To Those Who Have Stayed in Our House… Sunday, Nov 30 2008

We’re sorry.
We had no idea.
Let us explain…
Poor Dad.
The hot water tank died a slow death.
Dad decided this past Saturday to replace it.
First, he had to drain out all the water left in the tank.

Dixie was wondering what was going on in the basement…

This is what was going on.
This is why we’re apologizing to all those who have stayed at our house.
Because THIS is what drained out of the bottom of the tank.
Daddy (who knows like everything ever about home improvement) has NOOOOO idea what this crud is.
We are sickened!
Oh it’s so gross!
Nastier than this? You be the judge.

Next Owen & Dad used Grandpa’s old dolly to haul it up the stairs and out the back door.
Notice Dad’s back pocket…those are paper towels…???

Yeah! The new tank!

She’s a beauty! Holds a bit more water than the old one too.

They look like they’re trying to figure out something…

Hopefully no more “crystals”…
Dad did a great job of installing the new one and we can’t wait to have ya’ll over again!

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Thanksgiving 2008 Saturday, Nov 29 2008

We had a verrrry fun Thanksgiving this year!
Our good friends, the Navarros, came over for the day.
We thought we’d post some of our favorite pics from yesterday…

First we set the breakfast room table where the boys were going to eat.

Next we set the dining room table for the rest of us.
Notice that we are in need of two more matching dining room chairs!
The table is covered with some of our favorite family china.

Dogs don’t know it’s not bacon!
Actually, it really is bacon.
Mom cooked this up outside (so that our house wouldn’t smell like bacon for 2 days) for the broccoli salad.
We also served cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, green been casserole, sour cream muffins, and the     Navarros brought reallllly yummy mashed sweet & white potato swirl and a beautiful fruit salsa.

Of course….we had dessert!
We made chocolate pecan fudge pie, pumpkin butter gooey’s (thanks Aunt Judy for the recipe!), oatmeal raisin cookies, and molasses cookies.

While all us women were in the house talking and cooking….
The menfolk were outside frying turkey!

Every year Dad sets up his “turkey prep station” outside (so all the ickiness is outside too!).
Here Dad and Mr. Navarro made for a very good turkey injecting team.

Goodbye turkey.
We actually fried 4 turkeys this year (3 for us and 1 for the neighbors).
Daddy couldn’t have done all this without Mr. Navarro’s excellent time keeping skills!

Notice Dixie checking out the turkey!
Don’t worry – she didn’t get any.

After lunch, the Navarros treated us to a concert of Christmas carols!
They did such a good job, that now we’re ready to bring out the Christmas cd’s!

Grandma seemed to enjoy every minute of the day!

Here we all are (minus Owen who took the picture) after some exhausting (at least for us “old girls”) rounds of hide and seek tag!

We thought we’d leave ya’ll with this “vintage” shot of Dad and Owen frying a turkey back when we lived in Collierville.  Look how little Owen was! Awwwww!

Hope ya’ll had as good a Thanksgiving as we did!

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You Can’t Clean Nature With Nature! Sunday, Nov 23 2008

The name of this blog post is a quote from one of our favorite episodes of Monk! LOL! Don’t ask!
Anyways…here’s some pictures of “nature”.
All these shots below (minus the one of the deer) were taken on our property….if you call 3/4 of an acre “property” but whatever.
Here is one of the cute little bunnies that show up in the springtime.
Thankfully, we haven’t noticed them ever eating our gardens.

This is “Charlie” the squirrel. He isn’t scared of us at all.
He lets us get within a few feet of him and then acts like “ok ok! I’ll run off now if you insist”.
He looooves to hang upside down from the Dogwood tree and gorge on birdseed.
He is a pig-squirrel for sure.

Sometimes he falls.
Poor Charlie.

This picture wasn’t taken at our house but a few miles up the road.
This year we’ve seen quite a few deer in our neighborhood.
Sometimes they run up our driveway and into the neighbors yard.
One day Ariel and I were out for our 2 mile walk (like alllllll uphill too ….whatever) we were about to go up the steepest part of the road (which the neighbors rightly call Buttbuster Hill) a huge doe came running at us and then jumped off the cliff of the road (we know we sound stupid but that’s the only way to describe it…trust us). Oh dear we sound so blonde…moving on….

This is Augustus the Owl.
He is a whopper.
We named him after a character from Jeeves and Wooster (which we love to read and watch) who collects newts.  Ariel gets credit for naming this one because that is just weird.
He lives in an old tree across the street from us. He came up close to the house a few times and Ariel spotted him bathing in the creek across the street.

Owen took this picture of Augustus in one of our Dogwoods.

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Cannibal Crickets Saturday, Nov 22 2008

Everyone knows what crickets look like…like this, right?
This is a good example of the black colored crickets that we were used to in Arkansas and Tennessee.
When we moved to Virginia a couple of years ago, we noticed that the crickets don’t look quite right.
They don’t look very…healthy…or something.
First off, they’re brown (or light tan if you want to be exact); they can jump really high up in the air; they look like spiders but then they hop all over you; they can crawl all over the walls and ceiling and who knows what else. Nasty.
The grossest thing ever is that they are cannibals!
Our basement is the only place in our house where you ever see these critters.
There are tons of them in the basement, despite the fact that we have “bombed” them numerous times.
We are pretty sure they could survive a nuclear attack.
They start off realllllly tiny – like the head of a pen but they grow to be quite large.
We had Owen take a bunch of pictures since we know you wanna see what they look like.

Now we understand that you might not think they’re that fierce looking…
BUT…one day we found out that they eat other bugs and each other!
It is so gross to go down to the basement to do your laundry and have to see this kind of carnage!
We are going to leave you with some pictures of one of these crickets about to eat another one.
So nasty!


Here is all that remains of dinner (not ours…the crickets).
Ew.

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Nastiest Basement Ever Tuesday, Nov 18 2008

It’s official.
We have the nastiest basement ever.
It is strictly utilitarian. There are no windows or doors to the outside.
There are scary bugs with thousands of legs and hair (we’re not kidding) and crickets from Mars. We’ve never seen crickets that look like the crickets in our basement (one day we are going to devote an entire post just to these little critters).  And they climb on everything.
We discovered a little too late that when it rains, water leaks into the basement. Because of this, we’ve had to throw away rotted and mildewed items that were being stored down there.
All of this pales in comparison to the weirdness that there is…
*drum roll please*

a working toilet smack dab in the middle of the basement.
That’s right. No doors. No walls. No privacy.
When we bought the house, we thought the previous owners had just left an extra toilet in the basement.
And NO folks, not a single Gladu has ever used this piece of nastiness.
We were almost too embarrassed to post this picture:

EW.
This toilet needed to go (no pun intended)!

It was a wonderful day when Dad and Owen busted it out and hauled it off to the dump (no pun intended again). hehe.

It’s gone!
Eventually, the plan is to tile the whole basement, put up a drop ceiling, and use this area for extra storage.

While the boys were downstairs, they went ahead and busted out a HUGE old concrete (cement?) sink.
We weren’t being wasteful, this thing was nasty and the only way to get it out was to break it up.
Plus men love to demo things right?

All of this mess was cleaned up and Dad painted the walls and floor.
We hope we didn’t scare ya’ll too much with our basement story.

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