The Last 30 Days . . .

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Okay, I'm going to try to breeze through all this, because if I get bogged down, I'll never get a post out. Here's what we've been up to and why I've been so sparse on the postings:

It's been like Destruction Central here lately as we work on home improvement projects. You might remember our front porch step fiasco that we had done wrong by one crew only to have re-done properly by another guy last year. Well the remaining efforts of these first guys was in the sidewalk they patched when they did the front steps. Needless to say, if they didn't know what they were doing with laying brick, they certainly didn't know how to mix concrete. The sidewalk they patched was crumbling like peanut brittle (click on pic to see what I mean) a mess and a hazard to walk around.

Since we _had_ to get this fixed to avoid injury, we decided to also get our front retaining wall fixed. That had also been crumbling in spots as well as tipping over.

The guy came in with heavy machinery which made the destruction part easier and quicker, but it also made a huge mess of our front yard.

















All that mess got clean up eventually and the new wall finally got poured.


















That just left us with the clean up of all that dirt, and reseeding all the grass. At some point soon, we'll probably paint the whole wall white again so it looks sharper out front.



In the midst of all this destruction, we also had another progressive dinner. The theme for this last one was "Canadian" food, courtesy of Michele who lives here now, but is from Canada. It was fun trying to find recipes. Of course, Poutine was served (fries smothered in cheese and gravy).

We also attended a local minor league baseball game. A couple of the players were #1 draft picks that likely will go on to the major leagues.













We thought the game wouldn't happen because of the chance of rain. We got 2 innings behind us when the rain came.





After that, they kept covering and uncovering the field in between rain showers. We eventually decided to go around 9:30 p.m. rather than wait until around 10 p.m. for it to start back up again.







We also took in an Air Show at the beach one day. There were lots of turbo prop planes and some military jets as well as parachute sky writers.

































M's parents came to visit us last Thursday through Tuesday, I believe. So we made the obligatory trip to the beach, ate lots of crab, had a fire on the beach, and,

saw our first dolphins of the season. M had just commented "it's been ages since we've seen any dolphins," when Bam! There they were just off-shore. Click on the pic to see the best shot I could get of one of them as they quickly surfaced then went back under.







While M's parents were here, her mom (who is a weeding machine) began cleaning up our side yard. M then planted all the flowers I'd gotten at the plant sale and brought some much needed color back to our side yard.
























Now if all that isn't enough, remember we both still have work and personal things going on, and I am now beginning to do a make over on my daughter, Min's room. Are we busy yet? I expect the clearing out of Min's room to take a week, then there will be the sanding, painting, and ripping out the green rug, before I can put it all back together again. I'll do a starter post on that soon. Back to work!