porta-potty polka-dotted land

to look out our windows, especially the ones facing the back side of the house this morning was a sight to see! they have begun to place the porta-potties for Charlie's Holiday! it's great! these are super special porta-potties, they have men porta-potties and women porta-potties! it's great! i'm going to try to post a picture here soon before it looks normal with all the other things set up. here is a run down of Charlie's Holiday:

~the first of the portapotties have arrived, with more to come. (119 to be exact). over 100 trash cans and 50 recycling receptacles are on their way.

~ june 26th the huge entertainment tent will be set up, and the dirt moving crew will be leveling areas of the field for the rodeo.

~ tons of food have been ordered- including 20,000 burgers and hot dogs, 10,000 lbs. of beef and pork, and a semi load of bread, 120 cases of ketchup, 6 tons of french fries, more than 70,000 sodas and bottles of water.

~ commercials are hitting the radio and tv stations.

~ do you know how many acers are required to park 8000 cars? the parking crew is working out the logistics for that. (they figured 80 acers!)

~ Volunteer and event tshirst have been ordered and should arrive this week (to be distributed through work department heads).

~have you ever made kettle corn? we need someone to manage the kettle corn booth on Friday and Saturday.

~have you worked with inflatable games? ours need to be unrolled and cleaned before the big event.

~ do you have experience on a fryer? several time slots need to be filled with a french fry maker!

that's just the start of it. to see this put into song by our wonderful worship leader visit www.hlseakpeek.blogspot.com! it's funny!

hope to see ya'll there! i'll be driving a shuttle!

gardening

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful mom's.  in case your kids never tell you, you are appreciated greatly, even though they may not tell  you now, they will when they are 28, and yes, they will be 28 some day :)

so as you know it's that wonderful time of the year where everyone starts planting flowers.  this year we did something different, well, actually a lot different.  mom showed us a cool catalog that had some different bulbs and plants and other fun stuff.  so we got a butterfly/hummingbird garden that is bulbs, and they come back every year.  so it was a great deal, we ended up with 40 some plants for $45.00, what a deal, then the ladies put in some money, so i had a total of $108 to spend on flowers.

the plants came in the mail last Saturday, so of course we had to plant them.  we were a little skeptical, especially when someone asked me which end was up, i told them to plant them sideways (lol, not really).  this week we were out there looking and some of the bulbs were coming up already!  we were stoked and relieved, knowing that it was going to come out okay.

then for the next fun project i decided i would like some edging around our little flower garden it's like 12 feet long and maybe 5 feet wide, but thought brick edging would look nice, you know the scallops?  so we bought 25 of them thinking that would be plenty.  we were like 4 short!  ugh, but fortunately someone was going back to Wal Mart, so we were saved.  so last night we wanted to finish it, and didn't know how to break some of the bricks to make them fit.  i thought, hmmm, we have a hammer and a flat head screw driver, so we should be able to break them that way.  well, i tried, didn't get very far and decided that wouldn't work.  then one of the ladies came and said "here, this is what we need to do, i'll stand on it with the last scallop hanging off the step and you hit it with the hammer and it should break."  we bowed our heads in prayer for a brief moment, then went to work.  and guess what?  it turned out beautiful!  absolutely perfect!  we were so excited that we would get to do it again.  and now we have enough bricks for the garden.  it took so much work to do it, so many trips out to the road to make sure they were even, and we got tired of digging, so i started stepping on them to make them go down instead of digging and it worked!  we decided that we would have a side job for landscaping!

had all the ladies pitch in to help mulch around where all the bulbs were and it looks wonderful.  now we just have to wait for the bulbs to grow!  it's gonna be beautiful!

ode to Jode

this is my friend Jody.  today is her birthday.   i won't tell you how old she is though, because i like being her friend.  
i'm not very good at poetry, so i won't try to write a poem, but i will tell you why she's my friend:

1) everywhere we go we have a good time, yes, even to a funeral!

2) she's a riot, and you never know what she's going to say!

3) it's fun to tease her about bacon.  she hates it, but i always invite her over when we have it just to hear her politely say "no thank you".

4) she's only serious when needed, otherwise she loves to laugh.

5) she's got a crazy family, crazy as in fun though-not mad.  so it doesn't make mine look near as bad.

6) she lets me be me.

7) she looks sophisticated, but isn't. don't tell everybody though.

8) we can walk around the c-store looking at things and eat ice cream, and then pay for it, and she thinks its fun!

9) she likes apples

10) she loves God.

i wish that all of you could get to know my friend Jody, but she's great, just take my word for it!

Determination

Yesterday i had the wonderful privilege to watch 2 beautiful girls while their mother was at a doctors appointment. it wasn't for very long, maybe 5-10 min, but the fun stuff happened while i was in the waiting room with them and their mother. the littlest girl is 3 years old, and have a very big, strong personality! she's a riot! anyway, she's standing in front of me doing what this little girl in the picture is doinglike any good friend, i swiped away her hand, she didn't quite get her finger in her nose, but boy was she headed there rather quickly! but she went at it again, and again, finally i told her to stop it! she just looked at me and said "NO! I HAVE A BUGGER!" her mom heard this and rushed to the receptionist for a tissue.

now, this little girl was determined to get what she wanted! she wanted that bugger out! (now bear with me, i'm going somewhere with this) and she would stop at nothing. however, she was not about to ask for help.

i looked at her and i thought, i'm sure there's a lesson in this somewhere! i just know there is! it's to funny not to get a lesson out of it. so the lesson i came up with is, that's how we need to be in our walk with God. Relentless! not backing down, not giving up until the obstacle is out of our way. but so many times, we ask God to do all the work and leave none of the work for us, or the other way around, we try to do all the work and it's God who needs to do it. i think it varies on the situation. but the question is, are was as determined as this little girl was to get obstacles out of our way? or are we going to let it continue to hinder us?

snipe hunting

so this was the fun of last night. we had a bon fire, and we took about 12 ladies snipe hunting. it was a blast. so for a proper explanation of snipe and snipe hunting, i consulted the great oracle (Wikipedia) and found these wonderful definitions. hope you enjoy!




snipe is any of nearly 20 wading bird species in three genera in the family Scolopacidae. They are characterised by a very long slender bill and cryptic plumage. The Gallinago snipes have a nearly worldwide distribution, the Lymnocryptes Jack Snipe is restricted to Asia and Europe and the Coenocorypha snipes are found only in New Zealand. The three species of painted snipe are not closely related to the typical snipes, and are placed in their own family, the Rostratulidae.



A snipe hunt, a form of wild goose chase that is also known as a fool's errand, is one of a class of practical jokes that involves experienced people making fun of newcomers by giving them an impossible or imaginary task. The origin of the term is a practical joke where inexperienced campers are told about a bird or animal called the snipe as well as a usually ridiculous method of catching it, such as running around the woods carrying a bag or making strange noises. Incidentally, the snipe (a family of shorebirds) is difficult to catch for experienced hunters, so much so that the word "sniper" is derived from it to refer to anyone skilled enough to shoot one.[1]
A wild goose chase can also be more serious, either a deliberate attempt to thwart an opponent by sending him/her off on a quest based on misinformation, or a mistake on one's own part leading to a hopeless quest. [2]