Road Trippin' It

With the Explorer  packed with our necessities for a week long trip, Easton and I hit the road going north at 9:43 on Thursday.  It was going to be an adventure with our ultimate destination being Craig and Gretchen's in Albany, New York.  Easton was my navigator and helper.  We listened to music and watched movies on the laptop.  Narnia and Narnia II and Harry Potter helped us pass the time.  

We followed this lovely Ben and Jerry's car for at least 100 miles.  It was pretty trafficy and we just couldn't seem to get ahead of it!  After ten hours of driving we stopped in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania for the evening and stayed at the Quality Inn.  It wasn't our first choice or our second, but we were happy to have a place to stay and be done with driving.  We popped into the 24 hours Denny's for our late evening dinner.  That was the only place open in the town!

Easton and I split the blueberry pancake grandslam breakfast:  two eggs, two blueberry pancakes, two pieces of bacon (we ordered another side of bacon) and a huge pile of hashbrowns.  It was the perfect dinner and just the right amount of food for both of us!  We slept well with our tummies nice and full.

After a nice complimentary breakfast in the morning we drove for about 45 minutes to reach Hershey, Pennsylvania, the place where Mr. Hershey invented the chocolate bar and started his amazing chocolate business.  We were able to visit the museum and learn all about making chocolate bars out of the large cocoa bean.  It's quite the interesting process!  We went to the "Chocolate Lab" and we able to create our own personalized chocolate bars while learning even more about chocolate.  We were able to eat the leftover chocolate ingredients and it was delicious!

Mr. Hershey put wheels on old bathtub to wheel the chocolate supplies around the factory.

Here we are in our awesome hairnets getting ready to design our own chocolate bars!

Just waiting for our chocolate...

 Let the designing begin!  We poured melted chocolate into molds, creating our design.  Then we swirled the chocolate with a stick to get just the right pattern that we wanted.

Eating the leftover melted chocolate, YUM!

 After we left the museum, we got in our car and went to start it....NOTHING!  The car was dead and wouldn't start.  UGH!  I tried again and the system started to go haywire.  The flashers started flashing, the alarm sound started going off, the lights inside the car started blinking and the computer screen kept flashing on and off.  It was like the car was possessed!  Easton and I were getting a little nervous.  I called my handy, dandy Ford Roadside Assistance people and scheduled someone to come out and give us a jump or whatever was needed.  While waiting about an hour for him to come Easton and I walked down the street to the Chocolate Avenue Cafe and ordered some yummy lunch to help pass the time.  The town of Hershey was so beautiful and clean.  It was a nice place to be "stuck" in and I felt safe.

 

Our helper arrived on the scene and took one look at our battery and literally groaned when he saw it.  He said it was the worst corroded battery he had ever seen and he had been doing this for many years.  He got the car jumped and told me to not turn it off or it may never start again.  We took off directly for Craig's and carefully analyzed the distance and compared that with how much gas was left in our car.  The guy told me it was OK to fill up the tank while the car was still running, even though that made me really nervous.  We drove directly to their house without making one stop....I followed traffic and really just clipped along. We arrived around 10:00 pm with 33 miles on our tank to spare.  Phew!  We made it and I'm grateful.  I'll get the car into the dealership on Monday and see what's going on.

Glimpses of the Garden

I promise this is the last picture I will share of my finished garden, but this time it really is finished.  I added the black colored mulch to the ground to keep it from getting muddy and the solar lights make a nice touch in the evening.  You never know when you will need a little light at night to pick your tomatoes with!

I spent some time watering this evening and something is eating the leaves on my beans.  UGH!  And something devoured my cute little sunflower seedlings.  Gone...so sad.

Cool Concert

I was invited by these lovely ladies to the Andy Grammer concert!  Oh My Gosh!  (Say that in an incredibly excited teen-age I'm freaking out voice!)  The Higgins girls, Savannah and Sophia are just really the biggest fans of Andy Grammer and they were going to meet him behind the scenes and then enjoy his concert.  They had an extra ticket and I was honored to be invited to go with them and their Mother, Traci.  To be honest, I had never even heard of the dude but when I heard his music during the concert I recognized a few of his songs from the radio.  He really was good and quite enjoyable.  We had a great time.....Traci and I found some of the only seats in the entire little venue and sat and talked during the first two singers who performed before Andy.  There was some serious people watching going on.  I hate to say this but Traci and I were some of the oldest people there.  Oh well....we are young at heart!

 We snapped these pictures while we were waiting on the back staircase to get into the "Meet and Greet".  While we were melting on the hot, sweltering stairs I moved out of the way for a young man coming up the stairs with a sack of food in his hands.  The girls seriously freaked out as he moved by because it was the one and only, Andy Grammer!  I didn't even know who it was.

Andy sang a song from his new album coming out in August to just this small room of people that we were in.  It really was kind of cool to be a part of a personal little concert and to talk to him face to face.  We got his autograph too.  He called me, "Love" when he signed my little poster.  Woohoo!   Well, I am a now officially a fan of Andy Grammer and "That's fine by me!"  (That's one of his songs in case you didn't know!)

Sophia and Savannah created these amazing, personalized gifts for Andy.  Savannah decorated guitar picks and Sophia designed a personalized drink sleeve that was around a bottle of Coke.  While we were sitting on a couch waiting for the concert to start the girls starting screaming.  They were checking their instagram and noticed that Andy had posted a picture of the guitar picks on his own instagram.  Eeeeeeeeek!  What a moment and I got to to be a part of it.  

The concert was in downtown Atlanta. We parked in some parking plaza...when we parked there we read the sign on the wall that said that the lot closes at 10:00. Well, we thought that meant it would close to people coming in. I can remember all of four of us having a conversation about what the sign meant and all of us being so sure that we could park there and everything was hunky dory.   We were SO wrong!  When we walked up to the lot in the wee hours of the night after our wonderful concert experience it was all gated up! There was no way to get to the car. We could see the cute little fire engine red car but couldn't get to it. We kind of got all freaked out standing there in the steamy, humid locked parking lot in downtown Atlanta at 11:00 at night and we just didn't know what to do. We talked about getting a taxi or I thought we could call Stephen and he could come get us. Then all of a sudden out of no where appeared a very tall, large uniformed black man in a navy blue suit and shiny black shoes. He asked us if we needed help. Yep, we did! He asked us if our car was in the lot. Yep, it was!  He was the security dude for the office building above the parking lot.  He said the lot was closed.  Um, yeah, we figured that out!  He told us to follow him and he would get us in the lot.  Phew!  Relief!  We sauntered into the beautiful air conditioned law building and wound through hallways, through doors and on elevators. It's a good thing Mr. Security lead the way because I would have seriously gotten lost. We ended up right where Traci's little red car was parked. Phew! What a relief. He didn't even make us pay the parking fee. He just said to go. He opened the large silver, metal gate and we quickly zipped off but not without Traci handing our new friend a hefty tip. Man, we lucked out of that mess!

The Hard Part is Done

The entrance to the garden was completed this weekend.  The foundation walls have been built and I now have an easier access into the garden.  It was seriously way more work that I ever anticipated but it looks great and I think structurally it's great.  I still need to smooth out the levels and then put black bark on top of the dirt to keep the dirt in place and help with mud when it rains.  It's gonna be great!

It's Daddy's Day

It's nice to have a special day set aside to honor our Dad's.  We love them everyday but's it's nice to really let them know we love them on this day.  I wasn't able to see my Dad who lives in Utah and that's always hard but I did talk with him on the phone and that's the best we can do when I live 2000 miles away.  I am so blessed to have my Dad in my life.  He always made me feel special and loved.

We went to church and heard some great talks about the priesthood and priesthood keys.  The first talk was given by our wonderful, confident Easton!  This was his first talk in Sacrament meeting and he did awesome!  He was so confident and presented his message very well.  Definitely proud of him.  The Primary children sang a an adorable Father's Day song and I accompanied them on the piano.  There were so many children standing between the piano and the chorister that I couldn't see her and we both struggled getting started!  I would start and then nobody would come in.....oh well.  We will fix that problem for next year.  It's important to be able to see the chorister!

Stephen picked steak with baked potatoes and asparagus for his honorary dinner with some ice cream and raspberries drizzled with chocolate sauce for dessert.  It was just the three of us for dinner.  

 

Easton's homemade card was cute!

 We paid a visit to Stephen's Dad and just sat talking with him for a while and brought him a little present.

 Three generations of great men!

A Serious Work in Progress

Back in the summer of 2012 our yard was pretty overgrown and things had really gotten out of hand.  With the help of Dallin during the summer while he was preparing to leave on his mission, I had him take out all of the  bushes in the first level of our railroad ties that were ugly and unruly with the plan to use the ledge to create a vegetable garden.  With a careful analysis of our yard I decided that this was the only spot in our entire yard that got the required 6 hours of sun to sustain a healthy garden.   It was a good plan but after the bushes were removed we never followed through with the vision.

When the summer of 2013 starting I was determined again to get my garden going. The weeds had taken over the ledge and some serious clearing of the bottom level and the first level had to happen. With the help of Landon this time we worked together for days clearing, weeding, spraying roundup and hauling away leaves, trees, and rocks. We really got the ledge totally clean.

 With the ledge cleared off we were ready to start laying the foundation for garden.  Because the ledge sloped to encourage water run off we decided that we would have to build the garden in two levels to accommodate the gradual slope.  We bought garden timbers, rebar, and spikes and began building the structure.  It was a lot of work and we weren't professionals.  We just kind of figured things out as we went.  First we were building each level with two timbers high and were going to dig out the dirt and fill it in with the good stuff.  With further thought, we decided it would be easier to build raised beds with the top ledge being held by four timbers and the bottom level being held by three timbers.  Then we just had to fill each level with nutrient rich soil and we would be ready to go.

We kind of hit a dead end during the summer with a ton of rain that made it difficult to finish and we also headed on our vacation. By the time we got back from Utah it was too late to even get a garden in so we just never completed it.

Now if you'll fast forward to summer of 2014.....here we go again.  I was still bound and determined to have a garden so I started the process again.  With Dallin and Landon both on missions this summer I decided I would hire some boys in the ward to help me.  I know my limits and I just couldn't get those dang spikes hammered in without wearing myself out.  The Bradham twins are leaving on a mission soon and they were happy to earn some extra money.  So... here we go again.  We got started last week and the boys did a great job piecing my mess together and helping it work.  I seriously have gone to Lowe's every single day for a week and a half.  Every day we would end up making a list with new supplies that I would need for the next day whether it was more timbers, spikes, rebar, fence panels, fence posts, stepping stones, rocks, and sand.  And everyday we would run into problems in our design that we would have to fix or change.  What a process this project has been!

Yesterday evening I spent two hours at Lowe's FINALLY picking out my vegetable plants and seeds.   The garden was ready to go. I had a plan after talking to my friend Michelle Baumgart who is really an expert gardener.  She gave me great tips and told me which plants grow well in Georgia.  Georgia gardening is way different than Utah gardening.  We battle fungus, mold, rot, crazy bugs, too much rain, humidity, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, and DEER!!!

And welcome to my garden.....you may now take a tour.  The entrance is not quite finished because the Bradham's went golfing yesterday and we need to build one more little retaining wall and add a couple more fence panels to keep out the deer.

I love my little gate that opens up to the narrow walkway into my secret garden.  What a fun little place that's all mine!  

 As you walk down the path you can see the two garden terraces filled with plants.  Within a short time we will be enjoying sweet potatoes, green peppers, red peppers, and yellow peppers....tomatoes of a thousand different varieties, cucumbers, beans, squash, zucchini, corn and bunches of herbs.  I even planted some sunflowers that will get up to 12 feet tall.  I spread marigolds throughout the garden to help keep out unwanted pests.

 

The end of the garden has four rows of newly planted corn seeds.  Hopefully we will be able to keep the raccoon out and if we can't keep them out then I hope I planted enough corn so that there will be enough for us and them!

Notice the handy dandy fence that we put in.  Hopefully this will keep the deer out!!!!  It's a war that I hope to win with these wretched creatures. They eat everything.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of my "front yard" garden.  Plants and seeds are in and the soil has been watered.  Let the fun begin!