Football

 Taylor did Jr. High football this fall.  He enjoyed the experience though he's not sure he'll choose to do it again next year. 

 

 He says he likes soccer a lot better.  Soccer and football are similar in that they are both about speed and getting the ball away but soccer doesn't include purposefully knocking people down all over the place.  Aggressiveness doesn't really run in our family.  Borderline pacifists would be a more apt description.  :-)

Happy little cowboy and other characters

 My little cowboy.

 Cute as can be.

I just want to give them ALL a hug and somehow keep them this age forever.

This is Hailey and her friend Sakota at the Saturday trunk or treat.  Though they are "mature" high school freshmen now, they still had fun spending an afternoon deciding how to dress up and making coordinating pompoms for their hair. (Hailey's white one is hiding)

Drivin' a big old truck

The last few weeks I've spent quite a bit of time in this.

  A sugar beet truck.  

I drive through the fields along side a big tractor and a beet digger that are digging and

  simultaneously putting beets in my truck.   When the farmer gives me the signal  I take off to the beet dump to dump the load. 

At the beet dump I drive onto a scale to get weighed.  The heaviest load I've done was 32,000 lbs.  I have a small truck.  After being weighed I drive over to the piler where I back up a ramp and then engage the pto so it will run the belt to unload all the beets.  The guy on the platform tells me when to start unloading and when I'm done. I was backed into the piler when I took this picture.  The beets go up the conveyor and into the beet pile.

When I first moved to Idaho I thought these big piles were potatoes.  We are in Idaho, right?

I wondered how being in the sun didn't ruin the potatoes.  Then I started wondering why they were the biggest potatoes I'd ever seen in my life?  Hmmm -- maybe they aren't potatoes!  Around here the farmers certainly grow more sugar beets than potatoes.  Do you think it's because we Americans eat more sugar than potatoes?  I don't know.

 Last week we started on a field that involves 12 miles of dirt road from the field to where we dump the beets.  Potholes, blind corners, cattle guards, and some single lane places.  But some of the loveliest scenery I've seen around here!  The whole road is following the river and there are no farms or houses, just really interesting cliffs, rock formations and great fall colors. It's a dead end road and at the end are 3 pivots and a small farm house.  I was sad that I kept forgetting my camera.  Saturday, Joel, Reagan, Leif and I all rode together the whole day doing that field.  Actually, Reagan hopped over into Chad Mills semi to ride with his kids for part of the day.  Their family has a truck with a double sleeper cab and there were 5 kids in there playing hide and seek.  I'm not sure how many hiding spots you can find in a truck sleeper but they were all having a marvelous time. 

Snow on the mountains

Was driving Taylor to school yesterday and when I turned the corner on our loop we both gasped.  Not just War Eagle and Hayden peak, but even the little foothills of the Owyhees were covered in a fresh blanket of snow.  What is it about snow on the mountains that makes my heart sing and my stomach flip?  The air was crystal clear making the magnificent view even that more mesmerizing.  I had to drive to Grand View 3 times yesterday so I enjoyed the yellow cottonwoods, still-green pastures, and snowy mountains all day long.  Even caught myself taking glances in the rear view mirror to continue enjoying their beauty.

something like that....

Heidi was looking for her book the other day and asked me if I'd seen it.  She told me it was called "'The End of Cement'.....or something like that". 


I thought for a minute and asked, "do you mean Where the Sidewalk Ends"?

We had a good laugh.

Later---

Reagan was telling Joel, in great detail, all about a great experiment he was envisioning that involved sparks and "sheep fur".  He was trying to explain the sheep fur to us in better detail, and he said "you know, the sheep fur that's made out of metal?" 

That left us completly stumped for a minute until Joel realized he meant steel wool. 

Sometimes, the area we live in just looks like an ugly desolate brown desert. (I guess that makes sense seeing as it is the desert-- the Owyhee desert!)

But in the mornings and evenings, I think it is beautiful.  It helps that there is a reservoir out our front door. 



During the past month's heat, the kids have been swimming in the reservoir 4 or 5 times a day.  Here are some pictures from a recent hot summer evening......

I don't know where that big black rubber thing on the dock came from, but the kids put it to use as a makeshift waterslide.

The cat and dog will follow the kids to the dock.  Leif brought his book for me to read to him.  

Heidi's friend, Allison, was over for the day and they swam from sunup to sundown.
 

That pretty little desert area behind Alison is FULL of ticks.  We found that out last time we lived here and it hasn't changed.  Almost everyone, including me, have had one this summer. 

Sometime that evening, I told Heidi to paddle with the air mattress way out into the lake and bring back what looked like a piece of trash floating out there.  She paddled and paddled and paddled.  As she was coming back she kept yelling and complaining how heavy the piece of trash was and that her arms were tired.  I yelled back, asking her what the trash was and she said it was block of styrofoam with rope wrapped around it.  I told her that it must not be too heavy or it wouldn't be floating in the water so please quit being a wimp!  10 minutes later she was finally back to the dock.  As we were taking the styrofoam block from her so we could look more closely at it, we realized why it was so "heavy".  She had been dragging 15 feet of rope with a metal crawdad cage attached at the end.

Oops.  I guess that wasn't floating trash.  It was a floating marker for someone's crawdad cage.  There was a nice big crawdad in there too!  We had fun looking at it and scaring each other with it and then I said we better put it back.  Um, and Heidi could you pretty please paddle that crawdad cage back to where you found it?  Oh, she wasn't very happy with me! :-)



By the time we went home the sun was almost completely down.  I wish I could capture laid back days like this and put them in a bottle.  Life is good.





Funny

Most of the day Leif runs around with just a t-shirt and underwear. He's at the age that he can use the bathroom by himself and he thinks the lower half of his clothes are not worth putting on.  But I didn't realize what an ingrained habit this half dressing had become.

This morning Hailey overheard the following conversation between Leif and the little neighbor girl.

Evelyn:  Hi Leif!

Leif:  Hi Evelyn!

Evelyn:  Do you wanna come play?

Leif:  I tan't.

Eveyln:  Why?

Leif:  Betuz I have pants on!  We're going somewhere.


Oh my.  We certainly wouldn't want to be caught wearing pants while playing next door......