Some of you already know, and some of you have heard inklings trickling around the etherspace. Now, we can officially tell you… We’re having a baby! The first ultrasound was today, and according to the doctor the little one is eight weeks old today. After much finagling with the old scanner I bought this summer at a garage sale, I was able to scan the printout we got from the doctor. Somewhere around here, we also have profile pictures of Amanda, although she’s not showing yet, so I won’t bother posting any until she is. She might post them on her Facebook page if you’re lucky…
I was in such a rush the first time, I forgot a couple things I was going to mention. Our due date is May 25, and as you can see in the picture, the baby is 1.64 centimeters long, about the size of an olive. Amanda likes to call the baby ‘our little crustacean’ because of how it looks in the picture. We should know if it’s a boy or a girl by Christmas time, which will be nice timing.
A couple weeks ago, my site was super slow, and wouldn’t load properly. I did some investigating, and found it was getting hammered by a Chinese search engine. I kept tabs on it throughout that day, and there were either different search engines indexing various portions of my site within 24 hours. Yikes. So I set about to enhance the performance a bit. Finally, I think I’ve pretty well nailed it. I’ve moved everything from Gallery to ZenPhoto (except photo descriptions), disabled some extra plugins, and implemented various other tweaks. Enjoy.
This year we have more flowers than we’ve ever done before, and I even did a little vegetable garden on the side. The wife wants to make salsa, so we brought home some Garden Salsa peppers and a couple Roma tomatoes from Nebraska. We planted a couple rows of carrots for our guinea pigs and a watermelon plant. We rounded it out with a few strawberry plants that we brought from Nebraska, and a few more that we transplanted. In short order, the dogs dug up just about everything, except a Roma and some of the strawberries. Well, we bought some more Romas and a pack of peppers, and figured the carrots were all but lost. Then my dad dropped off some cherry tomatoes. And I put up a fence to keep the dogs out.
After about a month, the garden was in full swing, but one thing seemed to stick out above all the rest. The Roma from Grandy’s Greenhouse (my father-in-law owns it) was consistently twice the height of the ones we bought locally. The were all planted within two or three days of each other.
We’ve had a few strawberries and twenty or so cherry tomatoes already, but the Romas finally were ripe enough to pick tonight. A few of the carrots (six or seven) actually survived the dogs, and I pulled a couple of those as well.
And now, the main event… Most of the flowers we planted were from my father-in-law’s greenhouse. We brought back over eight hundred plants plants, most of them were in seed trays still, and were the castaways. We put them on shelving units with wheels (should have taken pictures, maybe next year) so that we could put them in the storage unit at night, since it was below freezing many nights.
We finally put them in the ground (and some in pots) in mid-May. The first pictures we have are from mid-June, and parts of the garden seemed to be stunted in their growth.
Boy have we been surprised this month. Most everything just took off, particularly the parts that seemed like they wouldn’t do very well. So I took a bunch more pictures for your enjoyment.
If you haven’t already noticed, I’m doing some catching up. Our latest addition to the family, Roo, is growing up rather quickly, and I’ve posted some more pictures. There are some from a few months ago, and I added a few more from during our recent vacation.
There’s also a couple rather cute pictures of Scooter this summer. We had this kiddy pool blow into our yard during the winter, and the pups love it.
Last month we went on vacation. We did lots of driving, as we went to Boise, Idaho, and then came back through Yellowstone National Park on our way back home. My sister-in-law got married (congrats).
We spent lots of time with family, including going paddle-boating at a rather neat park in Boise.
We saw all sorts of things in YNP. Words can’t even describe all the awesomeness.
Then we stopped at the Montana Grizzly Encounter. When we first pulled in, we were a bit afraid that it was going to be a dud, but we were amazingly wrong. The gal working there was really mindful of the visitors, and made sure we weren’t disappointed. The bears even answered to their names (Brutus and Sheena), and came ambling down when she threw them fruit (yes, bears are omnivores). Brutus was rescued from a bear breeder who was going to kill him because no one wanted to buy him. Sheena and her sister were kept in a very small cage, with no room to move for 15 years, so they don’t get along very well, and only one comes out into the main area at a time. We saw the cage, I can’t even imagine keeping any animal in there, let alone a large animal like a bear (2 of them even).
All in all, it was a great trip. Enjoy the pictures!
