Good morning!! Welcome back. I hope you are excited for today. We have a lot of adventures to go over, so let's jump right in and get started.
AUGUST 2021
There were so many fires that August. The air was thick with smoke and smelled like a campfire, you could even taste it.
Jaina and I went looking at antique stores for fun and we found this awesome coat.
I broke my finger. I don't remember how. I remember it hurt and that it made doing anything next to impossible, especially since I broke it right before we started getting the house ready to move in.
My new domain! The property goes past that white barn and clear back to that little peach house in the distance. This was the state of the yard when we started to move in. Just wait until you see what it looks like a year later.
Jaina all dressed up and looking fancy.
Richard has the best curly hair.
He's a redhead.
Having fun at Lagoon
It was our 10 year anniversary and so we went and visited the church where we got married.
I got a new perm. Thanks Becky!!
New little Sugar Glider babies.
Meow-meow's first day of Third grade at his new school in Layton. The first couple of weeks of the school year were quite difficult because we were still living in Nathan's sister's house, but we had to have the kids all attending their schools in Layton. It made for some very stressful commutes. I would drive them up and drop them off to school in the morning and then I would go to our new house and help the Durant's pack and clean. After the Duran'ts left, I would spend my day at the house cleaning, painting, and doing whatever needed to be done to get the house ready for us to move into.
Jimmy came with me to pick Meow-meow up from school
He turned 16!!!
Blowing out the candles.
The Durant's moving truck. We were finally getting close to being able to start working on moving in!!
Which was a challenge because the Durant's had smoked in the house. I have learned how to permanently get rid of any and all smell of smoke. That's the upside, the downside is that it's a lot of work. First, you make a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. Then you spray it all over the surfaces. This next part is the most important, you HAVE to let it set for 5 minutes. Then it just wipes off. If there are some more stubborn parts, you can mix the liquid mixture with Baking Soda and make a paste, that will for sure remove it. Once the cleaning is done, you then have to paint it with Kilz paint. After that, you can paint in whatever color you choose. The difficult part was that ALL surfaces had to be cleaned and treated. We took out all of the blinds, changed out all of the light fixtures, replaced all of the flooring, and had a company come out to scrub and clean all of the vents. All of that hard work paid off, because you would never be able to tell that this house had been smoked in at one point. The downside is that it took several weeks to get the house to the point that we could start moving in.
Back on July 24th when we had to move out of our Bountiful house, the Durant's had kindly and generously offered to let us store all of our stuff in the parts of the house that they had already cleaned out and weren't using. So, once they were gone, we had to move all of our stuff out to the garage so we could get work done in the house.
Since we were tearing out carpets and doing a thorough cleaning of the house, we decided to take advantage of it and tear down that section of wall that separated the kitchen from the front room, we wanted a more open feel, and to make the kitchen dining area big enough to fit the whole family.
We have come to the end of August 2021! Next up, August 2022.
AUGUST 2022
Never, ever smack your finger with a hammer.
And this is how the back yard looked one year later. Quite lovely, if I do say so myself.
JJimmy turned 17!!
Meow-meow's first day of 4th grade!!
This young man is very talented.
He decided that he wanted to learn to play the guitar and self taught himself how.
More Sugar babies.
Finding odd and suspicious pieces of carpet
The 70's called.
It doesn't help suspicions when you also find tons of bones buried in the yard.
Thankfully they are all animal bones.
Football season is beginning!!
And that is all I have in the way of August 2022 pictures. So, it's onto August 2023!!
AUGUST 2023
There is a really funny story behind this picture. In this picture, I am at the Urgent Care, waiting to be seen by a doctor because my thumb was swollen and painful, and only a few minutes before, had purple glittery ooze coming out of it. Yes, you read that right, purple glittery ooze. I have some colored lead mechanical pencils. Several weeks previously I had accidentally stabbed my thumb into one of them while I was putting another one away in the nifty pen case I have. I didn't think anything of it until it got swollen and painful, but when the purple glittery ooze started coming out, I figured that it was time to go see the doctor. He barely lanced the site when a fairly decent sized piece of purple lead came shooting out. I was given antibiotics and sent on my merry way.
Do you remember the chicks we got a few months back, well they were grown up enough for us to realize that one of them was a rooster. While we are zoned for chickens, we cannot have roosters because of all the noise they make. So, for a couple of months, we were constantly on the lookout for someone who could have roosters and wanted a rooster.
This too is a funny story. Do you remember the pigs? By this time they were MASSIVE. We had an EPIC thunder/rainstorm. Nathan and I were just relaxing in our room when we got a call from a neighbor telling us that our pigs were out. At that time, the only people home were me, Nathan, Jacen, and Meow-meow. Apparently the thunderstorm freaked the pigs out so much that they tore the fence away from the barn and escaped. We chased those silly pigs all over the place before we finally managed to trap them in the neighbors yard in the small space behind his white barn. Jacen stood at one end of the barn, and I stood at the other. Now, when we were first told that the pigs were out, we immediately jumped up to go outside to try and get them back into their pen. I put on the first pair of shoes that I could find, my sandals, that would later turn out to be a very bad idea as you can see. Anyway, we had Meow-meow placed to block the pigs from going back into the neighbors yard, leaving their only choice to be into our yard where Nathan was waiting to chase it back into the pen. Wrangling one pig at a time worked much better than trying to wrangle four of them at a time. It was tricky on my end to only let one pig at a time escape out from where we had them trapped. So, while I was trying to keep the other pigs penned while I released one of them, the biggest and heaviest pig stepped down on my foot. It was an extremely painful experience. At first I didn't think anything was wrong, my foot hurt, but I could still use it, and we had to get the pigs back into their pen and so I kept going until we were down to one pig left. Nathan had called Eilee and Tiger Lily to come home from wherever they were to help us out. Thankfully Tiger Lily and her friend arrived just in time to help with the last pig, because my foot, by this time, was finally hurting so bad that I couldn't walk on it. So, when I had a moment, I glance down and saw all the blood. That led us to our second trip to the Urgent Care in two days. The people at the Urgent Care desk definitely recognized me. Everyone had to come see the lady that got stepped on by a pig. They did numb me up pretty well, but it was still a very unpleasant experience to get the wound all cleaned out and stitched up.
Sweet little Cocoa Bean
I mustache YOU a question!
Her favorite place to perch.
Hilarious how she is sitting.
Meow-meow coming out to snuggle with me in the hammock.
I got these from working on replacing one of Choppy's belts.
He turned 18!!!
Pink Floyd concert banner from 1982
He loved it!!
18 candles to blow out.
It took a while for that silly thing to heal because unfortunately, because it's me, the stitches popped open and I just had to be diligent at keeping the wound clean and letting it heal on its own.
I finally got all of the dirt moved off of the island and put my other hammock onto it. It is a little slice of paradise.
Aww, they love napping on Jimmy's bed.
It's GAMEDAY!! I got messing around with some Snapchat filters. I look scarily like my older brother.
Jimmy's best friend invited him to go on an Alaskan cruise with his family.
They had a layover in San Francisco for, I think, a day.
They got to go see the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's quite lovely.
They also toured the Japanese tea garden.
So the scenery in Alaska is BREATH TAKING. One day I would love to go see Alaska for myself.
They went to some kind of lumber jack show.
He got to play with Husky puppies and do some bob sledding.
They went kayaking and apparently there were so many fish in the river that Jimmy was able to just lean over and scoop a couple of them up with his "bear" hands.
I guess Starfish have butts, who knew.
Bears got to have a spa day too!
Not so delicious food on the cruise?
Jimmy also worked at Lagoon over the summer and loved it. He was a supervisor and worked over in the area where the old White Rollercoaster is.
His work crew.
He and his friend riding the new Primordial ride. The employees got to test ride it before they opened it up to the public.
These next few photos are of Jimmy and some of the work friends he made.
Um I think something is behind you, possibly chasing you. I think you had better run.
Transformers are real!!
Waldo likes to play at Lagoon
More work buddies.
Well, there you have it, that's all I have for August 2021, 2022, and 2023. Jimmy got a lot of blog love because he asked me to put them in, so if any of you other kids would like your personal photos added, you'll have to let me know and then send me the pictures you would like added. I would be happy to add them into my blog posts.
