Summer is here...

It's official. Summer is here. The kids are out of school and there is a fly buzzing on my window wanting to get outside.

bicycles

My guage of the economy has typically been the customer service I receive at Walmart. If I get really poor service then I figure the economy is doing really well because Walmart can only get "poor" (as in job performance) workers to hire. If I get good service then I figure that the economy must be doing poorly because Walmart can actually get good employees. Well, today I found a different guage for the economy--bicycles. Yep, you read that right--bicycles. The gas prices have finally begun to make a significant impact on our personal household economy. So in order to ease that a little we decided to get Joe a bicycle. If he saves one tank of gas by riding his bike to work this summer then the bike will pay for itself. We are in a small town and it is about 3 miles to work one way so we determined that this was a good solution. Yesterday evening we went on our quest to buy Joe a bike. We reached Walmart with excitement only to discover that they only had about 25% of the total number of bicycles that they normally sell. And most of the ones they had left were in $200 range. It seems that everyone had the smart idea to buy a bicycle. I also had very, very poor customer service as I was trying to purchase mulch. And so I've changed my mind--bicycles are a better sign of the status of the economy.

My handsome boys

One of the college gals from our church is studying photography. She's also been babysitting for me while she's been home for the summer. She watched the boys for me when I took Ashley on her field trip and she gave me a treat by taking some fabulous pictures of the boys. I was going to post some of my favorites, but I was having a really hard time choosing which ones were my favorites. So I'm just going to say here is a sampling of them (actually a very small sampling). They are really awesome pictures! Thanks Lindy!