Scattered Thoughts . . .

W henever the grandkids are staying with us, we try to do a weekly weenie roast followed by S'mores over a fire in the backyard.  Of course, the weather must cooperate and, naturally, the weather has been rather lousy this past week for the kids' first week here with us.  Fortunately, we managed to have a weenie roast on a rather chilly, damp but dry evening under overcast skies.  The fire definitely helped keep us warm even though it was a bit chilly.  And, regardless of a little bit of dampness and chilliness, we had a nice meal and a really nice time! The hot dogs roasted over the fire were delicious and I made some New York Deli-style potato salad to go along with them.  I don't make that potato salad often enough!   Here are a few photos from the evening (photos shot mostly by Lukey and Kenzie this time) followed by a very short video...

W henever Lukey stays with us we will play catch whenever the weather permits.  We had a couple of nice weather days so we threw a baseball back and forth on each day.  Most of our time was spent playing golf on the new putting green in the backyard though.  I'll write more about that another time.   While Lukey and I were throwing a baseball, Kenzie was busy in the playhouse.  She was doing a spring cleaning to get the playhouse ready for summer.  She wiped off all the accumulated dirt and pollen and vacuumed up all the spider webs and debris.  I haven't peaked into the playhouse yet but I am sure it is looking good.   Below is a short video of Lukey and me.  We decided to do something different by shooting some video of ourselves.  At the end of the video is a short outtake...  I had an annoying Deer Fly biting my legs, over and over, until I eventually squashed it against the top of my sneaker.  This outtake is a full minute of me trying to put an end to this relentless atta

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

K enzie has been participating in Girls on the Run this school year.  Girls on the Run is a program that is designed to build confidence and character.  As a part of this program, she has been training after school for a 5K run.  Each of the girls can have a running partner so she asked Gee if she would like to do the run with her and, of course, Gee wanted to do this 5K run the moment Kenzie asked her.   Unfortunately, running had been a bit of a problem for Gee.  She was getting some pain in her joints whenever she ran so she had stopped running and replaced the running with walking and yoga.  Gee started training for the 5K run right away anyway by starting very slowly.  Then, Gee had some possible heart problems that were picked up by her fitness smart watch.  We quickly scheduled a few appointments with the appropriate doctors and, fortunately, Gee was cleared for a 5K run with Kenzie.   (After some tests, we found that the possible heart problems were not worth mentioning.  What

Today was a landscaping day.   Mostly, I was focused on the lawn and especially the new putting green.  The new grass in the putting green is filling in nicely.  The grassy area in front of the putting green is coming along but there are still a few bare spots as you can see in the second photo, below.  Some new grass should be popping up out of the bare spots in the next few days.   Mowing a putting green is something new to me.  I started with my usual mulching mower in the hope of picking up most of the debris that has already fallen from the surrounding trees.  We have all sorts of seeds that have fallen from nearby oaks and elms (I think).  After sort of vacuuming up the putting green using my usual mower, I then went at it with a reel mower.  This reel mower cuts much closer and it worked very well.  The putting green is looking very nice. The rest of the lawn around the house is looking nice too.  I spent extra time and effort on seeding bare spots and then fertilizing the lawn.

T his blog entry sat around in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks!   I guess I should finish it and publish it. My joints have been terribly and painfully inflamed for the past week or so...  knees, ankles, toes...  I spent a few days on the couch because I could not walk at all.  I was on crutches for a short while and then a cane.  Now I am just limping around.  My left elbow is beginning to get inflamed too.  Sheila already has elbow problems.  According to our doctors, these joint problems are likely related to long-COVID issues.  Sheila is dealing mostly with inflamed joints in her upper body while I am mostly dealing with inflamed joints in my lower body.  My elbow isn't feeling so great at the moment though.  We'll see how this develops. I did some work in the yard today and, by the time I finished for the day, my right foot felt was though it were broken.  I came inside, showered and then hit the couch again with an icepack.  It is feeling a bit better now...  rathe

I t has been about two weeks since I seeded the new putting green in our backyard.  The grass is coming up nicely but it is a slow and almost painful process watching new grass grow while hoping it would finally be mature enough to do some pitching and putting.   I've been watering all the new grass around the property every morning and every evening so I'm really not just sitting around waiting for the grass to grow.  I have a bajillion other springtime projects that are keeping me busy when my health allows too.  Waiting for this new grass to grow does seem like an awful lot of waiting though.   In the first photo, above right, we are looking at the putting green from our backyard.  The grassy field beyond the putting green in this photo is our neighbor's yard.  The putting green is in the farthest back part of our yard.  The photo below, at bottom, is looking at the putting green from the new area that I cleared out and also seeded.  This will be an area for pitching ont

T he additional bag of grass seed for our new putting green arrived in the mail this morning so I changed my plans and finished up preparing the putting green before lunch today.  It didn't take long to finish up that project although my spine wasn't too thrilled with this project this morning.  Walking is exceptionally painful again this evening. I loosened up the soil in the putting green first...  cleaned out a bucketful of small stones (for the third time), roots and debris...  then seeded the green with the new bag of grass seed.  I had already put down 2lbs of seed the other day but that bag only got me less than halfway across the putting green.  A 5lb bag arrived this morning which allowed me to finish the seeding job.  Since I had more than enough seed this time, I just re-seeded the entire putting green again today.   Things are starting to look good.  I put a Fescue mix down in the "rough" or "mini-pitching-fairway" adjacent to the putting green l

Wow...  it was impossible to get comfortable enough to sleep last night.  My spinal injuries were painfully and debilitatingly inflamed after all of yesterday's yardwork.  I'd say the pain was in the 8-10 range on the 10 point pain scale.  At times, the good times, the pain was only an 8.  Other times, like when I try to move, the pain was pegged at around 10 and would buckle me at the knees.   Sleeping was difficult, at best.  For a long while, I simply couldn't sleep.  I eventually found a position or two that allowed a few minutes of sleep before I would need to change positions to the other position.  This wasn't until the wee hours of the morning though.  I actually thought about just getting up out of bed around this time.  It was around 5am and, typically, I would have no problem with that.  This time, however, I was thinking that if I'm finding bed extremely painful, then the couch wouldn't be any better.  Actually, sitting on the couch before we went to

It was a productive day today...  my spinal injuries are screaming at me though and I am looking like one big question mark...  but, unfortunately, I didn't get to accomplish everything I had intended to accomplish.  It turns out that I grossly underestimated the amount of putting green grass seed that I would need.   This will set us back another week...  at least half a week...  since the seed won't arrive here until Tuesday.  I was only able to cover about 1/3 to just under 1/2 of the putting green with seed.  I guess I will finished up this project next week sometime.  I managed to change the oil in the lawn mower.  I cleaned the air filter in the lawn mower.  I cleaned under the deck of the lawn mower and noticed that the blade is cracked and actually broken.  It was a pretty even crack so I was still able to mow the lawn without any balance issues.  A new blade will arrive early next week.  I also ordered a new spark plug for the mower.   I managed to spot seed all the di