Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e always have our first barbeque of the season on the weekend that falls around July 1st which happens to be my birthday.  This year, we had this barbeque on July 1st.  If anyone is wondering, I turned 61 years old this year.  Unfortunately, most days, I feel like I'm 81 and I have difficulty and a lot of pain trying to get around and I even look the part due to being hunched over and having difficulty standing.  Contrary to how I feel on these days, my birth certificate claims I am 61 years old this year.   We had a very dry spring to the point where everything in the yard was dying and turning brown but the past two weeks were filled with day after day of solid rain until the day before our scheduled barbeque.  The rain stopped just in time for me to mow the lawn, do some much needed landscaping and set up the backyard for our barbeque.  It was sunny, hot and humid with a bit of smoke from Canadian wildfires hanging in the air.  My health didn't fare so well and I ended up

B ack in mid-August, we had a nice evening of pitching and putting in the backyard with some of the grandchildren.  This type of thing is always a great opportunity for capturing photos of the grandkids so, naturally, I had a couple of cameras and a few lenses on hand.  While they played, I kept moving around trying to capture the best angles.   Shooting photos of kids means getting down on my knees or crouching or sitting on the ground but my knees have been painful and swollen since my first bout with COVID-19 so this little informal photo shoot was a bit painful.  Even if I sit on the ground, getting down onto the ground and getting up again is painful.  Kneeling or crouching, however, will put me back on crutches again so I always avoid those two positions.  Still, I refused to resort to shooting photos of kids while looking down on them.  Kids should always be photographed down at their level.  It was beginning to get dark as the sun set behind the trees but we still had some sun

L ukey and I played on the new putting green a couple of days early last week.  We had a great time and were looking forward to spending time "Pitching and Putting" more often.  Unfortunately, the putting green took a bit of a nosedive so we haven't been using the putting green at all.  Well...  we haven't been using the putting green for golf.  I've been busy working on trying to revive the new putting green. In order to choose the right remedy, I needed to figure out what went wrong.  This was a bit of a problem because I really only had a bunch of guesses on what went wrong.  Let's list them... 1.  We used the putting green too soon before the new grass had time to mature and become hardier.   2.  Maybe my new putting green had a disease. 3.  Perhaps I didn't keep it moist enough once we started using it. 4.  Or the opposite...  perhaps I had some root rot and I had been watering it too much.   5.  Maybe the pH wasn't right for this type of grass. 6

L ukey and Kenzie arrived yesterday to stay with us for a couple of weeks.  It was a nice first day with them and they were greeted with a nice surprise when they arrived...  waiting in the yard were two new bicycles!  They had outgrown their old bicycles so Gee and Papa purchased two size-appropriate bicycles.  Needless to say, they were pretty excited so this was their first activity of the day.  Actually, they did a lot of riding... Kenzie arrived at the house wearing sandals but she changed into sneakers immediately so she could ride her new bike... While I was waiting for Lukey and Kenzie to make a lap past our house, I decided to shoot a photo of the house... I think Lukey was a bit torn between riding his new bike and playing golf.  After some initial bike riding, Lukey and I spent a lot of time pitching with a wedge onto the green and then putting on the green.  Lukey even got a hole-in-one once! After a short while, I realized that we needed to do some groundskeeping so I pull