Summer is here

Well, it's May. And in Houston, that means a few things. First, it's summer time here and the pools are not yet open. Second, the garden's growing like crazy. Here are some of our peas (and grant begging in the background).


Here's me and grant watching my defensive driving course. Cops rule. :-\

This comedydefensivedriving.com course say's it's funny online and has references to how Comedy Central endorses how funny it is. And I'll admit--it has it's 3-5 moment; somewhat humorous, sarcastic moments, but it was still torturous to have to sit through. The tests were easy and the picture of the girl in the skirt below I SWEAR was reading a script that written purposefully to be interpreted in a perverse manner each time she spoke.

So, for those of you that don't know, I'm trying to get back into shape. So as part of my regiment, I'm going to start doing some pull ups. I made this pull up bar and dips bar station and appended it to my work bench--now I'll call it my "work(out) bench!"

As you can tell, the bars easily slide out and can be moved to be part of the dips bar, or the pull up bar. OH yeah. I swear I could have been an engineer.


We've been using our dehydrator lately. For mother's day I made some strawberry and blueberry fruit roll-up strips!!! YuuuuuuuuuUUUUUMMMMM!!!!! NO sugar added, mind you!!! SO freaking TASTY!!!! Here's Karen and Grant making some dried apples. I love this dehydrator.



For Mother's Day, I made Karen some eggs with cream cheese (idea taken from Sister Laney) with HUGE slides of bacon and other assorted cheeses. This was SO dang tasty!!!

Tonight she's going to have steak (tenderloin/filet minon) and mashed potatoes with twice baked potatoes. Here are the twice backed potatoes. I'm pretty excited and hope they're as tasty as they look and smell. I baked the bacon (center cut) in Karen's new Mother's day convection toaster oven. After I had the bacon done, I baked the potatoes in it too. The steak will be grilled quickly in butter and minced garlic. We almost never eat cow meat products in our house (ground turkey instead of hamburger, chicken instead of steak/pork), but today will be "clog our arteries day" with all of this bacon, cheese, and steak.

So Camm and Judy sent us this train set that was a put-it-togther-yourself type of train. It was so fun to do with Grant each Monday for FHE. Now whenever I yell in my loud voice, "NEW NEWWWWWWWWWWWWS and OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD NEWWWWWWWWWSSS!!!!!!!!," he says, build train? build train? Lol. Too bad we've not run out of train pieces to build. We built one each week and here's the finished product!