Our Independence Day Weekend

Since gas is so high (I filled my car up for $57.00 on Friday at $3.93 a gallon) and we had a crazy week with Joe getting out of the hospital, we didn't go anywhere out of town even though I didn't have to work for three whole days. Oops, I lied, we went from Omega to Tifton but that's as far as we went out of town. We didn't go to the beach, we didn't hang an American flag, we didn't go to a parade and we didn't go to a fireworks display. Does that mean we could be deported to a non-American country? I say no, since I did grill a couple of chicken breasts outside.

During the weekend, I did something strange - I got to take a couple of naps and loved that, Joe got his "store bought" haircut (see pictures below on Smilebox), I did a little (very little) yard work cause I cut the hedge trimmer cord, it was getting hot and it was time to shower and take Joe to town for his haircut. I have already developed swollen spots from embedded stickers from blackberry bushes growing in amongst my gardenia bushes (darn pooping birds), mosquito bites and scratches. Now, we'll see if I break out with poison ivy rash in about four days.

Joe watched his NASCAR races (his main man, Tony Stewart, was sick on Saturday and didn't drive - shucky darn) and Omega has a fireworks display that I saw through the bushes outside our front door. We had to bring the dogs in because the sound of the fireworks was scaring them to death. Boring, huh?, but I don't care I loved it!

This afternoon after church, Joe and I took the furry kids for a ride to James and Jerry Walker's house. They are B.J.'s grandparents and they hadn't seen how big he's gotten in a while. And the furry kids LOVE to go for a ride. They would go for more rides if I let them. However, I don't want my car smelling like some new car fragrance named "Dirty, Nasty, Smelly Dog".

B.J. (bottom three pictures) doesn't hang out the window like Blaze does. He just likes to stick his head out and do some major smelling with his jowl flapping in the breeze. Maybe it's because he didn't grow up riding around in the back of a pickup truck like Blaze.

Blaze (top two pictures) HANGS out the window and goes back and forth between the left and the right hand windows. Every time a truck passes by, she lunges at the back window at the truck goes by. The larger the truck, the louder and longer the growl. 18 wheelers really drive her crazy. Cars and people don't seem to bother her at all.

I got B.J. for Joe's Christmas present a couple of years ago from Jerry and James Walker. (Jerry was one of my former directors while at the Child Care Resource and Referral Agency. Jerry is a very multi-talented person and one of the things she does is paint. One of her paintings is of Bryson, her grandson, with four puppies. B.J. is the black puppy being petted by Bryson in the painting.

One of the reasons I enjoy visiting with Jerry and James is their bee box. It's a large rectangular box that sits in their den and is built so that bees can come in and out of the box at will through a PVC pipe front the outside of the house into the bee box. It rotates so that you can also see bees busy at work making honey through the Plexiglas cover like the two pictures below. It's fantastic to watch - even better than an aquarium.