Birthday flowers

Last week I had a birthday and Cary is always so good about suprising me with something. This year I woke up to a card, roses, and a bag of chocolate. He's a good guy. :-)

Sanctuary site

So one of the House of Aaron's goals right now is to build a sanctuary. It's just something that is really important to dad as part of the role as Levi and Aaron and so we've already got the land set apart for and had it built up and leveled. Now we're just waiting for the next $2 million dollars to roll in. :-) Ha.

Here is the site.


Here is another view and this would be your view from the sanctuary facing South.

View facing the South West-ish side.

View facing East

View facing West

View facing North West-ish.....................

Ummm....yeah....

We need to work on that.....

Beautiful, isn't it?

Happy Birthday Grandpa

This is Heber and Arlene, they are my grandparents.


Today is my grandpa's 80th birthday and he's still as active as ever and always wanting to help other people out. He's only partially to blame for my gardening obsession (my other grandpa likes to garden as well)
Together these two are responsible for 9 children, close to 30 grandkids (with potential for more, ha), and 12 ish great grandkids, plus 3 on the way. (I'm struggling with my math skills today so I'm ish'ing it)
My mom and aunts threw him a birthday party last night with all his favorite foods and they had around 80 people show up. Wish I could have been there!

Happy Birthday Grandpa and here's to many more years of gardening and all your other hobbies.

Short house update

Well, I guess the people that were supposed to come out and stucco the house a couple of weeks ago still haven't showed up to work.
Dean and Kath were out working on the roof and it looks like they are pretty close to done.

Windows are in, and they are working on the plumbing and wiring.

My little boy that was sick all through the holiday.

Garage door in. Whee.

Some pictures of T-Day...

Here are some pictures of our day. You can see now what Ken and I came up for decorating. It was a lot of fun, it just comes and goes so fast. :-) I never have enough time to take pictures either.

My poor little boy was sick all day but he managed to muster up a smile.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone is having/had a great Thanksgiving Day.

Personally, my turkey and stuffing were delicious, as were the strawberry rhubarb pie with ice cream, and lemon pie.

I'm posting a couple of videos for Shawn, but everyone is welcome to view them ....obviously. :-) The computer was having a hard time converting the video since our camera is in HD so I don't know how they are going to turn out.

A few of my favorite things.

Obviously food is my favorite thing for special events and gatherings, but next to food is coming up with unique (and sometimes not so unique) ways of decorating for the event or season. We usually spend these holidays and events with our family and "extended" family so decorating always has a few challenges. The building is rather utilitarian as well as the tables and chairs, and we are usually serving anywhere from 40 people to 100. So it's always fun to figure out how we're going to set the tables up and make the room more festive and homey from the everyday look. This year we're planning on around 75 people for our Thanksgiving dinner and I've been trying to come up with the centerpieces for that many tables, color scheme, etc... all while trying not to spend very much money.
Last year was once of my favorite looks as far as Thanksgiving, Ken and I really outdid ourselves. ;-) So I'm hoping this year is as fun and looks half as good.

The best part of all, of course, is the pie table! Happy planning to everyone.