It is smoking hot here. Here’s proof:

And I kid you not, when I got home yesterday my house had turned into a sauna. Seems we have a few issues to work out. One being changing the filter on schedule which can be an issue, given that we had the wisdom to put in 9′ ceilings in our house and we have no ladder with which to reach the air intake. I can manage to take out the filter by putting a small stool on a chair and even then it takes a knife to reach the little fastener thingies. Yeah, I know sounds a little dangerous. But even if I can get the filter out, I can’t put the new one back in without a taller something or other. The whole process is You Tube worthy, believe me.

And though my family in Africa is probably saying, get over it already. It barely cools off to that here during un-rainy season, if it gets much cooler we pull out our blankets (actually, they wouldn’t say it quite like that, although it would be close to the truth. Last summer we saw the thermometer hit 98* in their kitchen and that was during rainy season when we were cooking supper.). 

So while I waited for the A/C man to come check out the problem, I entered my kitchen sauna and made peach jam. I gotta tell you something. The best jam in the world is freezer strawberry jam. A very close second and I mean very close (not as in someone with garlic breath is invading your personal space but like when you wish someone would be in your personal space) (okay, strike that from the record, that was a plain long dumb analogy ) is freezer peach jam.

And it so cool because 5 peaches made 7 half pints of jam. Well, it took 5 cups of sugar too but that’s a story for another day. We won’t go into the ridiculous proportions of that right now.

And to tell you how little time it takes, I made one batch in the time the A/C man was there. His nickname by the way, is Sug (pronounced shoog). When asked why he had that nickname, he said, “‘Cause I’m so sweet.” He’s an interesting character in case you haven’t figured that out yet. So I sent a jar of jam home with him and his wife who was assisting him.

The *fruits* of my labor. heh heh. uh, okay, dumb pun.

And my lawn was absolutely bonkers with new growth. It took me 1.5 hours to mow it (after the whole peach jam episode) and I have 3 bales of hay. Well, it is all true except for the hay. I’m pretty sure, though, that I could feed a miniature horse for a few hours with the clumps of grass that got left on the ground.

Here is the before look:

I don’t have the after look since it was dark when I got finished. Of course, you could’ve told it was dark when I was finishing up by few stems of bahaia grass still sticking up here and there. By the way, don’t you love the low maintenance flower beds we have ^ ? We think it is so artistic and expresses our style so well. Our style is *one day we’ll stay home for a bit and pay some attention to our place*.

Right now we really need 2 things. A ladder for reaching all things tall in our house and a weed eater for trimming up around certain objects. I know for a fact that we have 1 sprinkler head that we cannot mow over. I’m not saying how I know this other than: 1. I didn’t know a sprinkler head had so many parts; 2. The mower has great velocity.

Thank goodness for brothers who kindly repair things.

One reason why the grass is so thick is because we didn’t have time to mow it last week. Another reason is because the hot humid weather brings on nearly daily afternoon thunderstorms. Just last week one day we had our Annual-Nearly-Flood-The-Office-Toad-Strangling-Rain. Lois was there doing a little computer work and this is where her car was parked:

I warned her that it would probably get deeper so she grabbed her things and left. This is what it looked like about 15 minutes later:

You cannot see the curb on either side. There are two drains on our corner and they simply cannot keep up when it rains this hard.

Then you have people who come sloshing through the water:

Which is cool to watch other than the fact that it makes the water slosh over my threshold. There is plastic and sand around the rest of the building which keeps it dry. It used to come in all around the building before we put it down. 

And voila! Green thick lush grass.

Somewhere think I mentioned something about Indiana. Yup, it was in the title. Way to stay on topic, there!

We went to northern Indiana last weekend for Myra and Jon’s wedding. We had fun being tourists and stuff like that. We (Lois, Laurie and I) traveled with Reggie and Crysta and their two little munchkins. Traveled through the night Wed. night and returned home on Monday evening.

The dvd player was a hit. The littlest one looks like he is catching it all but actually the headphones only stayed on his head about 3 minutes.

We stayed at Bernie’s house which sadly enough I didn’t get any pictures of. She has an adorable little house and was a great hostess and we totally chilled throughout the weekend, using her place as a landing pad.

I don’t have many pictures of the wedding but here are a few for those that know them.

There reception was under a huge tent. The had planned to set enough tables for 560 and I think the tables were about filled up.

Other highlights of the weekend:

– Running into many people that I didn’t expect to see.
– Introducing Laurie to rhubarb and cheese curds.
– Meeting Sharon and Sandra for lunch.
– Shopping.
– Taking a nap if we jolly well felt like it.
– Watched Reggie play softball.
– Getting see Myra a little on Friday when they were setting up.
– Supper at Sandra’s house Saturday night.
– Enjoying Bernie’s hospitality.
– Seeing folks from home on northern turf.
– Arguing with Reggie about whether the funny smell was corn or *barnyard* smells. He said it was honest-to-goodness corn tassels.

Amish country:

 

Well, this has gone on long enough. Too much more and you might think I have ADD. This weekend and the next few, Lord willing, I will be home, blessed thought indeed.