What else I've been up to...

I realized I forgot to include two more items on my "What in the world have I been up to" list.

First, cleaning up my yard. We have a gorgeous yard with lots of mature trees that provide lots of shade. With the mature trees comes the price of limbs in the yard when a storm comes through. We've had a couple of vicious storms that have come through the last couple of weeks. A week and a half ago the six of us spent all morning raking and picking up sticks. We filled the back of Joe's truck and got to have s'mores later so that we could burn all the additional brush. After our storm last night, it looks like the kids and I will be spending some more time in the front yard. They are raking it in--they usually get around a penny a stick. (Last week we went to a set amount due to the amount of sticks--they were going to end up with more money then we had at a penny a stick...)

Second, Pizza with a Pastor!!! I'm not sure how I could forget this. Joe & I decided we wanted to have our whole church over for pizza--that's around 170 people. So we split the church up alphabetically and every Tuesday in July we had Pizza with the Pastor. The last one and largest group was last night--we had around 40 people and the storm hit right when everyone was arriving. It added some excitement to the night and for a few moments we thought we were going to be having Pizza with the Pastor by candlelight. But I've digressed, over the last four weeks we've consumed 42 pizzas, 20-some bags of Caesar salad, and too much lemonade and cookies to count. We had around 120 total and it was great. It will definitely become an annual tradition. Joe liked it so much that he would like to start fish with the Friar, ravioli with the Reverend, cookies with the clergy.....