Tbug

4th Annual Chili Cookoff – But remember the kids are the real winners!

Since I kind of took a small hiatus during October, I’m finally getting caught up with October goings on but I still have much to chat about… like the Chili Cookoff…

The Chili Cookoff was October 22nd. The day before we went out to Deb and Grady’s house to set up everything we could for the next day. I was fighting a horrendous cold so I tried to steer clear of people so I didn’t spread it although I was on the downhill slide of it. While Jared, Hubby, Karen, Deb, and SW set up, I sat at the patio table and set up an excel worksheet with the help of text messages/emails from my friend Kalem.

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It’s a Pumpkin Carving Party….

Why I call it a party I have no clue!

The end of September I happened to be at Sam’s and they had these big pumpkins for $8.88. I couldn’t help myself and had to buy them right then and there. Don’t believe me how big they are? Look at the picture of hubby carrying them below…. One of them we weighed for the pumpkin carving and it weighed in at 25lbs. When I found them at a greenhouse down the road, they would have been $50 or $60.

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Underwater Pumpkin Carving

I typically get sick twice a year… this year I think I’m at 3 times. Blech! I’m so over this! Anyway… A couple weekends ago we had our annual Underwater pumpkin carving. Yes, I said underwater, because who doesn’t want to carve a pumpkin underwater? Don’t answer that.

The surface temperature topped out around 78˚. The water temperature wasn’t bad at all either. I heard the thermocline was down around 30 feet. I couldn’t get past 3 feet because of whatever this is. My ears were jacking with me so I carved my pumpkin basically laying right under the surface of the water.

I’ve been bugging hubby for family photos all summer long so finally we found a weekend when we had Tbug and it just so happened to be this weekend. We got up early (although not as early as I would have hoped, my fault) and went to the lake to do photos. Not quite where I wanted to take them, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches and I was happy with how they turned out so it’s all good.

That morning it was a big chilly. Abug got cold so Tbug zipped her up in her jacket with her. I turned around and this is what I saw.

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Safari Hunt 2016

We just had our Safari Hunt! This is a time of year that we look forward to with our dive group because, well, it’s a lot of fun! Our SCUBAPRO Rep was on site with some fun new equipment that I got to try out. Yes, I’m bragging. One of the pieces is still more like a prototype really than anything. In fact, he asked my opinion on what I thought and said he was going to take my comments back to SCUBAPRO. Whether he does or not, that’ll be determined, but still I got to try it out.

I made 2 dives with this BC and Dive Computer. One was with Tbug before the Safari Hunt, the other was to hide animals for the Safari Hunt. Dan gave me 3 animals, and then the rest of the time I was to dive around and create diversions. I spent time hanging out in different areas of the cove playing with the dive computer underwater. Hey it was a good diversion.

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How to: Clean a Mildewed Saddle

It was really funny, people around my parts of the country were complaining that it was so cold in May, then once June hit, BAM, the heat hit but so did the humidity. And it is hard for some people to imagine the midwest having humidity since we’re not surrounded by water, but there are days that you can walk out and be ringing wet because of the humidity.

So one thing we have to deal with is molding saddles in our trailer. The changing area in the trailer doesn’t get a lot of air movement so when the saddles/bridles hang out in the nose of the trailer, they sometimes mildew. Yuck! So here’s a trick to help you keep your leather tack in tip top condition!

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Memorial Weekend 2016

I’ll apologize now. This will be photo heavy but I’m just going to do Memorial Weekend in one post and get it done. So Be Warned! 🙂

Our Memorial Weekend really started Thursday night. Tbug had a softball game… yes, she’s playing softball now. So we went over to her game and then she just came home with us because we planned on going to the lake. I have no idea if they won or lost or even kept score… But I can tell you that Tbug went around all the bases and made it home as if they were scoring a point. She even slid in to home instead of doing a summersault like she did earlier in the season. I guess you can take the girl out of cheer but you can’t take cheer out of the girl.

After the game we went to Jared and Karen’s house to borrow Karen’s truck (again, she needs that jalopy) and their camper. There was a tire that was starting to go bad so the guys decided to change it. We made it about 5-10 miles from their house and the tire blew. So I called Jared and asked him to come rescue us. I might also mention this was close to 10 or 11 at night.

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