Hail storm recovery

Our house before the hail storm.  I didn't get a shot that shows you all the damage to it.

And here it is now (minus the ladder!)  We'll have to get that flashing painted.

The window in the upstairs bedroom there on the left was cracked and the replacement for it is on order.

Now for the garden.  See this link for the before shots.

 Lettuce & Spinach (although I don't see any spinach in this shot.)  They were tiny seedlings when the storm hit so they weren't all that hurt by the storm.  Doing well and about ready to harvest.

 slicing tomatoes, finally have flowers again.

 dark purple sweet peppers, they have some buds now.

 cherry tomatoes with flowers.

 small sweet peppers, there might be a bud there.

 egg plant, no flowers, yet

 roma tomatoes, no flowers, but the one plant looks healthy.

 green beans...these hadn't sprouted by the storm and still weren't sprouting about a week ago, so I tried digging them up...didn't find much so I planted new seed.

 pumpkins, weren't sprouted for the storm.

 squash, 2 1/2 made it.

the onions look pretty bad, but I harvested some and they're not too bad.  strong smell that mellows with cooking.  Great for broth & soup, which is all I can use them for anyway as hubby & Darly don't like them.

I have to say that I am VERY impatient when it comes to my garden.  Part of this is our super short growing season here.  We can't actually plant anything outside until Mother's day and to be safe from frost I usually wait for Memorial day and just buy the plants from our nursery.  I choose plants that already have fruit or veggies on them.  So the hail storm was for me a huge disappointment.  I have a friend who has offered to help me make a hail screen for my garden and I'll have to do that for next year.

Growin up

It is a bit funny how life kind of sneaks up on you and shows you things you didn't want to see (were hiding from) and one of those things is about how you're growing up.

We all can't wait to become adults but pretty quickly learn that there's a lot of yucky things that come with that.  Things we would rather ignore....like work and stuff.

But lately there have been a few things that have happened that kinda smacked me in the face with that entire growing up thing.  One is the recent hail storm and having to make the arrangements for getting the repairs done.  I guess it didn't hit me before because I just put it off and let hubby deal with it...note: he didn't deal with it either, so we are just now getting the roof replaced. :p

The other thing is happened at Church.  I don't know if you've noticed but in a Church there's a certain order to how things are done.  When you're in one age bracket you do a certain type of job that needs to be done at Church...but there are some things that you don't do because that's for someone older.  Probably because that was a job your parents used to do so you expect folks your parents' age to do them.  And then one day it hits you... YOU ARE THE AGE YOUR PARENTS WERE WHEN THEY DID THAT JOB!  ACK!!!!

The thing that brought this on is that I was recently asked if I would take home the communion linens and wash them.  ACK!  Who me?  Really?  um, yes YOU! 

There's one lady at Church who takes care of "everything!"  She cleans up the kitchen after service and takes care of cleaning up the communion supplies...all that grown up stuff.  However, one of the ladies in our church embroidered our communion linens and when everything lady tried to get the wine stains out of them, she used bleach on them.  Well that got embroidery lady upset because the embroidery faded.  Everything lady didn't know of another way to get the wine out of the linens though... so Sunday she asked if I would do them instead.

We don't drink wine in my house and certainly don't spill it.  So I really had no idea how to get the wine out...so I was nervous.  I didn't want to mess it up.  But I agreed to try.  I sprayed Zout on the wine stains as soon as we got home and just let them sit.  A few hours later I checked and sprayed them again.  That seemed to do the trick, so I ran them through the wash and then I decided to just hang them to dry.  I ironed them this morning and now they're ready to go back to church.

I guess I just didn't feel as if I was ready to take on doing this kind of job.  Course now that I've done it and it appears that I've done it right (we'll see when I return the linens) I'll probably be doing this job for a while.  I wonder if there's someone I can trade off with though so I'm not doing church laundry every week?

Hail Update

Yesterday after Church we were looking at our hail damage and trying to see if anything survived.  It appears that we didn't have a total loss on my plants...YAY  My veggie plants all have new growth on them.  I guess they were happy with the Fish Emulsion that I gave them the day before.

But we also noticed another loss... one of our windows (the ones we replaced in Dec 10) is broken!  So we filed a claim with the insurance.  We also added the grill and our plants to the list.

I'm sure the adjuster will give us some grief for not mentioning the roof, but hopefully he'll be fine once we explain that we didn't claim it because they've already paid us for it.

Speaking of that... the day after the storm we had two roofers approach me that morning and then two more roofers came that evening!  Our roofer who we almost had a contract with called and asked to come over that evening to sign the contract!  I think that he knew if he didn't shake a leg that we could just hire one of these other guys.

We've also had a few ads on the door.  :p

Hail! Not Again!!!

Last night my area was hit with a storm that wouldn't go away.  We were pummeled with hail for over 3 hours!

Roses & bachelor buttons

hail couldn't get down the downspout so it jumped off the roof!

more hail from off the roof, last night the entire step was covered.

this garden was full of color until about 8pm

the aspens that I don't like lost a lot of leaves but look okay

all my brand new pansies are gone, this garden WAS full of purple

this one should be okay

this little guy, not so much!

white, maple seedling -gonner.  red, squash -gonner

cream pumpkin seeds that hadn't sprouted...may still sprout, but I'm not holding my breath.  red, roma tomatoes -probably gonner. white, beans that hadn't sprouted.  green in next shot

first green, eggplant -gonner, second green cherry tomatoes -gonner, red peppers -gonner

red above, white peppers - gonner, tall basket thing, tomatoes - gonner

pummeled tomatoes

red, lettuce & spinach - might have a chance, bucket w/brick & rock is covering maple seedlings that might be okay.

more piled up hail

yesterday I was planning who to give all my apples to, today not so much

most are on the ground

the ones on the tree are cracked & bruised!

pine tree

the cherry tree saved the plants underneath

onions & carrots (gone to seed on purpose) -gonners

our grill - we don't really use that table much anyway

hubby measured the hail in the first wave, we got two more waves of hail after that with hail up to 2inches.

Blessings Galore!

Over the past few weeks a few things have happened that I am just so grateful for.

First, my daughter's theater group acquired space our costume closet, and props & sets shed to be moved into.  Before they were paying rent for two separate very inadequate locations that we were literally spilling out of.  We were constantly having to weed out items that we didn't have room for.  And because these spaces were so cramped we had a very hard time knowing just what we had so we often made or bought new when we might have already had what we needed.
The new space is HUGE!  It is very tall so we'll be able to build clothing racks up the walls that are 3 high (we'll get a rolling ladder like you see at big box stores so we can reach everything).  We'll also (and this is my favorite part) be able to store questionable things (is it a prob or a costume?) in a central area so if the director puts it on a list for the wrong committee we can just get it anyway.
The plan is to build the racks & shelves and ORGANIZE everything...and then CATALOG everything (getting software for this) so that we can possibly rent out our stuff to other theater groups in the area (there are a LOT of them) and possibly cover some of our rental costs.  I'm just thrilled that I'll be able to store our show's costumes at the storage space instead of all over my poor house!!!  YAY!

Oh and another bonus is that there are two bathrooms in the space!  YAY!  now I don't have to worry about choosing between a busted bladder and a dehydration headache!  oops and another cool thing is that the space is in my town...just a few minutes from my house!  YIPPEE!

Second, and this is so HUGE!  My Church finally was able to break ground on the location for our new building!!!  We've been waiting for this for a long time.  We had our ground breaking ceremony this past Sunday.  The ground was very hard, but we were able to dig into it and have a blessing on it.  Next we have to get a sign permit for our temporary sign and have the land surveyed for the location of the building (we have an approximation on there now).  Then come the graders to move the dirt around so we can start laying lines and pour a foundation!  W00t!

Third, Darly will be going on her first mission trip this summer.  I mentioned this before in my projects post...about the coffee sleeves that I'm making for a fundraiser.  But the blessing is that the trip is already half funded!  YAY!