A little of this and a little of that

Summer time is Busy time.

Here's a little bit of what we've been up to lately.

The last week of June we enjoyed our trip to Ohio boating with family and friends.

I had a good time scrapbooking with 17 scrappin' friends last weekend in St. Louis.

Isaiah and I had great birthdays.
Evan's friends Harley and Hailey baked me a birthday cake.

I taught a Photography class to 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at church all last week.
Isaiah was my helper.

This is a photo one of my students took of me.

Isaiah had his birthday party over the weekend.
It started with water wars....

Then moved inside to the ice cream sundae bar....

Next was present time.....

And finally the boys dug into their goodie bags and modeled their "Billy Bob" rotten teeth for me.

We had a big storm today and a branch fell and snapped my Dwarf Japanese Maple tree in half.

The branch that took out the JM tree

My poor tree is not a pile of branches on the ground now.

The storm knocked over a tree out back.

My Purple Cone Flowers are in bloom.

My Crepe Myrtle is in bloom.

Thanks for popping in for a visit.
Is your summer as busy as ours?

Ike- You Shouldn't Have

Remnants of Hurricane Ike passed by yesterday, knocking on our door with 60 - 70 mph gusts of winds. We sat in church while the winds howled and the power flickered. It sounded like there was a helicopter landing on top of our church. A sliding glass door to the church blew off. But the large brick building remained unharmed. We drove around looking at the trees down, power lines down, the roof of the gas station had fallen on a truck filling up with gas. Our neighbor called us to see if we were home. Oh no, I knew it would be bad news. My first thought was it was our trees. Sure enough I was right. We arrived home to see several of our trees snapped and one large tree on our neighbors property laying across our yard, just missing our shed by a few feet. We had no power for 6 hours, so the kids had to occupy themselves with games and homework. About 5 hours after the hard winds started they died down and the neighbors began to emerge from their homes to access the storm damage. I, of course, emerged with my camera. Here are some photos of our yard, as well as our schools that were affected. Needless to say they cancelled school today. Look at the right side of the picture and you will see Dennis. This shows how massive this tree is
When the tree fell, it hit a few of our trees. It split this one right down the middle.


A view of our yard from the fallen tree. Thank goodness it was way in the back and far from our house. And praise the Lord that the trees near our house are still standing!



The lightpost in our front yard also fell in the high winds


Our utility trailer is pretty much burried
It's a massive mess of branches out there


The wind blew the top of this tree right off. It's now laying in the creek.


Our side yard
Side yard looking toward our house
The fence that is around the High School football field is now on the ground
This is Logan's Jr. High school. It picked up the roofing shingles and turned them back over the building like a page in a book.

All this, and not a single drop of rain!