Hot Fun In The Summertime

It's been quite a while since I last wrote anything but that's not to say that we haven't been busy. Since July 12th, we've had a birthday for our daughter Kaitlyn (9), been to Branson for a few days of waterpark fun and walking all over Silver Dollar City, traveled to Nashville a few days after that to see my new nephew Brady and visit the rest of my family, come back home and watch my wife start a new job and still continue on with my new diet/exercise routine.

As it stands now, I'm closing in on losing 20lbs, which is great to know but still I have a longer road ahead of me as I need to still peel off another 20-30 lbs before I'm in the neighborhood I want to be. The good thing is that the highly-feared "weight loss plateau" hasn't occurred yet, although my expectations of losing >2lbs a week is a bit lofty. I'm doing about 1-1.5 lbs so I'll have to be content that the weight WILL come off but just at a slower pace.

Tomorrow, August 5, we say goodbye to Kaitlyn as she leaves us for a few days for church camp. Even though there are plenty of "intense fellowship" moments going on tonight between she and her brother, I know that I am going to miss her like crazy.

So will Mommy.

They aren't allowing any kind of cellphones, emails or most any other kind of communication for those 3 days. I suppose it's a good idea to prevent anyone from stealing kids' electronics and keeping them from being on the phone at all hours of the day but I'd love to get a call or 3 from her during that time.

Who knows? Maybe that'll still happen.

I've been doing some major yardwork projects too. We used to have an entire wall of ivy on our home but it got to looking rather unkept and sloppy to me so I ripped it all down last Wednesday. As usual, what was supposed to be a quick, one-item project in my mind turned into something much more complex.

Not only did I rip down all the vines & ivy, I had to go dig up the root balls of each ivy plant. I also got to climb a ladder and scale the outer heights of our home to rip off the stragglers that didn't make it down with the rather large ivy bunches. You don't really see how many of those vines and their "suckers" have embedded themselves into the brick on our home.

Not to mention the gutters. Sheesh. I'm gonna have to concoct some sort of bleach power wash to scrap all the ivy residue off but hey...at least the wall is now clean and bare.

Wish I could say that for my hands. I ripped them up pretty good too by not doing the common sense thing and wear work gloves. Yes, I can be quite mule-headed sometimes.

I'll try to download some of the pics from our recent adventures and post those later.

Stay cool. We're "enjoying" that famed Arkansas humidity right now. Highs in the mid 90's which puts the heat index well into the triple digits.

Gonna make me sweat indeed.

(cue C&C Music Factory music)