July 10-15

This week was another normal July week.  Sam did her annual Pickleville workshop, and loved every minute of it.  She sang a song from Calamity Jane for her solo number.  They give them about 30 seconds to do it-- she did great in spite of it being about a whole step lower than the original music she practiced.  Sam has an absolute ball up there on the stage.  Above is her solo number, then below is her group number that she starts out with a little solo.  You can see her long skinny figure dancing along up on the stage.  Sorry the video is so blurry-- my camera is not so great.

 Here is her coach for the week, "Slater".  That is his name, and he was tons of fun with the kids.

 And above are some of the first fruits of the East garden.  I went to check my zucchini plant, and found cucumbers! The nerve!  Some veggies just think they can be whatever they want-- apparently being a cucumber is much cooler.   I am going to have to complain to the greenhouse in town about their labeling of the plants.

Laura Lee went with her friends kayaking for a YW activity.  She was Moana, Savannah was Maui, and their friend in the back was HeiHei.  As you can see, they are navigating by the stars.  She also went with some of the local kids to the bridge at Cutler Dam (the other dam near our house-- we are surrounded by dam water).  One of the kids set up his hammock under the train bridge to "hang out", and they also all took turns jumping off the bridge.  She was the last one to jump in the video.  She didn't realize this was illegal of course.  Just as long as she doesn't do something completely stupid, like say-- walk the catwalk in the middle of the night of the Perrine Bridge, then I can handle this sort of thrill seeking....

Last but not least of the weekly events, we lost our power yesterday afternoon for about six hours.  Someone driving a tractor with a trailer attached, sliced this power pole right to the ground, causing sparks and a nice little fire just west of town by one of the dairies.  He couldn't see where the trailer was, apparently. It is already pretty quiet out here at night, but when no one has electricity it is almost eerie.  You can only hear the distant hum of the Vance's generator.  Sister Vance hushed me today at church when I mentioned we could hear their generator kick on, so we knew we weren't the only ones who lost power.  She doesn't want people to know they have it-- even though it is the only thing you can hear for miles when there is no power. It is like a homing beacon for the power hungry.  She is afraid that people will line up someday and want to charge their devices if we have a power outage in the middle of the winter.  She told me that we have a standing invitation to come over, however, if there is another outage, *hush hush* don't tell anyone.....