Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes......

Well, Isaiah is moving out next Friday, May 8th. Like Isaac, he is moving into the arpartment that he will share with his new wife because one came available. Isaac has enjoyed living by himself for several weeks, but that will end after their honeymoon in the mountains that first week of June. Chuck and I stayed in Pidgeon Forge in the Great Smokies too. Isaiah and Aubrey will be going on a cruise unless the Swine/Mexican/whatever flu is truly a Pandemic by August.

So, with less residents to contend with, I've been giving rooms a makeover. The toilets (3) were all old and used about 100 gallons of water when we flushed. Besides, I'd be hosting a bridal shower and we knew we'd have house guests as well. We had decided to hire a guy to do work in a half-bath and my laundry room so that Chuck could go about his business in the Golf world and not have to worry about it. My job would be to do the painting once all the other work was done. Perhaps because we've done all the other work ourselves and know the proper way to do such things, we've not been very happy campers. First of all, "Dave" would only work at our house 2 or 3 days a week. That might not be so bad were it not for the fact that I have to be able to do the laundry and we had all kinds of materials piled up in the attached garage during this process. This made it impossible to find anything- and I get sideways over clutter and disorganization. Oh, I can handle it for a while, but to have this relatively small job drug out over weeks was making me a lunatic. This may be the first and last time we hire someone else to do a rennovation in our home. Neither room was done for the shower, and the laundry room wasn't
done when we had Isaac's future father-in-law come spend last weekend. And this all started with replacing toilets with more efficient flushing!

Hope to see y'all in Michigan! ~Mare

Deer rifles

I've been reading up on deer rifles lately. I plan to buy one, and practice in preparation for this fall. When Bri calls from the Wisconsin place, she invariably says deer are wandering around the yard, getting used to people being about.

I figure a stand just a short walk from the house will do it, just need to decide on a gun and get a license, plus learn how to field dress.

Turns out they can be very expensive if you want to, same as everything else I suppose, but I haven't seen anything less than ~ $400 so far. I'm thinking a .270 bolt action, but there are more variables to consider than I realized.

Interestingly, shotguns and muzzle loaders are the only legal deer guns for Illinois, but Wisconsin allows rifles in most ( but not all ) of the state.

I'll also need to find a nearby processor to slice it into bite size pieces.

Think I'll take my .410 up also, as we've seen some rabbits already. I'm starting to worry about this garden thing. Patsy thinks the deer and rabbits are just coming around now since we got some seeds in the ground, and they want to get the tender shoots as soon as they pop up.

intoxicating smell of pizza

So let's have some reports on the pizza fest. There is nothing that gets me drooling like the smell of pizza fresh from the oven. For the record, I have a pizza stone too, but find that it is not big enough for the pizzas I want to make. I'm going to work some more on my grilled pizza this summer, the one I did last summer was a bit misshapen.

This is what happens when you store potatoes in a spot that is not quite dark or cool enough. And I guess we kind of forgot about them too. No bad smells, thankfully. I felt bad tossing them, after they tried so hard to procreate.

We helped Bri move this weekend, lots of driving, road snacks, driving while trying to enjoy the rural Wisconsin countryside. We hit no deeer, but had to slow down to give them time to clear out once. Snow started Sunday morning after all was done, so the weekend went well.

We are making our seed list, will review and discuss with Bri, and hopefully order next week.

The do list gets longer every time we think about the place! Latest thought: Doing a Murphy bed in one room to make it an accessible guest room. Also, we were thinking of buying a sleigh type bed for us, but instead, may just make our own. We agree we are getting tired of the air mattress that slowly deflates over night.

I've been reading a bit lately about diaster prep, so

Question for the week: What is in your bug out bag?