Our garden is finally producing!  We’ve been getting strawberries for awhile, picked our first few cherry tomatoes a week or so ago and I just picked the first squash today!  Hopefully it’ll taste ok.

I took a bunch of photos at the end of July but I never updated here so I’ll show where the garden was then and then show how it’s grown SO MUCH in the last month.  It wasn’t really growing much into the beginning of July, but then I went on vacation for 2 weeks, came back and it had grown exponentially.  I guess maybe that means I really don’t have a green thumb…since it grew so much while I was gone..  Anyway, here’s how the garden looked on July 30th.  The cherry tomato plant is on the left, the larger tomato plant is next to it, there’s pumpkin and strawberry plants behind those.  The tall thing in the back right corner is supposedly a raspberry plant, but I’m not too sure…and then in front of that are two squash plants.

Here’s how the garden looks today (with much better lighting), almost a month later:

See how much it’s grown?  Crazy.  The big one in the middle is the large tomato plant (can’t remember the name of those tomatoes..  “Big 100″ or something??).  To the left of that is the cherry tomatoes.  The squash plants on the right are huge.  My raspberry plant is crazy.  It grew straight up taller than the 6′ fence and then it started bending over.  I think if I straightened it out it would be about 9′ tall.  I couldn’t get a full picture of it, but my pumpkin plant is INSANE.  You can see one end of it sticking out in front of the squash plant.  I planted it right behind the cherry tomato plant.  It is now going in 4 different directions and is in the shape of an X.  Each of the 4 directions is about 10-15′ long.  It’s taking over my garden.  I may have to trim it back.  A lot.

I didn’t really get any of the full tomato or squash plants today but here’s some of the produce from those.

This is our first squash that we picked!  I’m going to cook it up tonight and see how it tastes.

A couple more of baby squash (click for larger image):

Tomatoes from the big tomato plant (click for bigger):

Cherry Tomatoes (click for bigger):

A few strawberries we picked.  They are SO YUMMY.

Here’s part of the pumpkin plant.  Hopefully we’ll get a pumpkin before Halloween..

Last but not least…the crazy raspberry plant.  My dad thinks it’s not a raspberry plant.  I’m thinking maybe not either.  I believe he has one and it’s more like a bush.  This one just keeps growing up and up and UP.  Here it was on July 30th:

…and here it is today.  Unfortunately I just took a pic of the top of it, but you can see that it started sprouting things from the side and is bent over at the top.

So there you go.  Our garden is growing!  It’s so exciting to be able to pick the produce and eat it.  I think we’ll do a lot more next year now that I know we can actually grow stuff.

I’m getting bad at keeping this blog updated. Just not enough time in the day I guess…or maybe I just forget. I’ll post a big update soon. I promise.

See this photo?

(It’s not great, I know. I took it with my cell phone and had to zoom in which brought the quality WAY down.)

Anyway, I took this pic and she saw me take it. She went back around through the obstacle course that was setup and climbed back up on the vaulting table and yelled across the whole gym “MOMMY! TAKE A PICTURE!” Oh how I wish I had my good camera. She NEVER wants me to take a picture! Luckily, her class (of only her and one other little girl) was the only class in the gym. Ah, the things that come out of the mouths of little ones.

I haven’t written much about my new job in the daycare center but I come home absolutely exhausted. I’m sure those of you with kids can completely understand too since I run after 2 year old’s (and a couple of 3 year old’s) all day long. I’m in the “potty training class”, which actually isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s mostly 2-1/2 to 3 year old’s who are attempting to potty train. Once they turn 3 and are trained they get bumped up to the next class.

Right now it’s me and another teacher and we typically have anywhere from 12-16 kids total. It’s not that bad in the mornings but the other teacher leaves around 2:30 everyday and I’m pretty much left to handles things (though sometimes they send another teacher to help me). Can we say CRAZY? Yes, that about sums up what it’s like.

I have a couple of kids in the class who are just obnoxious and are always in time-out.  The rest are great though.  I love coming in the classroom and hearing one little boy yell out “HI MISS ELI!”.  It’s an awesome feeling being able to make them laugh and listen to them all sing the ABC’s or another song.

So yes, I’m exhausted, but it’s a good exhausted.  I finally feel like I have a rewarding job.  It may pay next to nothing, but the smiles on my kids faces make it all worth it.  :)

My new favorite website is Pioneer Woman’s site.  She is so witty and funny and talks about so many interesting things.  I’ve always secretly wanted to live on a big HUGE horse ranch, like she does.  I’m just so enthralled with the way she and her family live.  Anyway, go check out her site…and make sure to read her still-in-progress love story of how she (a city girl) and her husband (a rancher) met and fell in love.  It’s good.  You’ll thank me, I promise.  ;)

We got to wear jackets today…and long pants!  I thought for sure I’d be leaving Houston still wearing shorts.  It was absolutely gorgeous today.  I don’t think it got out of the 60s…maybe low 70s, but it was awesome!  It was only mid-50s when I left the house this morning.  I had to actually search for a jacket for Anna to wear.  I just love it!  I can’t wait to start wearing pants and sweaters and cold weather stuff.  I’m so over the hotness of Houston.  Over it.

This link shows a bunch of good photos of the hurricane and it’s destruction.  Photo #8 is not too far from where I work.

Well, we got lucky. The house didn’t suffer too much damage. There is a section of shingles missing from the roof and it looks like water leaked in just enough to leave a water mark on the ceiling. The siding “skirt” around the bottom of the house is completely gone too. That’s pretty much it for the house itself. There is some of the wood decking that is gone, including the steps that lead into the backyard. Also all of the fencing around the house (and in most of the neighborhood) is gone. I was told that my in-laws’ dock is the only one that remained fully in tact. The rest in the neighborhood are damaged or gone. Apparently most of the houses in the neighborhood are unlivable, so we were very lucky.

Anna and I are currently in Chattanooga staying with my parents. It’ll probably be 2-4 weeks at least before electricity is back on; there’s no clean water and the sewage system isn’t functioning…so it would definitely not be a good environment for Anna to be in, so my parents flew us here to stay until it’s safe to go back. I’m not sure how long we’ll be here.

Here are a few photos that Dan took with his phone and sent to me. They’ve been taking a lot of pictures but, even though they have power from running on a generator, the internet is not working so they can’t send those. Anyway, the first two photos are looking right and left from the back of the house. There’s tons of wood and other debris everywhere. All fencing is gone between each house’s yard. The third photo shows the missing siding on the house.

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Well, we were evacuated due to Hurricane Ike that should be hitting the Galveston area pretty soon.  Dan’s parents live right on the water, the ship channel, in Baytown and we were part of the mandatory evacuation area.  We left late last night, around midnight, and headed to Dallas to stay with Dan’s cousin.

This storm is looking pretty bad.  As of right now, the eye looks like it’s going to go pretty much right over Dan’s parents’ house.  They’re calling for a storm surge of 15-20′…..and since the house sits about 12′ above the water that’s very much NOT GOOD.  We got a lot of stuff out of the house and packed it up into three trailers, two of which are stored at Dan’s dad’s work north of where they live…but now we’re getting a little concerned that the storm surge could affect those, and we’d lose pretty much everything we brought down here to Houston with us.  We only brought a couple changes of clothes with us to his cousin’s house, along with our laptops, camera gear and some toys for Anna.  We do still have a good majority of our stuff in a big storage unit in Seattle, but most of our everyday stuff is either in those trailers or still in the house.

This storm is so big that we’ve got tropical storm warnings all the way up here in Dallas and they’re saying we could still lose power way up here.  Ugh.  This is just all so stressful.  I just want it over so that we know what the damage is and can figure out what we have to do.

Anyway, if you’re the praying type…please pray.

While on vacation with Anna my 8 year old mini-dachshund Zoey passed away. About a month or so ago she had a false pregnancy that wouldn’t clear up with medication we were given. We had her spayed hoping that would help her heal (yes, we should have had her spayed a long time ago). Apparently that along with the false pregnancy left her immune system very weak. Sometime along the way she was bitten by a tick which made her very sick. She’s been in and out of the vet quite a bit in the last month but this last time the treatment wasn’t given in time…well, I think the tick bite wasn’t really caught in time due to her other ailments…and she passed away at the vet on the night of July 31st. I had talked to the vet earlier that day even though I was out of town and was told that her platelet count was really low but “not critically low”, so when Dan called me the next morning and told me that she had died it was quite a shock. I knew she was sick but I didn’t think that she would die from it.

I’m just so sad. She was our second baby (we have a 10 year old mini-dachshund, Oscar). Dan buried her in my in-law’s backyard next to their bassett hound who passed a few years ago.

Anna doesn’t know yet but we’ll tell her after we get home on Tuesday. I don’t think she’d really understand it while we’re gone.

Rest in peace Zoey.

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November 13, 1999 – July 31, 2008