The sum of Sylvain's travels

I am so happy to finally have Sylvain home after his week long visit with his dad. As you can see, he didn't come home alone -- bringing a 5' tall "friend" he won at one of those Carny games at Cedar Point. The text message I received from him when he won it was a photo of him with the stuffed toy, followed by the plea: "Hey mom bring the jeep when you pick me up [from Alma]". He knew right away that there was no way it was going to fit in the Honda.

On the up-side, we can refer to the "gorilla in the room" and really mean that...


As for the rest of my day today:
rows knit -- about 5 on the Daphne purse;
movies watched -- zero;
housework accomplished -- much.

Though, I must say that our neighbor whose yard we totally trespassed through to clear out that debris I mentioned yesterday called. After being unable to catch them while home, I left a note for them and taped it to their doorway earlier this week. The note explained what we were going to do [did] and when, as well as providing our home number so that they could reach us if this weekend wasn't a good time. I was assured by a local police officer that that was more than sufficient and that'll cover our butts in case our neighbor turned out to be less than friendly and wanted to make a ruckus over our invasion of their yard.

As it turns out, he was a very pleasant person to talk to on the phone and even insisted on paying us for the work!?! Of course, I turned him down, and hoped I didn't offend him in the process b/c he was quite insistent. We do have to rent a chipper to take care of the debris, but I can't stand the thought of someone paying me for damage to my own tree.


Chuck focused on priming the back of the garage. This poor part of our house has been the focus of much scraping, sanding, patching, followed by more scraping and sanding. We definitely over-did the prep work on this one part of the whole enchilada, but hey we're newbies at painting and want it to look good.


We took a little break and went to a Troop 125 parent's BBQ at Tom and Kathy's house. That was quite nice, and we probably stayed much longer than we should have, given that I'm going to be travelling to the Boston area tomorrow and still needed to do laundry and pack. Chuck's key-lime mini-pies turned out really well; though, they're definitely something that you leave in the freezer until folks are ready to eat it. Even the short while they were set out on the counter with the other desserts, the key lime started to melt. Maybe he should consider adding some plain gelatin or something to the mix...

Chuck was quite the trooper, though b/c he really wanted to try out painting the part he primed. After we returned home from the BBQ, he quickly got the paint and supplies together and hit the ladder. Even though it was dusk already, he was painting away. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so hopefully, the paint will be okay and all wouldn't have been for naught.