Sunday, July 30, 2006

Dad's health scare

We have just returned from my parents' house.
My mom called Thursday night from the small town hospital and said that Dad was in the emergency room with chest pains, numbness, headache: possible heart attack. They did tests and kept him overnight. At that time they thought he had angina. http://www.webmd.com/content/pages/9/1675_57854.htm
On Friday they called and said that he was being transferred to the nearby college town, bigger, better hospital. There they would do a heart cath. Which could tell them of blockages and if needed maybe do a procedure while they were in there... very scary. And hard to be away from home/family. My family of four quickly packed up and headed to the hospital, which is a three hour drive.(here I take another opportunity to inform. :)) http://www.webmd.com/solutions/heart-disease-detection
They took him in Friday evening and did the test, which sends a camera in through a vein in the groin and looks at the heart's passageways. This was supposed to take an hour, but only took half an hour. The doctor said there were no blockages, whatsoever. The doctor said he hopes his heart looks like Dad's. So, good news. I took he and Mom home that night where he slept comfortably. Now we wait for some other tests to be done, possibly next week to figure out the cause of the symptoms.
While there, my family convinced me to leave my daughters for a few days, without the hubby and I! I don't do that very often and feel out of my element when I do.
My hubby and I drove home-without my wonderful girls-and I read "True Believer" aloud to him. We often do this with Nicholas Sparks books: read them aloud to each other. We picked it up again this afternoon and finished the book. It was a good book. We have also read aloud Message in a Bottle, the Notebook and A Walk to Remember. Wonderful reading. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?ATH=nicholas+sparks&z=y
Currently the hubby is off to mow the lawn in the heat and our house is oddly empty and quiet. I miss those girls already and we just left them yesterday. My husband says it's good for all three, the girls and I, to be apart for a short time. He also asks what I will do when I have an "empty nest"? I will bother him, I guess! :) We get them Wednesday, which feels not soon enough, to me, but will give me time to reorganize the file cabinet and crawl spaces, and hopefully time to paint our master bathroom and to glaze the kitchen with some sort of new technique. Maybe I will even find time to scrapbook! :)
That is all for now. I am happy that my father has a strong heart and my heart currently is missing my girls tremendously.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Quotes

It is looking like a rain or storm is headed my way, the dark clouds blocking out the sun. I have a few chores to do, it is Thursday and my list says clean the upstairs, but I have scrapbooking on my schedule, too. I started it about a year ago and I am just doing yearly family albums, not going back and doing baby albums for the girls right now. I am mid March of last year and enjoy it when I take the time to get out all my supplies and work at it. In doing so, I come across quotes I like to use. There are some in the magazines I peruse, but there are also a number of sites I like to look up quotes online. Thought I'd share some:
http://www.worldofquotes.com/
http://www.quoteland.com/
http://www.quotegarden.com/
http://www.quotegallery.com/
https://www.terimartin.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=38
http://www.inspirationpeak.com/
http://www.brainyquotes.com/
http://www.annabelle.net/

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Family Trip

Now that the mounds of laundry are shrinking more house cleaning tasks have been attacked, I can sit down to blog. We went on a family vacation and since we've returned home, I have had much catching up to do. The piles of laundry filled my laundry room and it seemed as if it would never go away, after all, people keep wearing more clothes! :)
For our summer vacation this year, our family of four, as well as my brother-in-law's family of five, headed to Myrtle Beach. We drove, and it was a long drive. We stayed there for five nights and enjoyed the waves, sun and sand. The kids had a great time making sandcastles and we went to a midevil times show, which was a great dinner evening for all of us. www.mideviltimes.com And, oh yes, we sunscreened: should have bought stock in sunscreen. My poor daughters came out every hour to have me put a new layer on them.
After the beach, we separated and our family headed to Williamsburg. We only had time for one full day there, but we spent it wisely. The kids trooped through the heat all day, and we all had a great day! It was so interesting to see the buildings, reenactments and hear the stories of the times. We also stopped at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, on our drive home. It was a great stopover. I had never been to any of the three places, so I had a extremely wonderful trip. And for my hubby, he'd been to Williamsburg and Mount Vernon, but it'd been ages. The girls loved it, as well, especially my oldest who has studied the time periods in school.

An update on the nasty beetles: I found a chemical-which must be horrible to the environment because it smells like chemicals after you use it and it lasts for a day or so-that seems to rid them until the next rain washes it off! The bees and butterflies aren't bothered by it, so that is good, but the beetles keep returning and destroying my garden. It was sad to return from the trip and see half of my daisies brown with death, and purple coneflowers black from the nasties.

Summer has flown by. We still have one month left...one month! But July is about to be finished already! I cannot believe time has gone so fast. I think it goes faster as the children grow!

I finshed several books in the last three weeks since I've written:
  • Wicked, which is very odd
  • Keepsake Crimes, which was a fast, easy mystery
  • Photo Finished, a sequel to the Keepsake Crimes
  • and I began reading True Believer by Nocholas Sparks, as I like all of his books that I have read.
Tonight we take our neighbors out for dinner for keeping our two dogs the week we were gone, and then the week is half over! Hope the summer is going well for you.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Garden Pests

Well, another two weeks of summer have flown by since my last post. We have had our wine party-which turned out to be a great party! We served stuffed mushrooms, sausage on rye toast, a raspberry and nutella on puff pastry dessert, cheese and crackers, crab cakes (which everyone raved about so here is the recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_27332,00.html
We love Paula Dean!) We also had some pastries with cream cheese fruit dip and fruit, shrimp cocktail, a few other appetizers and many wines. :) A few we didn't even open. We had a chardonnay, a few rieslings, a moscato, a couple cabernet sauvignons, a malbec (my new favorite) and a zinfandel. Our guests stayed, well most of them, until almost twelve thirty, which is late for us! :)

We've also had a wedding in the state we met at college, a trip to my homestate and a great time with the family at my paternal grandparents' lake cottage. We also brought my maternal grandmother home with us until tomorrow. We have had a busy and fun week with Gram. We've tooled all around our area and shopped more than I normally do.

Onto the title: Garden Pests...Ugh. My flowers in my perennial and annual garden are growing so nicely and then they returned for their annual buffet: the Japanese Beetles.... for those of you who are lucky enough to not know these munchers, I educate here: http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Entomology/entfacts/trees/ef409.htm
They have thoroughly attacked my purple loosestrife, my daisies, my purple and white coneflower and my black-eyed susans! They eat or kill all of said plants in a short amount of time, but the traps only attract more as does squashing them one by one...yes, I've tried it and I've also tried organic and pesticidal methods of destruction. They have not led to the demise of the beasts in the several years of my attempts...so I'm about to break down and call a pest control company and pay an arm and a leg to get rid of them. Wish me luck!