Weekend in Bama

I have done it again....taken a big pause in blogging and now lots of good things have happened and it feels like a lot to catch up on.  Life comes at you fast and unfortunately, I can't remember all of it.  It is a problem. Can't see, can't hear, can't remember things.  Getting old is not for wimps.  

Let's just do the best we can, alright?

I recently spent a fabulous weekend in Bama with my people!  We worked hard - but we laughed hard too! Our goal for the weekend was to do a big yard clean up for the parental units and paint the floor in their screened porch.  Now all of these pictures will give you the impression that it was only me and my sister, "The Nice One" doing all the work.  That is not true...although we did do a bunch!  We had some help from my brother, brother-in-law and nephew and lots of supervision from Bob.  Though to be honest, the men seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to fix a chainsaw while me and The Nice One were cutting everything by hand and taking a ton of trips to the curb to pile up all the clippings. 

When you trim bushes by hand it can look pretty bad!  Look at this nightmare of a bush! 

It was almost up to the roof line and we were reaching into the bush and trying to give it a real good haircut.  It looked like a hot mess!  I stepped back at one point and said, "Let's take a picture and send this in to Disney to see if we can get on the topiary garden team to shape bushes into animals."  We are still waiting to hear back from them.

Here is a little bit better work that we did.

We clipped, cut, dug up, weeded, mulched and got the corner lot back in great shape!

Now the hedge below was a monster!  Seriously, it was like 15 feet tall and tried to kill two of our people.  My brother-in-law FINALLY got the dumb chainsaw working and was getting to work on this hedge and stepped in a hidden hole and fell down with the chainsaw running.  He threw the chainsaw into the hedge on his way down to his face plant and thank goodness the chain quit moving and he was unharmed.  

Bob also tripped while working on this hedge and took a serious stumble!  I heard it happen, but didn't see it thank goodness.  He damn near impaled himself on some small trees that had been cut off but were still sticking out of the ground about four inches. We were actually in the process of clipping all of those close to the ground to prevent the very thing that happened to Bob.  He was definitely being watched over by God, because he had sticks coming out the ground on both sides of him within just a couple inches.  That would have been so bad.   

The hedge didn't kill or injure anyone, but I am going to give it the stink eye every time I walk by it. 

All the while, the pile of refuge at the curb kept growing and growing.

The Nice One got scratched and cut up while working on our topiary masterpiece.  Dangerous work.

But it didn't slow her down.  She started straightening up the garage and before you know it she had us all involved in that bonus project!  We got it organized and it will be time for Can Man productions to get fired back up. 

We took a break in the afternoon and watched gobs of football and ate some of Lana's awesome Gumbo and Chicken and Dumplings.  It was a great day! 

Sunday morning, we got started early painting the screened porch floor.  It didn't take any time at all. 

While it dried, we took some triumphant pictures of our hard work by the big pile of limbs. 

We also staged some pictures to look like this rug was really heavy, but honestly we could have carried it with one hand. It doesn't take much to amuse us.

Just looking at this finished porch picture makes me laugh.  You would never believe how long it took us to figure out what was wrong with the chair cushions.  We could not figure out why they wouldn't fit back on the chairs.  We flipped them, turned them upside down, worked as a team to try to stretch the fabric that was not stretching.  So exasperated, only to finally realize the corners were flipped inside out. Once we got those flipped around they went on perfectly.

Before we headed back to the airport we took this cleaned up photo on the refreshed porch.  Sisters that share "Acts of Service" as their love language....nothing makes us happier than a working weekend.  We often wish we lived close enough to help each other out with house projects like we did back in the good ol' days.  We get stuff done! 

Well that wraps up one fun event!  Happily, I remembered more than I thought from my weekend in Dixie!  Hooray!  

Next up, a college visit to ASU!