Sunday, August 12, 2012

You've got to pay the piper

The first full week of August is one of my favorite weeks of the year.  Hubs, myself and the two girl angels spent the week at Keller's Lake, the day camp for the mentally handicapped we help at.  Since it's a long drive from our home, we spent the week at Rent-a-Grandma's house, except for Angel #2, who lives somewhat near camp and can ride the bus back and forth there everyday.  She was the only staff riding with the campers, which she said made for an interesting ride.  The girl she  looks after went to camp for the first time and just loved being there.  Every year, my wheelchair/toilet transfer skills get better, which is nice.  That's always one of the biggest challenges of the week.  We had beautiful weather, except for one entire day when it was cold and rained on and off the entire day.   When we had clear spells, we grabbed the campers and went for quick walks before the rain would start again and we would wander back to the shelter where we worked on arts and crafts, sang camp songs and played games.  We were getting a little stir crazy, but that area needed rain so bad we were hardly going to complain.

After camp was over on Friday afternoon, we headed straight home.  My cousin's husband succumbed to brain cancer and his funeral was Friday night.  That was pretty sucky - he was only 37 years old, a loving father and husband as well as a policeman in the town less than 10 miles from our house.

Then came Saturday, and I paid the price for not being in the garden for an entire week.  On Saturday morning, I picked, snipped and canned 12 quarts of green beans.  The girls picked and shucked 12 dozen ears of corn and the we boiled, cut off the cob, bagged and froze it all.  I also pulled some of the more aggressive weeds, picked the giant cucumbers and zuchinni that had been neglected all week and brought them into the barn to dole out to the chickens in the next week.  We had a zuchinni that was about 3 feet long, I'd never seen one that big before.  The kids call it the bommyknocker - WE's favorite book when he was little was about a giant who carried around a club he called his bommyknocker, the giant zuchinni looks just like the giant's bommyknocker.  Hubs was running errands all day, so wasn't home to see the corn canning assembly line the girls and I had rigged up.  He got home around 7:30 at night and we were all sprawled out on the sofas in the living room, having just finished cleaning up the corn mess less than half an hour before after boiling and cutting all day.  He told me to get my tennis shoes on so we could go on our nightly walk...I told him to bite my butt, I wasn't going anywhere - and I didn't.

1 comment:

Tanya T said...

Was great seeing you and your hubby while the daughter and i were out for our evening walk!!
I think it's wonderful that you both volunteer at Keller's Lake, i'm sure it's just as rewarding of an experience as it is for them to get away for awhile.
Sorry to hear about your cousin's hubby. Just lost a cousin of my own in June due to a car accident and he was one month shy of his 39th birthday.I always hate to hear about people dying so young.