It's My Life

 The heat of summer has arrived in my area. It took so long to arrive, I was beginning to questions its existence. Within days we went from mid 70's to nearly triple digit temperatures. I like the heat. I hate the heat. No, wait, I like it... sometimes. It is definitely a love hate relationship with the heat. The rain continues to visit us. We are having the most difficult baseball season. I heard a rumor the baseball league has had to reschedule 400 baseball games this summer. That is a lot of missed baseball! Our yard and flowers love the rain. Everything here is so green. I wonder how long that will continue now that the heat has arrived. We have an active summer planned.  It is so hard to balance all the fun things going on in the summer with rest and relaxation. Luckily for us the Graduation Party forced us to get many of our summer projects done early. We did some landscaping, some mudjacking, and some deep house cleaning. Two areas that did not get organized befo...

Unofficially, summer has arrived. School has ended. Memorial Day has passed us. Let the daylight linger as the days stay longer. On the heels of my near 800 mile road we headed out to Weston Bend State Park just outside of lovely Weston, Missouri.Luckily for us, it is only about a half hour from our home.  The weather forecasted rain all weekend but we still went out in search of our weekend getaway. Our camping spot was perfect! Friday night we were serenaded by owls all night long. The dog did not like it but we loved it! Weston Bend State Park is a fairly small park. I think there are only 34 camping spots. We made our reservations about six months prior to ensure we would have a space. I am happy to say this is the first state park on our attempt to earn the Missouri Camper Award for the second year.  After breakfast on Saturday a small group of us headed out to enjoy Weston, Missouri.  Small shops line both sides of the street. The men folk spent ti...

As winter starts to settle into our Midwest home we received great news this week that reminds us of all of our summer fun.  Hopefully you read about our goal of earning a  Missouri Camper Award  as I shared our Tour of Missouri travels this past summer.   In order to obtain the award, campers have to visit five different state parks in a year.  I learned about the award doing one of the things that I do best. Reading. My friend Angie and I were sitting together at a picnic table on one of our early camping trips to a state park. I was reading the brochure the camp host handed us at check-in and found a tiny paragraph about earning the camper award. It looked simple, camp in five different state parks in one year and earn a patch. Our geek-ness took over and Angie and I decided we wanted the award!  The Missouri Camper Award was actually started in 1971 with only 13 recipients. Each year the program has grown to reach nearly 600 recipien...