Weekend Stuff

This weekend was good and bad. I didn't get a chance to write mostly because my Internet connection still wasn't back to normal yet. Hub spent a lot of time (and some money too) fixing it this weekend. I don't know exactly what he bought or the details of what he did (although he did try to explain it a few times), but he had to drill a hole in the wall and crawl under the house. While under the house, he found signs of an animal coming into the crawl space. Maybe we have a mouse or a squirrel. I wonder if I can charge them rent or at least claim them as dependents next year? Hub also found an opening by the drainage pipe where the animal(s) are likely coming in. So now he gets to go back later and cover the hole. He also did something with some wires down there and now the Internet works again! :)

On Saturday the weather was great. We went to the Tulip Festival about 45 minutes north of here. It was beautiful!

My son had a T-ball game later Saturday afternoon. T-ball is a very fair sport. Everyone gets a turn to hit the ball. Each child can take as many "practice hits" as they need. Once you do hit the ball, you only run to first base unless you are the last hitter for the team, then you always get a home run with the bases loaded. Building sandcastles during the game is optional. Since each player gets a turn, and there are no outs, the team with the most players wins. This time my son's team had 8 and the other team at 6, so we won!

Sunday it rained in the afternoon. We went to the Botanical garden in the morning. The kids ran as fast as they could down the path and we missed most of the flowers. After that we stopped by a nursery to buy some plants for our annual vegetable garden. I don't recommend going to a nursery immediately after the Botanical garden. It was very tempting to buy way too many plants! They all looked so nice at the Botanical garden and they look easy in the store. It doesn't matter that we can't control the plants that we already have and that I have a record for killing 75% of the plants that I buy. Still, somehow I managed to buy just the vegetables that I came for, but I did make a mental list of everything else that I will need to go back and buy before the summer is over ;)

By lunch time, the clouds had moved in. So right after lunch it was a race with the weather to get the plants in the ground. A few sprinkles helped us to keep a good pace. I wish I had a fast forward button so I could already enjoy the vegetables! This year we planted corn (no success with this in the past), tomatoes (got lots last year), pumpkins (got 2 last year), broccoli (first time trying this), cabbage (first time with this too), green beans (we got about 3 beans last year), and I already forget what else. That's ok, surprises are fun! There are also lots of strawberries that we planted last year. They are doing really well and starting to invade the rest of the garden. I even saw a few green berries starting to form in the flowers :) Now if only I can get to the strawberries before the slugs do. The problem with the slugs is that they cheat! They go for the berries even when they are green, so I don't even get a chance to pick them before the slugs do. We tried some kind of anti-slug fertilizer mix this year. Hope it works!

On another note, I wanted to give you a "coupon shopping update." I went to the store on Friday to take advantage of a sale where you had to buy $25 worth of one set of products and $25 worth of another and then you got $10 back plus 4 movie tickets. Since movie tickets cost about $9.50 each here, I thought $40 for 4 movie tickets plus $50 worth of food was a great deal! Of course I got lots of other things and still only paid $43 and then got the $10 off my next order, plus 2 more coupons for free milk and then 4 movie tickets. So here's the total for net $33, 4 movie tickets, 4 gallons of milk, 3 dozen eggs, one bottle of local wine, 4 boxes of cereal (don't laugh!), 6 salad dressings, 5 barbecue sauces, one loaf of bread, 2 packages of kraft cheese, 2 big boxes of eggo waffles, 1 box of cookies, 1 bottle of shampoo and 3 boxes of nutri grain cereal bars. Not too bad :)