I have a house update!

Well kinda…

We had a feeling it would be coming soon, but not this summer. We were hoping to hold out for a few years but after having an 84 degree house for the past two weeks it is time to replace these puppies:

Anyone else still have one of these bad boys? Ours is 30+ years old, and was made right in our back yard. Well, a few blocks away at the old Singer plant.

The downfall:the installation crew is so backed up, we won’t have our new AC and furnace installed for another TWO WEEKS! Good thing they are a nice company and haven given us a window unit to use until then.

Yes that is cardboard and foil. The accordion sides were all ripped up and had duct tape hanging everywhere. So this is my way of making sure the cold air stays in, the hot air stays out, and all of Main Street doesn’t see what goes on inside our bedroom. But it works and our room is cold so I’m not complaining!

Needless to say we are looking forward to the new units!

On to the garden updates!

The watermelon, not too much action yet.

The zucchini plants really took off once it got hot! I may have planted them too close together, but when you are planting them, they look so small. It is hard to image that they could get so big. As of right now there are about 20 zucchinis growing! Some have grown a few inches over the past day or so. LOVE zucchini!

The longest:

The fattest:

The two cucumber plants:

Quite a few little cucumbers sprouted over the last few days. The beginnings of a cucumber:

Ahhhh the lettuce! Very close to harvesting. Probably could eat some now if I wanted but I want the leaves to get a little bigger. I will probably be eating salads for breakfast lunch and dinner here shortly! Next year, plant a foot of seed, wait a week, plant a foot of seed, wait a week, etc. Like I said this is an experiment and a learning experience.

Romaine close up:

Salad mix close up:

Beans, still growing:

Pole beans growing all over each other. Next year, have a higher trellis!

Peppers:

There is about 4 banana peppers on one  of the plants.

Jalapeños!!! I think there is only one so far.

Potatoes, still growing, waiting on flowers.

Cherry tomatoes grew like a weed the past few weeks!

First cherry tomatoes! I can only find two so far.

Regular tomatoes, much shorter than the cherry tomatoes and no fruit yet.

And the acorn squash, yeah I thought I read somewhere that these were going to or would trellis… doesn’t look it yet. They are getting huge!

Ok now I’m hungry! See ya!

Stylish Blogger Award

Not sure my blog is really “stylin” but Sarah Roscow thinks so, or maybe she just wanted to pass on this award to me so I would blog more…

Anyways, 7 facts about myself:

1. I’m one of the only bloggers around here that isn’t pregnant or doesn’t have kids! Maybe that’s why I don’t have as much to blog about, because I have nothing to brag about or show off! (All of your kids are cute BTW, and I can’t wait to see pics of the new babies that are going to be born so soon!)

2. I’ve always been pretty weight stable, but I think I have gained roughly 3 pounds since I started working at Oak Hill. The nursing home food (which is free lunch for me) is really starting to take its toll on me! It’s good, but its loaded with calories! Can’t let the old folks get skinny!

3. I can’t stand a lot of new “country” music that’s on the radio now days. Country just ain’t country anymore. Craig and I listen to more Texas/Oklahoma country than Nashville country these days. It just feels more real to me. Heck last summer we drove all the way to Nebraska to listen to one of our favorite bands!

4. I’ve never really lost a loved one. I have all but one grandparent, which passed before I was born. I was too young to remember the death of my great grandma and grandpa. I am fortunate not to have lost any close friends; to this day I still feel that we are the class that got “skipped”. I pray to God that still have a while before I lose anyone close.

5. Craig and I have been together for over 9 years now. NINE YEARS! I just turned 25. That’s a lot of my life we’ve been together. Its been great so far, and I can’t wait to see what is to come for us in the future: getting our own farm, raising award winning national champion sheep, having kids, grandkids, taking vacas, etc…

6. Back to #5 and getting our own farm… I cannot wait to get out of town!!! Don’t get me wrong, I love Red Bud and I love the convenience of everything being close and walking everywhere, but I grew up on a farm, so did Craig, and its hard for us to live in a little house on a little lot on Main Street. I have to keep all my blinds closed (except for the North facing window in the living room, Flower likes to sit and look outside at the cars driving by), I can’t walk outside in my skippies, I can’t have animals outside without the fear of them getting hit by a car, I can’t grow a bigger garden, I can’t raise my alpaca herd, etc. haha. Someday I’ll get back!

7. We didn’t get to go on a honeymoon. I hate that we didn’t, because I would kill for a vacation right now! We didn’t have the money to waste on one when we could spend it on the house. I wasn’t going to have my parents pay for that along with our wedding, nor was I going to ask them for that. I had school. Craig couldn’t afford to lose days of work when he was actually working because the weather was good. I spent all summer planning our trip out west, I had it planned day by day! And we never went. I wanted to take a trip for our anniversary this year instead, but I can’t plan one in advance because I can’t be gone when state surveyors come in, and there is a three month window where they can come in, and they always come in the fall for our facility. So if we do go on a honeymoon/anniversary trip this fall, it will be totally spur of the moment, which I don’t mind! We did that in ‘07, planned a trip to Colorado (our fav) two weeks before we left, and it was so much fun!

Well, there you go. A personal post. I never do these. But I figured I would since Sarah would like more posts from me .

I would like to pass the award on to my friend Jackie and her brand new blog that features her adorable baby girl Loreli. I don’t even know if she is a follower of mine (I don’t have many lol) so hopefully she sees this!

Our growing garden…

We’ve been super busy lately (as always), but we have been spending a lot of our free time and evenings working on the garden. Last week Craig finished the mulch and everything looks great. There were a few nights where he worked past dark, and our light that overlooks the back yard is set on motion and it only stays lit for like 10 seconds, so that was no help. He was also working 10 hours days last week, so I really appreciate him staying up late working on it. It paid off!

Every night when I get home from work I try to do a little weeding in each bed and then I water everything (if it hasn’t rained). I’m trying really hard to have a successful garden this year! I’m no expert, and this year is definitely an experiment. My only experience gardening was from my childhood (my grandma had a huge garden on our farm that I would help with, or maybe I HAD to help….), and gardening was also a part of my internship last year. We had a garden on campus, and we also taught students from different schools around STL how to garden and gave them nutrition lessons. I’m thankful to have a yard to grow a garden; a lot of the students we taught did not even have a yard.

So here is what we’re working with:

I’m trying watermelon this year. Once the plant sprawls out more, we’ll remove the fence if needed. It will continue to keep the bunnies out until then!

Here are the tomatoes on the close end, cherry tomatoes on the far end, cucumbers in the middle (left), and acorn squash growing on the green trellis in the middle (kind of hard to see):

From the other end:

Zucchini on the close end, two eggplants in the middle, and potatoes on the far end:

From the other end:

And this is what I like to call the pepper patch (with one lonely eggplant):

From the other end:

And here is the lettuce and bean bed. Romaine in the front, salad mix in the middle, edemame on the far left row, green beans (bush) on the far right row, and two different types of green beans (pole) on the trellis at the end of the bed:

From the other end:

I think I’ll be canning a lot of green beans this summer! I had a feeling the trellis that I had found at my parents’ house wasn’t going to be tall enough, so I bought four 6’ poles on Monday. It is now Wednesday and the beans on the right have already wrapped themselves to the top! Grandma Kay if you’re reading this, the Helda’s are growing much faster than the Melba’s!

Well that’s it for now. Cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and pepper plants are slowing starting to flower, looking forward to some produce!

Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend! We had another wedding this weekend, my friend Brad Koester married his beautiful wife Jessica and the reception was at Missouri Botanical Gardens, so pretty and fun! It was also my first weekend on administrative duty at work, which I will have to do every 16 weekends since I am a department head. It stinks that I had to do it on Memorial Day weekend, however it was great because I did not have any call-offs! If any one from housekeeping, dietary, activity, or nursing calls off, is even one minute late, or leaves early the day before, of, or after a holiday, they do not get their holiday pay, which is double time. So in a way, having duty on the weekend is not such a bad thing because no one wants to lose their holiday pay so there are hardly ever call-offs on the holiday weekend.

I will leave you with a few pictures I stole off Facebook, because I failed to take any pictures at Kortney’s wedding last weekend. The day was gorgeous (it didn’t storm like it was forecasted to), the party bus road trip was amazing, and the reception was a BLAST! Congrats to Craig and Kortney!

Uninvited Visitor

I planted some seeds on Friday and Saturday, and by Monday or Tuesday they were already coming up. Now all the beans and lettuce have really popped! So exciting. Here is the first edemame plant:

And here is the first of the lettuce!

Sunday evening Craig and I ran up to Rural King to get some chicken wire to go around our beds.

Why are we putting chicken wire around our beds? RABBITS!

Oh look, a baby one. How nice.

There are a ton of rabbits and squirrels that like to play in our yard, and I didn’t want them stealing our crop or nibbling our plants to the root all summer. So one night Craig did two of the beds, and he was going to do the other two on Thursday night.

We were trying to avoid this:

I came home from work Thursday night and as I walk walking up the sidewalk I noticed a big dark spot and looked over. There was a rabbit digging a hole in my potato patch! I chased him out of the yard, went in to change clothes, went to the back door and I see this:

Seriously bunny!? I chased him out, only to find him in there again, digging further and further each time. Luckily, he didn’t get into my potatoes. We were going out to eat that night for my brother and I’s birthdays so I quickly wrapped some chicken wire around this bed, because I KNEW he would get back in while we were gone.

Today I was off work, and was doing some cleaning in the kitchen when I looked out and saw this:

He was trying to burrow in our straw pile. Then I watched him for a few minutes, and sure enough, he was trying to get back into the very same bed.

Nope, you can’t get in there!

He even tried to bite through the chicken wire to get in the bed! Crazy rodent!

So he just sat there. All day. I have a feeling he isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Sorry for the Delay…

Life has been so crazy these last few months. I’ll try to give you a quick recap!

January: Last semester of school starts. One course will be done by beginning of May and the other two in the middle of July. This month was full of studying, both for school and my RD exam, and it paid off. I am now a Registered Dietitian! Finally! The job hunt started… Also, our bottle baby Annabelle went home to the farm. But it wouldn’t be long before we had more babies at our house.

February: School work. Job hunting. Read an email from an organization I belong to (St. Louis Dietetic Association), found a job posting for a Registered Dietitian for the Monroe County YMCA. PERFECT! Called immediately, got an interview that afternoon, had the job by 5pm! SWEET! Well, the guy who hired me resigned 4 days after hiring me…. I have only participated in a few events at the Y so far but I am always on call and still an employee. Job hunt continues… 

March: School work. Job hunting. Lambs are born!

March continued: We ended up having 5 lambs here at one time. Bottle feeding 5 lambs? Not easy! Good thing there was a stay at home mom for a while (me). One evening my Aunt Tammy called and said there was a job posting in the North County News for an RD at a nursing home in Waterloo. For real? I have never, ever seen an RD position posted in the NCN! She cut the ad out and put it in my mailbox the next morning. As soon as she brought it, I emailed my resume in. I didn’t hear anything for about 2 weeks, but I had spoken with two people who work there and they had given me some information about the job. Thursday March 10th, 3:45 pm, I get a call and it is the administrator of the nursing home. Interview is set for 9 am the next morning. I quickly updated and reorganized my portfolio and do a quick brush-up on geriatric nutrition to prepare for the interview. Friday March 11th, 9 am, my interview lasted 2 hours!!! It was the best interview I have ever had. Same day, 3 pm, got a call from St. Elizabeth’s about an RD position I had applied for about a month prior. I basically had an impromptu phone interview that lasted about 20-30 minutes and was told that I would be contacted by the manager next week for a formal interview. I was so nervous the rest of the weekend I could barely sleep. Monday March 14th, got a call from St. E’s, had an interview lined up for Friday. Little later, got a call from the YMCA and had an interview lined up for Wednesday. I had applied for the Fitness and Sports Director position there (the position of the guy who hired me but quit). I was feeling great! Two interviews lined up in one day?! Then about 4 pm, I got a call from the administrator of the nursing home and she wanted me to come in at 9 am the next morning (Tuesday). Sure thing! That next morning I was offered the position at the nursing home, which is called Oak Hill and it is located across from The Ridge golf course in Waterloo. And of course I took it! I am not only their only Registered Dietitian, I am also the new dietary director! This job comes with A LOT of responsibility but I absolutely LOVE IT so far! Everyone has treated me very well and I am getting to know a lot of the residents and my employees. I never pictured myself working in long term care, or in a clinical or food service setting, but I am learning to love it! Plus, it is not far from home which is easy on the gas tank. Also in March, Craig switched companies and now works for Dieker Terry out of Marissa. His good buddies Luke and Hattrick also made the big move, and they are all still on the same crew. I think this is going to be a good company for Craig to work for, and I am glad he finally found a company that actually cares about their business and their employees!

April: School work continues, but on top of working full time, it is not easy! I admit that working full time and getting up early every morning was definitely a wake up call! I love to sleep in! I need to enjoy it before we have kids! My little cousin Emma had a birthday in the middle of the month. This girl LOVES horses, and my father in law has horses, so I invited her out to take a ride on George’s horse Cash on her birthday.

Little brother Jack wanted to ride too!

Also that day, Craig was loading up dirt from his dad’s farm to put into our garden beds. Craig built four 12’x4’ raised beds for our back yard. We turned one whole side of our back yard into a vegetable garden. The area used to be a play area with a swing set (I was told by neighbors) and it was covered in mulch. But that was a few years back and the mulch has decomposed and the whole side of the yard was full of weeds that we just mowed over. Here are a few pictures of our yard transformation:

May: School work! I am finishing my masters through University of Alabama, which is in Tuscaloosa, which was devastated by a tornado April 27th. The campus was not hit but was without power for several days. Six students lost lives in the storm. As a result, operations were suspended and final exams (which were supposed to be last week) were cancelled or postponed. If you were satisfied with your grade as of April 27th, you did not have to take the exam. Well I had an A, so I was satisfied. The footage and pictures from that tornado are horrifying, I hope I never have to go through anything like that! When it finally quit raining and I had the extra time, I was finally able to plant veggies! Some very nice people (Ryan Devall, Grandma Kay) gave me free plants/seeds so I only have spent about $12 on this project. The wood for the beds came from my parents barn, dirt from my father in law, trellis and tomato cages came from my parents, and I bought a few plants and seed packets. This year I am trying to grow tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, jalepeno peppers, bull horn peppers, green bell peppers, two types of lettuce, edemame, and three types of green beans. I am still trying to find space for some sweet corn, acorn squash, and sweet potatoes, but I have a little bit before they need to be planted. Here are a few pictures of what it looks like now (well almost, I have added a few more plants and a pole bean trellis):

We are filling the gaps with mulch next weekend, so it will look more complete. Can’t wait to see how it looks!

Well, that is the four months in a nut shell. Hope I didn’t bore you too bad! Hopefully have some more updates soon (yeah right…).