Catastrophes, Birthdays, Moving Sales, Luna Moths, Deer, Life Goes On!

These birthday photos of Doug are especially for Jan! Doug turned nine years old on July 10th.
Doug and his sisters spent the day with Doug's best friend Luke and Luke's older sister, Sabrina. I grabbed a couple of group photos of the kids in Luke and Sabrina's front yard when we took them home.
Later that evening, we met with the grandparents and local uncle, aunt, and cousins at the restaurant of Doug's choosing (a Chinese buffet, of course!) and had more birthday celebrating. As we were pulling into our drive, we saw this doe. (And earlier that morning, we had admired a luna moth on our library window screen.) We will miss the wildlife when we move to Bolivar. Speaking of which, that is why I haven't blog in forever (Red Mary Janes, and everyone else!)...between two birthdays and trying to get our house cleared out to sell, I have been busy as can be.


Rayna bought a pirate kit while we were out today (sent away from our home so it could be shown!) and she posed in front of a few of the signs we will be putting up all over at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to herald our ENORMOUS moving sale! This sale is about VOLUME, not profit. The more someone agrees to take off my hands, the lower the price will get!!! (Example, you can buy one hardback book for one dollar OR you can buy the ENTIRE BOX of books for two dollars. I have TONS of boxes of books. I have TONS of children's clothing (size infant through size 8). The clothes are prebagged according to sizes (5-8 or more outfits per bag). One bag is fifty cents. Eight or more bags are 25 cents each. You can buy some of my nicer items (bikes, trikes, cattle gate, etc) for a fairly low price OR you can get them free if you will take the metal swingset, too! You get the picture....this sale is all about CLEARING EVERYTHING OUT. I'd rather make twenty dollars and have nothing left at the end of the day than to make $300 and still have half my stuff left when the dust clears! And we have a LOT of stuff to sell. Right now our garage is packed floor to ceiling with just one little walking trail left. Early tomorrow morning we will unpack it out of the garage and out onto the drive way. Hopefully, I will have time to bring up from the back (basement) garage a bunch more stuff to throw in the sale, too...then there is stuff at my mother-in-law's house, next door, that she has been storing for us for eight years that I would like to get over to the sale, too...so much to do, so little time! So, you see why I have been so absent in the blogosphere.

(Eight years ago when we began building this house, I decided that I would finish all the interior trim and doors myself. Well, I never got around to doing it! So, this past week, I have been staining and finishing like a crazed woman, trying to get the house presentable for people coming through! LATE last night, just as I was finishing almost the last bit of trim in the whole house, I managed to knock an ENTIRE quart can of STAIN over onto our BEST carpet. And it wasn't in a discreet spot in the room, either...it was right in the MIDDLE of everything....this huge, dark brown, greasy pool of stain all over our pale blue and white specked berber carpet. Talk about sick to my stomach. And we had people coming to look at the house this morning! Grant was so sweet about it all...never even gave so much as a sigh of frustration. He just got busy cutting out the 2'x3' patch of carpeting I had ruined and pieced some more in it's place. The patch is a lot brighter than the carpet that spent the last seven or so years fading, but, it doesn't look too bad, actually. Of course, it was about 3:00am or so before we got to bed because of the repairs needed...seems we never get to bed before 2:00am any more and we still are up by 6:30 or 7:00am racing to get things done. In a way, it is almost a relief when we have to LEAVE the house for it to be shown. It gives us the down time we need!)