The Bee Envasion!

Does anybody know why bees continually come back to the same house? Here is our latest.

This one is on our patio. We have had so many bees in the past years I probably can't remember them all. The first one I recall was up on our clear story windows - right in the corner and up above our kitchen door. That meant even though the nest of bees was way high up we had bees around the door that none of us liked. Then, we had bees in our garage wall and Cody at the time had his business here in Arizona and he had to take the wall apart and remove the honeycombs they had made. Just to continue to move around the house we once had them in the corner of the front bedroom window. And, the corner of the front door. Here again Cody had to go into the stucco and remove them. By the way, he looks pretty funny in his bee suit!


Probably the most unusual place for the bees to make their home was in the sprinkler box that I wrote about earlier.

Cody you need to come home - I need a "bee man."

Drum Roll . . . . . .

Before:


After:

Easter Weekend

Busy - Busy - Busy - but fun!

Saturday we went to the park on Lindsay and Chandler Heights and it is the perfect place for kids to roam and have fun! It was such a pretty place with the yellow flowers blooming. We spent the afternoon eating, riding bikes, playing ball, fishing, hunting easter eggs, getting feet wet in the water and just having good bonding time with the cousins.


























Now if that wasn't enough for one day we journed to the ballfield for Cooper's first baseball game. We couldn't miss that - no way! I am really looking forward to his games each week. Chandler is playing football but no games for the day.
Isn't he the cuttest little guy - such form!


So, on Sunday a little more quite - dinner and than we ended up on the front lawn with the Easter baskets and discussed paint colors of course. Cooper picked "E" because it is red, Alvin picked "c" and everybody else picked "b". We are going with "C".

How do you choose!

Eeny, meany, miny mow! (is the spelling right?)
Blindfold myself - spin myself around and point!
Throw a dart!





This picture is for Cody. Last summer we had bees going in and out of our sprinkler box. Finally when it got cooler and they kinda went away early in the morning we sprayed stuff in thru the cracks and taped it shut. This is what we found yesterday when we opened it up.

Back to a routine . . .

The end of spring break has come to a close and now Alvin is back to a heavy workload and has come home grouchy the last two days and it is only Wednesday. His mind is busy having to maintain two work places, working on a City of Chandler tile project, keeping up with his church job, and on top of that knowing he has to go thru the interview process to actually get the college job. It is defnitely sometime to worry about knowing some of the issues that are involved.

But, nevertheless we had a good two week break. Alvin said it was very relaxing for him. The days we spent in Seattle with Cody, Chelsea and kids were awesome. I do love going up there. We went to the Mill Avenue street fair. We haven't done that for a while and Alvin enjoyed visiting with some of his old ceramic buddies that he used to do the show with. The rest of the time we had appointments, went to a couple of movies, pizza with the kids, and the hike and helped Chelslea and Stephen paint the outside of their house. Alvin actually had only one week off from college teaching so the second week he put in many more long hours at the college. He will never get caught up! I feel so sorry for him with such a hectic schedule.

We are picking out outside house colors for the house. The painters are coming Monday. We have lived here 30 years and the stucco has never been painted but the wood has several times. We are going with a darker stucco color and the green a different hue. It is hard choosing the right color! We have purchased quite a few sample paint colors to hopefully get it right. We are also repainting the inside two accent walls that we had painted in the fall and after living with the awful brownish color for quite a few months will try for a better color.
Here are some pictures of painting Chelsea's house. Unfortunately we did not get a before and after picture.

Let's Take A Hike Stephen!

This morning we got up and I asked Alvin what he was going to do? (still on spring break) His plans were to go out to the college like he has done all week and do the millions of things that need to be done out there. He asked if I had something in mind to do and I said I wanted to go on a hike. I have been on a real excercise kick since seeing my knee doctor last week. The Doc and I decided I should really give my knee a workout this next month to possible see if it "might get better."

So, we headed out with tennis shoes, water and camera and decided we needed some kids too. Chelsea and Stephen are painting the outside of their house this Friday so Chelsea all week has been prepping the outside by sanding, scraping, cauking windows and fixing cracks. We didn't figure she would go but if we took the kids she would possibly get more work done.

Chandler and Tatum were overely excited to go but Cooper took major convencing that it would be fun. So, we headed out to Usery Pass only about 15 miles away from Chelsea's house.

We told Tatum to not touch any cactus so the first little while she walked with her hands behind her back. She was such a good hiker and kept up with her brothers. Chandler helped her in the rough spots by holding her hand. Such a good big brother!
She slid on the loose rocks a few times and came home with a few minor stratches.





We preceeded to walk up the hill (ok - that is just the lower part of the hill in the above picture - it was taller than that) and were about 20 steps shy of reaching the very top when a bee hive scard us from going further.

These rocks were about three quarters of the way up. We had a rest stop at my encouraging of course. Back down the hill we walked around the mountain so together we probably walked two miles.





We went to McDonalds for lunch and then decided to go to the lake and Butcher Jones Beach which was another 5-6 miles down the road.



Alvin was teaching the kids how to skip rocks in the water. Both boys were finally succcessful at the task with many tries.

We had lots of fun! Now, I am requesting a public apology from my favorite son-in-law Stephen! It seems when he called home to see how everybody was doing Chelsea told him we took the kids on a hike. His response was, "I hope we don't have to call the emergency crew to rescue them off the mountain." I understand that you haven't seen much physical activity from us the last few years and we have defnitely gained a few in the last years; but, well - - - next time you just come along and see for yourselves that we still can do these types of things. (You can only come though if you will let me try out your walking sticks)

My challenge for the October fall break is to be in better condition so we can hike the "wind cave" trail which is a 3.2 mile round-trip hike. Anybody welcome to join me. My grandkids committed themselves already.

Go to this site to check the hike out:
http://www.azcentral.com/travel/hiking/articles/2009/10/22/20091022hike1024.html