Before I run out the door...

Hubby and I are leaving Monday for the trip of a lifetime. We're going on a brewery/pub tour of Germany and the Czech Republic. All told, we will be gone 13 days and visit Frankfurt, Bamberg, Berchestgaden and Munich (for Oktoberfest) in Germany and Pilsn, Prague and Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Our tour caters to those who appreciate good beer. Hubby is beside himself with joy. I am excited beyond belief to be going on my first trip to Europe. I make no promises, but MAYBE I'll post some pics to the blog while we're there. :-)

In the meantime, Hubby and I received a call from the builder for our new house last week. Someone had canceled their house and the builder was offering us their slot. That means instead of being ready in March or April, our new house will be ready in January or February! :-) Hubby and I ran over to the design center last Saturday to chose the brick we wanted so that it can be ordered. While we were there, we also picked our kitchen cabinets, countertops and flooring. :-) We've narrowed the carpet down for the rest of the house. :-)

Trip to Europe. New house. :-) Feeling pretty blessed right now.

A Heartbreaking Reality

Not sure if you guys have heard about this one - children grow up.

I do not have children. Hubby and I decided years ago that the world would be no worse in the absence of human Butler Brats, but could possibly be worse with the addition thereof. So I don't know first hand the excitement and heartbreak of raising a child.

I do, however, know how heartbreaking it is to watch a child you love grow up. My sister has two beautiful daughters. I am their only aunt - for the most part their only extended family period. I consider being an aunt to be one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me. Being a part of Mirney and Carebear's lives is a wonderful privilege. I watched them play t-ball as little bitty girls; watched them perform in the city's dramatic society. I've gone to band and orchestra concerts, Girl Scout dance recitals, helped to sell cookies and raffle tickets. I've taken them shopping, taken them to get their hair done or to get a makeover. I've taken them to see sandcastles on the beach. They made beautiful additions to my bridal party. I have not been in their lives every day, but I like to think that I have at least been a fixture in their lives.

I was a junior in high school when my oldest niece, Mirney, was born and was pretty much still a child myself. She was a wee tiny little thing at 21 inches yet less than 6 pounds. When Mirney was about 13 months old, my sister brought her family back to Houston and moved in "down the road a piece" from my mother and myself. Carebear was born just nine months later. We were constant babysitters. :-) I have tons of fond memories of throwing them in the air as children, taking them to parks and playing silly games on the living room floor.

How is any of that heartbreaking? Last Sunday, Mirney turned sixteen. She's still a funny and silly girl (which I TOTALLY love and hope she never outgrows), but she isn't so much into sitting on the floor playing silly games anymore. She doesn't believe the crazy, whacked-out stories I make up anymore. In just a few short years, she will be old enough to vote and will be going off to college and to start her own life. Her baby sister will be just 22 short months behind her. They've gone from being kids I carried on my hip to kids that are taller than I am. From having sweet little rolls of baby fat, to being elegantly thin and statuesque young women. Where'd the time go?

Mirney was a such a TINY baby!

Carebear, known in my family as the mini version of me. :-)

The two most beautiful kids in the world! (I am NOT biased!!)

Mirney on the left, Carebear on the right.

Now two of the most gorgeous and sweet young ladies ever...

One with their very, very short aunt...

And last, but not least, one that makes my heart warm and fuzzy...

TREEHUGGERS!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm Ba-ack!

I have no excuses. I am merely a slacker. I have been putting off updating the blog simply because I didn’t want to try to remember what all we’ve been up to. So! I’ve decided not to give you a blow by blow of the last month and a half and to merely pick up as if my last entry was made yesterday. I swear that I WILL post the Heartattack On A Plate recipe (with pictures), but it’s not going to be today. :-)
The garden is for the most part in shambles right now. We’re in a bit of a drought down here in the Houston area and watering the whole garden daily is just not plausible. The jalapenos are still growing like gangbusters as are the bell peppers and the new set of corn. Everything else is screaming in agony and praying for rain. I can’t tell you how disappointing that is, because before the onset of the ridiculous heat and lack of water, the garden was doing SO WELL!! I miss my little backyard oasis. :-( Hopefully the heat will slack off soon and I can start planning a fall garden.
You may or may not remember that our house was damaged during last year’s hurricane Ike. Our roof FINALLY got replaced this past weekend – just eleven short months after Ike blew through. Since Hubby and I are planning to move to the “the big house” next spring, we are currently working on a long list of fixes for the current house. Right now we are painting the exterior of the house. I was amazed at how exhausting that is. Of course, I’m sure that is directly related to the aforementioned scalding heat.
So, the next few weeks will be busy weeks with most of our weekend time devoted to house projects. Hubby and I will then be going to Germany for a few weeks! The last three or four years, we have dreamed of a trip to Germany (me because I’ve never been to Europe, Hubby because he wants to go to Munich’s Oktoberfest). After watching the rate for the tour we wanted to take go up steadily over the years, this year we decided to just bite the bullet. :-) It might not be the smartest way to spend that much money right now, but it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.
So that’s where we’re at right now. Hopefully over the next couple days/weeks, I can post more about the fun stuff we’ve been up to (brewery events, Broadway shows, baseball games, etc). I seriously hope the slackerism is behind me now. :-) Sorry I let you down!

Abbey's Hundred Dollar Flatus

I think I've mentioned before that Abbey is our vet-lover. Well, she got us again today.
Golden Retrievers are very prone to a nasty condition called "bloat." If you've ever read "Marley and Me," you know that labs are also prone to bloat and that Marley was a bloat statistic. With bloat, a dog's stomach essentially turns itself in a knot and they swell up and their stomach is hard as a rock. They can die within hours. So that's a primer on bloat...
Last night, Hubby and I had some friends over for a little party. Hubby has a very nice smoker in the backyard and decided to make a brisket and a beer butt chicken. I contributed a heart-attack inducing "Bacon Explosion" log that I'll blog about tomorrow. Like most grills, the smoker has a drip can at the bottom to catch all the bits of grease that are released during cooking. Last night, we caught Abbey snout deep in that can. We knew she'd have an upset tummy today and we weren't surprised by some vomiting and loose stool. I was a little surprised to find the stupid animal snout deep in the grease again this morning though. After a severe scolding, I didn't let her out without supervision the rest of the day. Hubby and I were not at all surprised that she kept drinking a lot of water. Abbey is part camel anyway, and after eating all that grease, we couldn't blame her for trying to wash it down.
Then about 3, Hubby mentioned that she looked bloated to him. I went into the hall where she was laying and agreed 100%. She looked like she'd gained 20 pounds in just a few hours. I went over and started feeling her belly to discover that it was hard as a rock. Hubby and I debated for about 3 minutes what to do and then loaded her up for a trip to the emergency vet; we just could not risk it being bloat.
Animal emergency rooms are a lot like human emergency rooms. You spend a lot of time sitting around being ignored and they charge a lot of money. Two and a half hours later,while being totally ignored in an exam room, Abbey let off a few flatus that had us opening the door so we could breath. Then she stood up and we noticed that the floor under her tail was wet (not brown or gross looking, just wet). We figured we'd been there a while and she might need to pee, so we took her outside where she proceeded to pee twice and at considerable length. She also seemed to lose 10 pounds before our very eyes. Whilst we were outside, a vet tech told us the vet was NOW ready to see us. We told him about the grease and the water and that she'd just gone to the bathroom like a racehorse and that she looked and acted much happier now, thank-you-very-much. He said that she most likely drank too much water after her grease snack and the combination of the gas from the grease and the overindulgence of water had made her bloat up like a water buffalo. Hubby and I were like "Ya think???" The vet told us to bring her home and monitor her food and water intake tonight and tomorrow. He then proceeded to give us a bill for $103. Yes, that's right. We paid $100 for our dog to take 3 hours to fart at the emergency vet. :-) Happy Fourth of July!

Drumroll Please!!

I've been meaning to post about this for two weeks, but haven't found the time or the words. Or maybe I was just afraid that if I put it out on the World Wide Web, I would wake up to find it had just been a dream...
Hubby and I put down earnest money on a new house!!!!!!!!!!!! After looking at houses for months and months and convincing myself we would never actually move, I am shocked at how quickly a decision was made when the right house came along. We are going with the builder/home/neighborhood I eluded to before. We both loved the layout of the house, the garage is to die for and the backyard might be big enough for a new HUGE garden for me and just maybe a pool. Apparently Cervelle Homes has not been hit by the housing recession I keep hearing about in the news...they've got so many houses on order they won't even be starting ours until NOVEMBER!!! They said their process takes about 5 months to complete a house, so we won't get to actually move into our new home until next spring, likely in March or April. But STILL! We're getting a new house!!! A great big, beautiful, brand new home! I am so thrilled I can barely stand myself.
I am also thankful that we've got some time before the house will be ready. Our current home is STILL suffering from damage caused by hurricane Ike. TWIA is still refusing to pay for the proper repairs. Even once we get a new roof, Hubby and I want to replace some, if not all, of the siding and repaint this house. So, though I desperately want to move like yesterday, it is good that the new Butler abode will not be ready for a while. Not to mention that the new place is quite literally more than twice the size of our current house, so I think Hubby and I are going to need to do some shopping. :-)

Our new home!!!
You'll have to excuse the following mess. I was having a very hard time downloading the floorplan off the builder's website...

Upstairs
Half the downstairs...
The other half...don't ask me, I don't know why it did that...

Hubby is beside himself with excitement over the new garage. It's four cars with a "barn" style room over the entire area and a porte cochere (covered parking for wifey who refuses to park in the garage). You have the option of having the room above the garage finished out or trying to do it yourself. Hubby and I actually somewhat enjoy house projects, so we've opted to finish it out ourselves. We're thinking ginormous guest suite. There's almost 1200 square feet above the garage which is not that much smaller than our current house!

So that's the good news! I'm sure I will bore you with ad nauseam talk of furniture and cabinet/counter/tile choices over the next few months. On the plus side, maybe I'll shut up about my garden. ;-) Actually, I wonder where the graph paper is...I want to start laying out the veggie garden for the new place... ;-)

closing note: I tried one of the spicy bread and butter pickles before it went into the canner. YUM-O!!! I am so terribly impressed with myself. If you're a fan of bread and butter pickles and want to give them a shot, lemme know!! :-)

A Flyby Posting

Hubby and I had corn tonight from the garden. He thinks we let it stay on the stalks too long as it was somewhat chewy. Another lesson learned. I'll be ripping the used up stalks out of the ground tomorrow and putting in some new ones. I'm determined to get some corn!
Other things are growing like crazy right now. I'm currently making my first ever batch of PICKLES!!!! We got quite a few cucumbers off the plants this past week, and I don't want them to go bad. The recipe I'm using says I should come out with about 4 pints. We'll see. My very first pickle attempt ever is Spicy Bread and Butter pickles. I am a pickle fanatic while Hubby can live without them, so there's a good chance that if they're edible, I'll be offering you some. The cucumbers are still growing like crazy, so I'm sure this will not be my only batch of pickles this year. I plan to try a couple different recipes and find one I love.
The newly planted green and wax beans are doing very well. They're probably about 4 inches tall already. We've had a bit of a dry spell down here, so I've been watering them at least every other day. :-( The squash plants are also doing well so far.
I know I've promised an update (and we've got some really exciting news), but the timer is going off on the pickles. Told you it was a flyby! I'll try to post more tomorrow.

Some Changes in the Garden

Sorry it's been a while. Life has been hectic, especially the last week. I have been taking tons of pictures, intending to update the blog, yet haven't found the time to actually do it.

Last weekend, I FINALLY got around to doing some of the replanting in the garden. The green and wax beans had given their all and it was time for them to come out. I went ahead and took out the snowpeas too since we'd only gotten about 1 1/2 cups of pods from it and the plant was really starting to look miserable. The temp here in southeast Texas has been in the nineties lately and snowpeas REALLY don't like the heat. The lettuce plants had all gone to seed, so they had to be ripped out too and put in the compost pile.
Before:
What a mess! The snowpeas are the tall brown things at the front of the pic. The lettuces in the back have clearly gone to seed and need to be ripped out. That cabbage was also attacked by caterpillers while we were in the Hill Country for our anniversary, and needed to come out.All the way on the right are the cucumber plants. Beside those are the green and wax beans. We got a LOT of beans from these plants and they had stopped flowering, so we figured they'd given us their all and took them out.

One of the principle ideas with Square Foot Gardening is that you never plant the same "crop" in the same square two times in a row. You want to give the soil a chance to recover whatever nutrient that particlular plant leaches from the soil before you put any back in that spot. So, here's what went where with the new plants:

Where the green and wax beans were, we now have carrots and radishes planted. Radishes in particular aren't normally a summer plant, but the cucumbers create a lot of shade, so I'm hoping we can trick the plants into thinking it's not really summer. :-)
Where the lettuces were, we now have more green beans and wax beans. The great thing about the beans is that they'll not only grow in the summer, but you can plant 9 bean plants per square foot. So, in a three foot by one foot space, I have 27 bean plants!! YUM YUM YUM!!!
Since the last cabbage was eaten by bugs and the snowpeas needed to come out, a LOT of space was freed up in the one bed. Since I figured I might never get that kind of square footage again, I broke down and planted Yellow squash and zucchini. Squashes take need roughly 9 sq ft EACH to grow and produce, which is why I wasn't planning to plant any. I only have 33 square feet total and I didn't want to commit that much space to any one plant. So, I gave each plant about 6 square feet, so we'll see how it goes.

After:
The two big spaces are where the squashes are planted. That lone plant on the left is the one carrot I managed to grow so far this year. :-) The three squares up front are the green and wax beans. To the right are some strawberry plants and the corn (still going strong with six ears growing).
It was hard to get a good pic of the other bed... in this pic you can see the empty squares to the right of the cucumbers. Next to that are the onions which are still growing like gangbusters, the marigolds which apparently LOVE the soil and have gotten stupidly big, and some of the herbs. I got tired of fighting a losing battle to keep the cilantro contained and from going to seed (it grew new flowers every single day), so I ripped it up and planted some new seeds. Hopefully we'll be back in cilantro within a month or so.

This last weekend, I had enough tomatoes to make some homemade spaghetti sauce. We got roughly 2.5 quarts of sauce, which we've already gone through. :-)
We also managed to harvest two of these:

Bell Peppers

And six of these:

Jalapenos

Yesterday, when I went out to water and weed, I also saw three of these guys and picked them (these grew in about 4 days, I kid you not. They were barely more than flowers last weekend and now they're five inches long!!):
YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PICKLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I noticed this morning that the squashes and beans are already sprouting. Guess there's one good thing about the heat down here. Seeds germinate quickly! :-)

And now, I leave you with a funny pic from this past week. Hubby was laying on the couch in a spot Rion normally considers his. Daddy's head did not deter my boy at all! He just sat right down on it! I threated Hubby with murder if he moved before I got my camera. Knew you guys would appreciate the giggle! ENJOY!!!

I've got a lot more to tell you about, but this is a long post and I need to start being productive today. I'll try and get in a mid-week post in the next few days so I can catch up with all the news and info. :-) Have a good one!