No end to all the Weed's

This is the dreaded dandelion weed. Actually, some people don't count this in as a weed because of the pretty yellow flowers and the green leaves that are eatable. They can sure cause some problems in a yard though. This area of our lawn is in the hot (very hot) sun and is not as thick as it should be. This hot summer took a tole on our front South yard and now with the recent rains the weeds are really taking over that area.

I have been picking a lot of weeds lately, seems like hours and still it seems like there are so many. We have had a lot of rain lately and the weeds have really shown up. They are also easier to pull out of the ground when the soil is wet. I'm sure many of you will recognize many of the weeds I am about to show you and talk about and relate to my weed problem. The weed above, is the most prevalent in our lawn right now. It starts so Innocent and small, but in just a few days it will be as big round as a dinner plate killing and chocking out the lawn under it.

We don't have many of these painful, prickly thistles this year. But even 2 or 3 are too many, right? In the Word of God, in Genesis 3 verse 17 and 18, as a result from sin, God tells us, "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field". He was not just talking to Adam and Eve after the very first sin but to all of us as well since we are all born sinners. Just as the weeds are everywhere and effect us all so is sin in all our lives. It is a good thing God loved us so much he sent a solution to our many sins, His only Son was the answer, John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Last year there were many of these weeds, lucky the roots are shallow and easy to pull out. This year there were very few, I found this sneaky pesty weed very close to the edge of our raised garden. Sometimes, just like sin, they think they can sneak into our lives without us even noticing.

This weed is one of those grass looking weeds that sticks and clings to your cloths or hair and it's hard to get rid of it, it hitches a ride to be secretly distributed to other placed. It is also like sin, I especially think of gossip with this weed, how it sticks with you and is spread secretly from person to person cosing many more problems and causing it to grow, grow, grow.

About 2 weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Garden show with question/answer time. This weed above, I think they called it a pig weed, is capable of producing many thousands of seeds and the horticulture specialist told us only a small percent of these seeds grow the following year. Many of the seeds will lay dormant for up to 7 years. So that explains a lot, why there are always so many weeds. You think you have them under control and they just keep coming back year after year. Kind of like our sin right?

This is creeping Jenny, It is very hard to kill or get rid of! I talked to one of our chemical companies and they said they have to be sprayed 3 times a year for 3 to 5 years to control their growth. This weed has the ability to twine around good plants and choke them and kill them.

Again, like sin twines around us choking us off from Gods Word, His Love and Forgiveness. If we are continually around sin, letting it grab us and twine around us, we could be choked off. It is only with His help, that we can keep the weed's in our life under control, but never gone. that's why we are thankful for Gods constant forgiveness through Christ Jesus.

As I was picking weeds, I noticed where our lawn was the thickest and healthiest, there very few weeds, that is more the answer then picking the weeds, keeping the lawn in good condition with water and fertilizer. The thicker the grass, the harder it is for the weeds to get hold.

You got it, just like sin, If we are healthy in our Christian lives, Bible reading and studies, prayer, attending Church and having a close christian relationship with other Christians we have a better chance at fighting off the sin (weed's) in our life. The more we neglect these very important things the thinner and weaker our lawn becomes and those weeds just start taking over. Once they have a hold, it is very hard to get rid of them.

Now that we have had some moisture, we have noticed lots of little mushrooms growing. These also could be considered weeds if they are in your lawn.

I'm sure many of you recognize this weed! The hard thing about this weed is the root is so deep and hard to get out of the ground. unless you can catch it when it is just a new baby weed it is almost impossible to get rid of it completely. OK, by now you know I am also going to compare this to sin. If we let it grow and grow the root also will take hold deep in our heart and sometimes we don't even want to get rid of it!

Hear is another sneaky weed, growing as close to the edge of our sidewalk as it possibly can.
This one also has sharp stickers that hurt my hand when I try to pull it from the ground. You got it, just like sin, God certainly created weeds to remind us of our sin.

Hear is another weed that can grow very fast covering a large area and kill whatever is under it. It seems like weeds grow twice as fast as the good plant. A LOT LIKE SIN!

I often think about Ephesians 6 verses 10 - 18 God tells us to be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. I will let you read the rest of it. Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Fish! Fish! Fish!

This week my husband and I had the opportunity to spend a couple days at beautiful Custer State Park and do some long overdue fishing. The weather has finally cooled off. It was in the 60's at night and about 80 Degrees during the day. It is a absolutely gorgeous area with the lake nestled down between the Black Hills and big bull pines. I did not take my camera and It was more beauty then I could have even captured on a photograph. Wow, God sure has created some special places for us humble sinful people to whiteness. Some time I will take my camera to give you an idea of how special this place is. Stockade has now become my favorite Lake. My other favorite lake is so very low that it is hard to even dock the boat or safely boat around.

Here is a sight you can see some parts of Custer State Park http://www.blackhillsbadlands.com/external.asp?url=www.custerresorts.com

The camp ground was very full but quiet. We woke up to 5 deer close by so we quietly watched them for quite a while before heading to the lake about sun rise. We caught a bunch of fish. We had to release a bunch as well due to the size limit on Bass is over 15 inches. We caught and reeled many that were 10 - 14 1/2 inches. Those are really fun fish to catch and even jump completely out of the water as you real them in towards the boat. They feel like such big fish and are hard to release. We also caught a lot of Northern Pike. Now they are big and so much fun to catch. They hit very hard and sometimes if you aren't using a steel leader they chump of the lure and are gone. They have very sharp teeth.

This is the bucket full of fish as we emptied them from our live well in the boat. The top fish is a nice size Crappie that my husband caught. Too bad we only caught one, they are good eating fish too. The next fish is the only 15 inch keeper bass, and I landed that one.

Here they are, most of them Northern Pike.

You can see that the Bass is 15" and the longest Northern Pike is 25 inch's. Most of the fish were caught using spinners, Yellow or green. I love fishing with spinners. My husband caught this largest Northern early morning with a top water lure as he was fishing for bass. Now that was a surprise when this big fish came up out of the water with the lure in his mouth.

This is a close up of the Bass and Crappie.

A close up of some of the largest Northern Pike. Next time I will take a picture of their big sharp vicious teeth.

My husband, bless his heart spent over an hour cleaning all these fish. We figure we got about 12 lb of fish. I won't even guess at the amount of heads, skin and insides that we had,and you ask what we do with all that stuff? We bury/plant it in several different holes in our garden. That's why our garden dose so good with growing blue ribbon vegetables. See blog below!

This is the difference in the fish filet's, This is the bass, the Northern in in the picture above.

We plan to take some of the fish meet to My parents in ND. They love fish and are no longer able to go fishing and catch them themselves.

Fair Time

I always enjoy fair time, entering a few things and also looking around at the many other entries from our Central States. Its always such a hard decision on what to enter and how to display especially the Vegetable collection. This is my basket, it was awarded the Blue Ribbon. There was another basket done up so beautiful in a old Coke Cola wood box. It was just chucked full of Vegetables and got the Grand Prize Ribbon. You can display 10 different vegetables but as many varieties of any vegetable as you want. Like, green pepper, red pepper, sweet banana peppers and hot peppers. I only had 7 different vegetables in my basket.

I love the lighting in the horticulture building. It is a rounded, gazebo like building with many windows around. I think these vegetables look so nice. One of these trays of Green Peppers is mine and also way at the end, sweet banana peppers.

None of these are mine, I just thought it looked very nice with the different colors.

This is my entry of Cascade Geraniums. We had to display 2 stems. If you have never seen cascade Geraniums, they are very pretty, with many blossoms all summer long. They are the flowers mostly used in Germany in their many window box's. I can only purchase them at one of our local green houses.

This is just another pretty area of the flowers, I did have a small rose bowl just next to the big gorgeous purple ribbons, mine got a red.

Here we are in the sewing displays, This is the baptism gown I entered, it only got a red but I was surprised it did that well. When I sewed this, I had sewn both a gown and a romper for our 4th grand child. You see, we didn't want to know what sex the child was so it was the best way I knew to be prepared. My daughter always has her children Baptized when they are only 1 or 2 weeks old. This prevented a big rush in sewing after the baby was born. It was a boy! What a sweet precious boy at that! So, when I had sewn this gown, I was not trying to win a ribbon and was not as precise as I could have been. It was fun to enter though and I think it looked nice on the display rack. I had several photographs entered in the photography department. Anyone who knows me, knows I love to take pictures. I did not take pictures of my pictures though! It just didn't seem to make a lot of sense. I did take 3 blue ribbons and 1 white. There were so many photo's entered that it was hard for them to fit them all on the display racks, most in the people and water scenes lots.

As I was walking around, I spotted this cute little hungry calf with it's mother and just had to snap a picture. I'm sure as sweet as they look, they had to win best of show!

The Dinner Train

Who would have ever guessed Chadron, NE would have a Dinner Train! Well, here it is! We had never heard about this train until our good friends ask us to accompany them for a evening out to celebrate both His and my husbands birthday, both on the 12Th.

This is the car we were in, about 3/4Th way to the front. It was about a 3 hour ride, slowly going about 12 miles East and then back to Chadron. The two train cars hold about 64 people for the meal. It was 98 degrees out side but a very comfortable air conditioned inside.

You can see how nice it is with all the covered chairs, cloth table cloths and napkins, etc. Our table was where you see the waitress standing.

This is the 4 of us at the very beginning of the evening before the train started to move. You can tell at that point we were setting next to some old train cars with writing and graffiti on them. The scenery got much better as we started rolling.

Our friends are from that area and even own about 5000 acres of land. This picture is of some of their land that is rented out as ranch land.

Since our friend had been brought up and raised in that very area, we had our own tour guide.
This, He said used to be the very sight of a popular place called The Pink Panther. It was a big arena way back then where all the popular music groups and artists would come to perform. The arena building was sold and used as a pig farm before it finally burnt to the ground. This photo shows what is now there.

I did not think to take a picture of the first course of our 5 course meal. It was a appetizer tray of different olives and cheeses. This is our soup, corn chowder soup. It was very tasty. You can see I just had to try the Wheat Beer. Well, after all, I originated from a Wheat Farm in ND. This was very good beer, almost, but not as good as Michelob. It was made in Kansas City, Mo.

Here is our salad, served with a very nummy slice of sweet bread. The spinach salad with pear chunks and grape halves had a different tasty dressing, I think it might have been made from pear juice and vinegar? Maybe?

Here it is! PRIME RIB main course. We did have our choice of Prime Rib, Chicken cordon blue, or Cajun Shrimp. It all smelt delicious. Everything was cooked and prepared in the train kitchen.

This was the final course, desert, Cappuccino Mousse. It was very creamy and rich. I had to ask for coffee. I love coffee with my dessert.

This is what it looked like after almost everyone had gotten off the train.

Here is the train from the dark outside just before we got ready to leave for home. This train has been in operation for several years. This September 29Th will be it's last run. The tracks will be taken up. Farewell to a wonderful part of Chadron and History. Maybe if someone with a lot of money comes along and offers to buy it and the track section, just maybe it will stay in operation. It only ran from early may until late September every Friday and Saturday evening.

Here we are on our way home with a 45 minute lay over or traffic stop. We found out we had just missed a horrible storm with 4" rain, strong 65 MPH wind and large Hail. The water was running over the road that led back to our homes. The police had to close the road due to dangerous high running water. A few miles before we got to this point, we saw a big semi on its side in the ditch. This was all due to the bad storm. The area was so very dry and really needed moisture but when it is a down pour, the earth can only soak up the rain so fast, and it wasn't fast enough. All in all, we had a very enjoyable evening with good company, our friends.

New washer and dryer

It is here! YEA, YEA, YEA! We are a week ahead of schedule. They could deliver our new washer and dryer on Saturday 9AM.

Here they are, getting them both installed. This is the new energy saving, high efficiency washer/dryer. Tide even makes a special Tide HE detergent for these front loading machines.

It is specially formulated for great cleaning without creating too many suds.

Lots of neet buttons and the separate soap/bleach/softener compartment to the upper left. It looks hard but it is really very simple to use and select the correct setting.

Here we are, washing our white's.

It dose a very nice job cleaning and is much quieter then our old washer.

This is how it looks in place. It saves a lot of space in our small utility room. I am sure we will enjoy this new investment for years to come.

Tricks

This is our 10 year old, very precious, spoiled dog. He loves his treats! He will do almost anything for his treats. Hear he is waiting patiently for his treat! We almost always make him do a trick or two for his treat. He knows about 5 tricks. The dog we had before, lived to about 14 years old, He knew about 15 tricks. We enjoy and love our pets.

Hear is our dog begging, just before he sneezes for his treat.

Shaking hands, GOOD BOY!

SIT BOY, SIT! GOOD JOB!

CATCH BOY, CATCH
Well, it's OK to miss once in awhile!

We know, that was hard work and now you deserve a nap!

NOW, for those of you who want your own dog and want to have him do tricks . . .

TYPE IN a command and see what happens... sit, roll over, down, stand, sing, dance, shake, fetch, play dead etc. and...it's also very cute if you type in a command that's not recognized...!!
Make sure you type in "Kiss" too, but do it last.
Click here: I Do Dog Tricks