If I Were President

If I were president, there would be none of this namby-pamby "pardoning" of turkeys. Birds would be on the table. Roasted, slow roasted, baked, fried, you name it. Those receiving pardon would be the cold cocktail weenies and the oyster dressing

Luxury Bentley Action Figure

The most interesting bit of news on the Radio this AM was that Bentley is recalling 820 cars. The reason, of course, is that the hood ornament might not properly retract in an accident. So if you're scooting around in your Bentley, not wearing your seatbelt, and you get flung through the windshield, the danger is that the hood ornament may impale you. Or if accidentally run over a little girl in the street, it would be a terrible shame to get a flying B stuck in her spleen. Therefore these things need to retract upon impact. The first image the came to mind when hearing the story was that of a childhood He-Man figure, whose chest would flip over and reveal a huge gash if you thumped it just the right way. It was probably marketed on the packaging as something like "massive battle-scar action!!!!"

So be looking for the Bentleys that will start hitting the shelves as part of the new marketing campaign:

"Improved Flying B Hood Ornament Break-away Action!!!!"

"Smack!! Ka-Powwww!!" (appropriately embellished with smack / ka-pow clouding)

Suzuki

Last Wednesday, Timnah and Elias had their very first violin lessons. One of the first things they did at the lesson was to trace their feet on a piece of poster-board: once with feet together, once with feet shoulder width apart and at a slight angle; "red feet" and "green feet" respectively.

The deal is, that during the lesson they are to stay standing on the board in one of the two positions, with their teacher giving directions as to which one.

If, through this process, Elias-The-Bouncy-Boy can learn to stand still for thirty minutes at a time, I might not even care if he has learned how to play the violin.

Cheese

Zaiah

Okay- since my little brother is such a punk, I decided to go public with pictures of Zaiah. Not like the interested parties have not either been emailed pictures or seen him in person (or both), but because Brent made comments about having new goats without posting any proof. Here is proof of Isaiah William Roberts. According to Heather's Dr. (during an unspecified procedure done only on males), he will become a "formidable young man." This will definitely be repeated at an important moment causing much embarassment (his wedding rehearsal dinner:) However, by God's grace, I hope and pray that those very words do become true- that this young man will arise and shine, and may he reveal the Lord's glory by his very life. I love you little man- Welcome to the world!

Beating the Heat

Andrea and I are the captains of exceptional timing. The last time we tried to have a bonfire, Middle Tennessee received 13-inches of rain in matter of two days. Since the roads were closed we decided reluctantly to reschedule.

This past Saturday was the day. Despite a heat index of right around 100 degrees, and that still holding steady until about 7pm, a good time was had by all. Ninety-degree weather is actually pretty good for making s'mores, because chocolate that is already melting melts pretty easily when you had a half-burnt marshmallow.

Elias spent the whole evening making a triangle from the food table to the fire to my chair: "Can I eat this?" "Yes, Elias, you can eat that."

Timnah caught a handful -- literally a handful -- of lightning bugs, and got to show everyone the frog she caught in the backyard.

Same Frog, different afternoon. This was from the end of May.

One of Timnah's other friends, The Lizzard.

Kids...

Supposedly Brooke and Heather had a baby boy, but I've heard nothing about it here on the blog. So I suppose now is a good enough time as any to let everyone know that we had three more goat kids around the Memorial Day break. Two does, Semmie-Aneed and Daisy, and one buck, Elias.

You can thank Timnah for naming the buck Elias, and we can thank Elias (the boy, not the goat) for naming Semmie-Aneed (which name will probably put this blog on a federal watch-list for potential jihad-ism threats). Andrea and I are responsible for naming Daisy.

Sorry to disappoint anyone out there, but I think we already have potential buyers for both of the girls.

High and Dry

We got about 18" of rain in about 30 hours. The weekend was a wee bit soggy. Here are some pictures.

Looking North from our porch.

You can hear the river rushing from our porch (something you can't normally do).

Barn.

There is a very wet John Deere in there somewhere. We could barely see the steering wheel and exhaust pipe.

The North end of Boxley Valley Road.
There is a fence on the left side of the street that is completely under water. I can zoom in to the full size picture and see that the water at the end of the street is only about 4" to 6" down from the bottom of the stop sign. Our neighbors, who own the pasture across the street, can only access their home via boat. The blackberry farm is underwater.

Other than a wet basement (which had little to do with the flood, and more to do with a tennis ball being stuck in the corrugated pipe) we stayed high and dry and fared pretty well.

Aravis's First Giggles

Bumper Crop

With all of white flowers now in bloom, were bound to have a banner year with our strawberries. The asparagus was looking good, too, but we paid someone to cut our grass and he took care of that for us. But the story of the year has to be the dandelions. These are absolutely EVERYWHERE.

If only they were a little more life-sustaining. Or at least tasty.

Hay Goat (where you goin' with that gun in your hand)

I was doing some ruminating while cleaning out the goat barn (sharp ones will notice the pun in that last comment). Goats are notorious for wasting hay. But its way more fascinating than just that; goats actually defy the law of conservation of mass. If you feed a goat one bale of hay, they will scatter two bales of hay on the floor right below the feeder, and the empirical evidence dotted all over the yard indicates that they ate something along in the line, too.

This discovery is not quite as revolutionary as the invention of the flux capacitor, but almost. Who needs the Large Hadron Collider?

Cherry Blossoms!

And what a cute one she is!

Hello there cutie with the pig-tails!

BTW, that's a balloon (mylar mom- no worries) attached to her pig-tail. She enjoyed having it follow her around:)

The latest addition (or is it edition?)

Aravis

"The Crew"

Snowmageddon

Just a few pics here to show the immensity of 'Snowmageddon' this past week. I was off work all week (okay, I could have gone in Friday, but there was already a late arrival and unscheduled leave policy in place- and I already had today off as an AWS day anyway and had plans- Oh, and we have President's day off too [start government worker jokes here]).

Geena's height compared to the walls of snow (she's on the sidewalk to our front door).



The 'Man Machine' and the snowblower:) My neighbor let me borrow his- saved me a whole day of shoveling and a lot of Ibuprofen.



Geena likes icicles:)

So simple, a caveman can do it?

The DC Roberts' haven't posted in a while- which means me. So, I will post at least two articles to show you what we've been up to.

First, we decided for MLK weekend we would get our 46" LED TV mounted on the wall. Should be simple- screw a few things in the TV, screw a few things in the wall, hang TV. We've had the bracket and TV since late Sept., at least we're finally getting around to it. Well, that wasn't all that had to get screwed.

The bracket was made to modern building code, 16" between studs. Our 1954 Rambler wasn't, 24" b/w studs. So, I opted for the most difficult and dumbest solution, install a new stud (I already had one anyway from the basement demolition project). Here are the before, during and after shots. I still need to mud up the back wall, but we'll eventually 'get around to it'- hopefully before guests arrive.

Spotted: Short-haired Snaggletoothicus

Here is the evidence presently available to confirm the sighting:

(It was a little funny seeing a mass of Timnah's curls in an envelope labelled, "Baby's First Haircut.")

More Fun

Snow Much Fun

Well since no one has posted anything in a while, I will. I ran a trial run of the 1/2 marathon course Saturday morning and finished well under my times from the past four years. The real deal is on Valentines Day so I'll let you all know how it goes. I can't believe I will have done this 5 years in a row!!!
JCB is deep into his studying for the bar. He has about two more weeks of the review class, a week off, and then it's game time the last week of February.
Peanut is doing well too! She has recovered nicely from the stitches she had over Christmas. You can't even tell she had them at all. I figured up the other day that she is roughly 6 (or 42) years old! Wow!
Love you, Les

Mr. Walker Would be Proud

[for those who don't know, Mr. Walker was my old Scoutmaster...]

We had been getting by without running water since last Thursday. At about 10:30 last night, just as I was returning from showering at a neighbors, I noticed that the dishwasher was running and Andrea had a huge smile on her face. The pipe thawed while I was out, and only a few minutes prior to my return. Hallelujah!

Poking around in the crawlspace, I convinced myself that the freeze wasn't there, but was instead somewhere underground outside (I could tell by how the supply line left the crawlspace that it wasn't nearly as deep as it probably should have been). My master plan was to put a heater under the porch over where the water line was, cover it with a blanket, and see if that did the trick.

Well I never did get the heater, because I didn't really want Andrea to come home from her shower while I was in the crawlspace recovering the heater from where I had last left it. But in preparation for the heater, I did take my handy-dandy emergency space blanket, left-over from the Troop 51 days, and lay it down over where the pipe was (a space blanket is like a tarpaulin with a foil facing on one side).

It could have been a combination of many different factors, but in honor of Mr. Walker, we'll just say it was the space blanket.

The Disenfranchisement Starts Early

The weather man is already on Elias's bad list. The little-man's words to Mommy when he woke up this morning: "Its not snowing."

They were expecting accumulation of less than an inch, so no big loss. But to add insult to injury, though, as I was driving in this morning, the projections for today's precipitation has been revised downward from "one to three inches" to "a light dusting." Whoopee!

Conspiracy theory du jour: meteorologists (particularly in the south) are in collusion with bakers and dairies.