Monday, July 10, 2017

Problems Left Alone, Weekenders On Our Own


So, this last weekend was crazy busy. We are trying to get so many projects done, while still playing on our bicycles, but I think something's gotta give here. In a couple of weeks, we'll go to Decorah for my birthday and then we'll be on OOBRAI for the next two weekends after that, so we are feeling a little pressure...Or a lot of pressure to get as much done as possible.

This will be a mostly photo post about all of the things we tried to get done this past weekend. As always, every day starts with the chore of dealing with a fat orange cat...


Saturday morning, our friends Burne and Chelsea came over at about 8 am. The plan was for John to  help Burne fix up his new pretty orange bike frame in exchange for the use of Burne's battery operated chainsaw.

They worked for a while on the bike, and since I have no mechanical skills, I opted out of that and rode my bike to the farmer's market. I got some coffee from Cafe del Sol for the guys. They loved it and it's a local company which is always important. I also got some beets and some sweet breads and monster cookies.


I headed home and we got to work on the trees that were growing too close to our foundation. They have been there since I bought the house, but I haven't had a chainsaw to use until now.


I got to use a chainsaw for the first in many years. Yea!. It was nice to have Burne help me figure out how to cut the trees without hitting power lines and our next door neighbor's roof.


 Burne's girlfriend also helped me drag the brush to the front yard.


 We got the first tree cut and the brush dragged out of the way,


 And when we were working on taking down the second tree, I was putting pressure on the stump. Of course, it snapped at the last moment and all the pressure I was applying threw me down on top of the pointy stump of the other tree. Ouch! You should see the bruise on my butt...Well, you really shouldn't see it.


My next order of business was to cut that stump way down where it couldn't do anyone any more harm. That'll teach it.





















After all of our hard work, we rewarded ourselves with a 35 mile bike ride and a nice dinner. The other kids had regular bee and I got a nice, refreshing, Millstream root beer. Ahhhhhhh.


John and I weren't done with the work even then. We had to go to the bridge at the cyclocross course we're working on and clean it. Then we went to Lowe's and got paint and sand for it. We finally stopped at the grocery store and went home. We were both exhausted.


On Sunday morning we were back at the bridge. Since we'll be riding our bikes over the bridge when it's raining, we had to mix sand into the paint to give it traction.


We also wanted to match it up to the same colors as the rest of the buildings in the park.


I think we did a damn fine job. There's about 50 lbs of sand on the bridge now. We could probably play some beach volleyball on there if we wanted to...


Of course, Sunday was no different than any other day in the fact that we had to listen to the constant complaining of our fat orange cat. He was hungry, he wanted to play red dot, he wanted us to brush him...No, not there. Right under his ears. He was hungry some more. Why won't we just let him go outside and kill birds like the other cats?


So, we decided to get away from the cats for a while and go on a bike ride with our friends.

At one point, me and the other woman riding, got a little ahead of the boys. You know, boys can be so slow sometimes...Anyway, the other woman had never ridden the route before. I had ridden the route about a hundred times, but that didn't mean that I wasn't going to miss the turn-off and get us lost just all the same, though.

Some accidents are happy accidents and this one led us to a goat heaven. Look how cute they all are!


The boys finally caught up with us and gave me a hard time for having no sense of direction.



They didn't stop there either. They then gave me a hard time for taking goat selfies.


Apparently, this is what I look like when I'm trying to take a selfie with my new goat friends. Crazier than usual.


We were sad to leave them and our new goat friends were sad to see us go.


We made it to Kalona and had a nice meal and then we headed home to more incredible views and sightings of deer, chickens, sheep, horses and most importantly, goats. And none of them whined at us like Archie does.

We got a lot done last weekend and still got to play, which means we were kind of excited to go to work on Monday so we could finally get some rest.

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