thought we'd look out and see all our seeds and dirt washed away. It looks just fine! Now to keep Zoey from going in the dirt and getting muddy! 

She doesn't even look like this hairy dog any more! 

Are we all a bit confused?

It's another new week, wait its Tuesday! Aren't we all a bit confused about what day of the week it is? Every day kind of feels like the same. No reason to plan for anything, no where to really go, life is on hold and what day is it any way?

Here I am on a new Tuesday and trying to figure out how to best spend my day. Another day of no working, rain and not much on the todo list. 

I do think it's time to make more positive changes. Weight loss, I'm not on the corona diet any longer,  instead of worrying and not eating, I'm eating and making poor food choices. Time to get back to exercising more and stop staying no to it. I do feel better once I go for a run, walk or bike ride. Some days it's too easy to just sit and not want to do anything and eat unhealthy. 

Should we change it up?

Steve and I went for a drive to look at land to possibly build a house on. The price was great, on the Cannon River close to the lake and in our price range for 3 acres! The only issue is getting our house ready to sell, down sizing all our crap. We would have to sell our house first and then live some where while we are building. We did see if we could have an RV on the property and live there while building. That would be an option. Are we ready for all this right now? Nope, but we could take the next year and start getting it ready to move and downsize!

We noticed the house next door to this lot was for sale. It didn't look too bad from the outside. The realtor was there and we got a tour. The land is 8.5 acres on the Cannon Falls river. It has a huge garage building next door, but it needs some  (a lot) of inside updates and the price is way more then we want to spend to down size and be debt (mortgage free) $599!

It's probably the right size home for us, once the kids are gone, but so much to fix and really dull looking outside. We passed on this house. I'd rather build something I love and be debt free. 

We've had this canoe for years now and used it maybe 3 times. Its sooo heavy! I'm going to try selling it. No need to store it for more years and never use it. 

All four of us went for a bike ride on the new Spring Lake Park bike/walking trail. It was super nice.

What a view!!

 The Mississippi River Below

Some more blooming crab apple trees 

Today, I started the day off going to the Rental house I take care of. The owners couldn't make it back into town. I needed to pick up some supplies and take updated photos. I had Steve go with and it took far longer than I thought. Three trips to the local ACE hardware store and almost 3 hours later I was done working! Oops, I should have gone alone. A job that was going to take 30 minutes turned out a lot more! 

The cute rental house front porch. 

Just waiting it out!

Saturday we spent the day cutting our trees in the back yard. It was a bit of a jungle out there. We had planned to get a truck load of mulch to put down under all the trees in that back corner of our yard, but found out they weren't open this weekend! Bummer!! It was probably a good thing, because we ended up cutting all the over grown branches and cleaning it up back there. Next week, I'll be putting down the mulch! In the mean time, we are just waiting out the rain, to cut up the branches and pile them up for future bonfires. A lots of work left to be done today! 

 My back was feeling it yesterday after all that bending over and lifting branches. I feel perfectly fine today which is a good thing! We went for our morning run before the next wave of rain storms.

I never made my tart because Celina decided to make a tart using oatmeal for the crust. I got out of that one! 

This guy was handing out on our deck chairs after the rains passed! 

Rain, Rain go away!

Friday we celebrated our 21st Wedding Anniversary! We spent the day working, picking up Chinese food for dinner, playing cribbage and having a back yard bonfire. We treated ourselves to new floating tubes with a cooler in between to use this summer. 

Hard to believe 21 years have passed. So much has changed since we got married. We now have two grandchildren, two more kids ( 20 and 17). My oldest daughter is 32. We moved two times into newly built homes. Our jobs changed multiple times and now have stayed the same since 9/11 in 2001. Retirement years are not far off and downsizing is getting closer every year. We had some set backs with 9/11, both getting laid off within 2 months of each other, starting our own businesses, 2008 market crash, losing jobs but bouncing back, 2018 Steve's eye injury and now 2020 the pandemic. Every time I thought we'd lose our house and income. We some how managed to scrape by and keep living but just not spending money on a lot of out of state travel. We just did more trips close to home, embraced camping. In all, it's been a good 21 years. I look forward to the next 20+ years together! Little did I know in 1996 when I met Steve working at Aveda, that we'd spend our lives together! Who knew I could find someone so perfect for me to be married to forever! 

First date, Stillwater MN

We have a rain kind of day on schedule for this Saturday! I had hoped to do so many yard projects! Good thing I mowed the back yard and trimmed Friday! One less project for the rain filled weekend! I hope to get some mulch done in between the rain today. Maybe make some crackers. Because I keep putting off doing that! 

Steve and I did go for an early morning 1 mile run around the soccer fields. One mile is clearly enough running right now for both of us. I do miss the days where 6 miles felt easy. I'm sure I could run more, but my feet would take a beating and I'd pay for it for months not being able to walk normal without pain of some kind. Better to ease into my running. 

Friday Holiday Weekend

Memorial Day weekend. What to do, now that we have rain every single day in the forecast? 

There are lots of outdoor projects we can get done if it isn't a wash out this weekend with the rain. We did decide to just scrap off all the old paint and have the deck natural. It's going to require renting a big sander and lots of scraping. Better to just do it this year and have it done forever! 

We stopped at Menards bright and early this morning to pick up our Anniversary gift. 21 years! Steve wanted a new grill cover and a two person float with a cooler in between. This way we can float and drink. I'm also seriously considering buying a heater for the deck. My customer has one for their screen porch and she uses it all the time. I think we could spend more time outdoors if we had one of those stand up heaters. I checked out the price at Menards $140, plus buying the gas like for a grill. 

What would I tell you on a Thirsty Thursday?

What would I tell you this Thursday? Steve and I went to Hastings park in town to check out the waterfalls. We received about 4 to 5 inches of rain a few days ago. The water was gushing!!!

We even got sprayed by the water, standing far away from the falls. 

 I took a photo of the trial map to see where we can bike in town. Lots of options! 

We started the whole deck process of power washing and scraping off peeling paint. It's a lot of work! I kind of wanted to just sand the whole deck and not paint it. Go back to just putting on a clear coat. 

We have paint so we will just re-paint again! 

Today, is sweep the deck, pick up the scrapings from the yard below and start painting the rails. I'll leave the actual deck for Steve to roll out. I might do the stairs but that's about it for me. We still have more yard projects. I want to put in some dirt and seed the front yard where the tree roots are sticking out of the ground. We are suppose to get rain all Memorial Day weekend, so it's a good project if we can get it done before it rains! That means, not going out of town to spend it at the lake. Rain and Camping = no fun! 

Exploring a new area!

Since Steve and I had the day off on Tuesday, we had lunch by the river in Hastings. We took our little gas BBQ grill and had some hotdogs, chips and beer next to the Mississippi River. It was a little windy and when the sun went behind the clouds it was chilly. We ate and left there quickly. It was still nice to have a picnic lunch! 

 Our lunch views..

 After lunch we decided to drive across the bridge to check out Gray Cloud Island on the other side of the Mississippi River. We had never been over there before and found the Gray Cloud Dunes park to hike to the river on the other side. I figured from the map, it was about a mile hike to the river. 

 It was a pretty and quite walk to the river and we were the only ones there!

 The train went under rail road tracks and there was a lot of cool looking graffiti all over the tunnel walls.

We ended up hiking 3.5 miles, a lot longer than we were planning. I wanted to see where the end of the trail was at. We just kept following the rivers edge. I should have worn better shoes and not the thin sandals. My feet were sore after all that walking in bad shoes! 

Dinner last night was grass fed beef cheese burgers on the grill. I topped mine with a home made beer batter onion ring. 

They turned out nice and crispy! 

I have a quick job today and then Steve and I both are off today. We are going to start working on the deck, prepping it to paint.