Because I had to

Because I had to, I wore overalls this weekend. Overalls were necessary due to the type of work we were doing, not because we wanted to look like we were working like farmers or whatever.

The weekend started on Thursday night with Noah's 8:00 baseball game. Bedtime being 8:30-9:00, it is safe to say that it was a late night. We went into the weekend proper with some racing on the track Friday night. To get there, it took Noah and I 90 minutes to drive 25 miles. My temperature was 98.6, Celsius.

I just showed up and registered like last time. There was no real plan about which race to do or even that I was looking for some result. The idea was/is to go with Noah so he can race. Mission accomplished.

Noah races his heart out at the velodrome. He's measuring his success by how much he is involved in each race, not by his actual result. This is effective because he races with the women (adults), the novice men (adults), and juniors up to 18yrs old. He's about 4yrs or so younger than the next youngest racer, and for those of you not counting, there is some difference between a third grader and a 7th grader. With a few years of this, if Noah is still infected with the cycling bug, he's going to be something to watch. Heck, he seems to be the crowd favorite now (with a little help from a buddy, Mark, who does the announcing).

I raced in both the 1,2,3 and Masters (racers over 30yrs) events. "Doubling up," as it is called, is tough when one is fit. When one rides once per week, it is a lot like swimming through wet concrete. Since I have absolutely no reason to expect to be competitive, I really am just out there to ride in a race. To be perfectly honest (it is my blog afterall), it didn't matter that I'm not running the right gear or that I'm not training--I had just about as much fun out there last Friday as I ever have at any other race. I have no idea of how I placed in either category, and if you told me I happened to win--even though I know I didn't, but let's play along--it wouldn't have made the night "more fun" for me.

You should check out a night of racing at the track. As far as bike racing goes, track cycling offers the most "bang for buck" for spectators. You can see ALL of the action, even if some of the events may seem a bit odd.

Saturday morning started with a Country Boy breakfast. Strong coffee, eggs (ayeggs), hashbrowns (taytrs), bacon (baykin), and toast (like my legs).

Then we absolutely just got after it on the outside of our "farm." It is Monday evening as I type, and I'm only sore in my legs, back, hips, shoulders, neck, hands and arms. And feet. From this weekend.

We cleared out the brush at the front of the place by the old well. Turns out that the cap on that well has "4/9/1951" carved into it. In digging out the Nandina roots and other crap I didn't want in the ground, we found chunks of the foundation of the original (what I assume is the original, anyway) house here. But the coolest discovery was a grape vine in all that mess.

Now, anyone who has spent even a little time in these parts will notice wild grape vines around. Heck, the town of Grapevine is all of a few miles away. But the grape vine we found is about 70-80 feet long from end to end. This thing was tangled in bushes, brush, trees and junk and we didn't even know it was there.

I thought it was cool, anyway.

I've got it run along the fence right now, but we'll most likely cut it out, since it has been neglected for so long, it prolly can't produce anything proper. But we'll leave it there for this growing season simply because it is cool. Maybe I'll get a picture of it or something.

Besides clearing out that brush and such, we also heavily pruned the trees up front. It isn't the time of year to prune those trees, but they needed it so badly that I got up in there and did the basics to keep the trees from killing themselves. Even though we were doing only a simple pruning job on those four trees, it still gave us 6-7 truck loads of branches to haul. But we didn't use the truck. We mostly used the Noah to drag it all out back.

Chloe did the digging of the Nandina roots, which is no small job at all. And she did it for four bushes that were about 5ft tall before I axed them who was the boss. We also created a garden for some blackberries and strawberries. And we planted a bunch of trees. And we tilled up (with a shovel, because we're too cheap to get a tiller) a garden spot for some watermelon...

Counting the last two weekends, we've planted (I'll list for dramatic effect):

1 Willow Tree
2 Oak Tree
2 Plum Tree
3 Apricot Tree
2 Apple Tree
1 Pecan Tree
17 Strawberry Plant
4 Blackberry Bush
2 Rose Bush
2 Blueberry Bush
2 Pepper Plant (I started from seed a few weeks ago)
2 Watermelon Plant (I Started from seed a few weeks ago)
1 Squash Plant (I started from seed a few weeks ago)
2 Tomato Plants
1 Eggplant Plant
2 Lemon Trees (supposedly a type adapted for this far north)
1 Plot of Basil
1 Fig Tree
1 Thyme Bush
1 Plot of Oregano

AND we took control of our lawn. If anyone had seen our place lately, it was looking like maybe the house was abandoned...last year.

Fertilized, weeded, weeded, weeded, and weeded. And weeded. And, yes, weeded.

We would have gotten more done, but the babies got struck with a tummy bug. It broke my heart to see Reanie throwing up. She handled it very well, but the look in her eyes...being so helpless for them, when all you can really do is say, "It'll be ok." Maybe I'm weird (maybe?), but it makes me love my kids even more when they go through something like that.

We were in Chloe's car, Moby, at the time. I could see Reanie in the rearview mirror. Besides saying, "It'll be ok," there wasn't much else I could do. Chloe said, "Pull over at a gas station!" But I was thinking, "I'd rather her throw up here, in the car, than take her in to a gas station rest room."

But I pulled over anyway, and Reanie emptied her guts some more in the car. Chloe stripped her down and held Reanie in her lap for the rest of the ride home. For a few minutes there, Reanie was happy again. Then she threw up some more about 2 miles from home.

So add cleaning out Moby to the list of things done this weekend, because even though you love the babies, you still don't want to smell that nastiness.

We made an early evening run to Home Depot yesterday only to be met with what must have been Home Depot's freshman B team in terms of personnel. Our mood went from content-happy-tired to youaretheposterchildforabortion-tired. We hoped getting some takeout pizza would help, but we were done for the weekend.

Then Chloe woke up this morning with the stomach bug too.

Our place is really starting to look like our place, though, so at least Chloe got to stay home for a day and see it a bit more.