Halloween of Days Gone By

This Halloween is the first since we've had kids that no one at our house dressed up. The grand kids did visit in their costumes but I thought I would let their parents post their pictures. So I found a picture of a past Halloween .

Alan as Dracula, Adam a dead boy scout, Laura a princess and Rachel a baby doll. I think Kimberly was a teenager and gone:) Weren't they cute? I miss it already.

Tanner Day

Every Thursday my grandson, Tanner, comes and spends the day with me while his mom, Kimberly, works. Thus, we call it "Tanner Day". Today was such a beautiful fall day so we decided to go out and rake up the leaves in the yard. Tanner was a big help in the beginning then he discovered the fun you can have with a pile of leaves.

It was an awesome Tanner day. Sunshine, little boys and leaves are a great combination. I will finish raking the leaves tomorrow but I know it won't be as much fun without him.

Happy 21st Birthday Adam!

Scattering Sunshine

OK, I know most of you think of farming and ranching as a glamorous lifestyle where we drive around in John Deere tractors and Ford pickups looking good or ride our horses off into the sunset. I'm going to shatter that illusion in this post. There are quite a few stinky jobs that have to be done on the farm and this is one of them......hauling manure! After last year's calves were weaned in the fall, they spent most of the winter in the corrals behind Grandmas. After a winter of feeding the calves and strawing the pens when they got a little "gooey" the pens get pretty thick with manure. The calves were sold in the spring and the manure was left to compost over the summer. Now that it is time for this year's calves to come home from the ranch, the corrals need to be cleaned out. This job fell to Alan this year.

As you can see it is pretty deep. About three foot deep on the level.

He put the bucket attachment on the telehandler and started scooping

and scooping.

It takes about eight scoops to fill the manure spreader.

He then drove to the field behind our house and drove up and down while the manure spreader flung the manure over the field.

Cheap fertilizer!

The manure in our corrals covered about 90 acres. It took about a week to complete this task. There's a lot of driving between the corrals and fields. A spreader full only covers about a land and a half. It's a crappy job but somebody has got to do it.

Photo Tag

For this tag you are supposed to go to your picture folders and go to the 4th folder over and pick the 4th picture out of it and post it. Here is the picture.

I only found out last year how to put pictures on my computer so my files don't go very far back. This is in front of the White House when we were touring D.C. before Alan's wedding last year. Oops, Laura blinked.
I tag Janet O, Kristie C, Kathi G and LeAnn M.

Father's Week at U of I

Conference weekend also happened to be Father's Week at the University of Idaho so we took a few days to drive up and visit Laura. It was a busy week for her with Ag Days also going on at the same time, but we did get to spend some time with her. Roger & Laura on the staircase in her sorority house.

Bonding at the Vandals football game

My favorite - Tuba Men in Skirts

Our hotel was in Lewiston because everything in Moscow was booked so we spent a little time along the Snake River at the port of Lewiston. It was a fun weekend trip and Roger was glad to be out of the tractors for a few days.

Countdown to Adam!

I had been waiting for an official letter from the mission office before I posted this. Yesterday the letter came. About two weeks ago I received a call from the Jacksonville, Florida mission office. The sister missionary told me she was working on scheduling flights home and wanted to know which airport we wanted Adam flown into. This call caught me completely off guard. First, the call came on my cell phone and second, I was dripping with peach juice as I was at Kimberly's house helping her can peaches. Adam was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. All I was able to babble was "We don't even have a release date for him. We don't know when he's coming home!" She laughed and told me he would be released on December 23rd. Several thoughts rushed through my mind. We had hoped he would be released on the 17th then we could go and pick him up and play in Florida for a week and be home for Christmas. We can't do that if he is released on the 23rd. Adam has mentioned several times that he really wants to be home for Christmas. The next thought was "Wow! Adam is coming home! What an awesome Christmas present!" We are so excited to have a date to look forward to. So watch the ticker at the top of the blog and you can count down to December 23rd with us. And, of course, he will be flying into the local airport. Here are a few fun pictures Adam sent us this spring.

At first I thought this sign was funny. Now I think its kind of scary.

Adam hunting gators. The one in the background is hard to see. In his Monday e-mail, Roger had asked Adam how it was going with the investigators he has been working with. Adam replied that everything was going great with the "gators". Must be a mission pun.

I hope he used his camera zoom when he took this photo.

This picture was taken at a yearly ward party called the "Beast Feast". Notice the skin is hanging on a church gym wall. At the Beast Feast ward members bring all sorts of wild meat cooked different ways and they don't tell you what it is until after dinner. I think they serve everything from alligator to squirrel meat. Sounds like an interesting ward party.