senior pictures......

the lovely kellie......

 we found a few really cool places to shoot her senior pictures.

this lovely gazebo and fountain is at the entrance to a subdivision a few miles away. 

 i also found an abandoned railroad track with the graffitied up train cars just waiting for us to use as a backdrop.  that's her cute dog...

 we also took some of the pictures in my yard.  

the weather was perfect.

 my favorite place so far though, is this old abandoned house.  there are no windows or doors, just an old crumbling foundation and peeling paint...perfect backdrop for teens...

 and last but not east, we found a golf course that closed a few years ago and is now completely overgrown.  it's sad but it was cool for us.

we drove our car on the cart path to get to the spot where we took the pictures....we weren't there for 10 minutes when a car came driving up behind us asking what we were doing there.  apparently, it has been used by the local kids as a party spot and they were making sure that we weren't there to party...  huh?  one car, three people and a camera?....oh well, i can appreciate that they are looking out for the surrounding neighbors...

thank you kellie, you were a perfect model and you are beautiful....

it's a jungle out there.....

or as i like to call it, 

the incredible shrinking raised bed...
i'd say the incredible shrinking yard, but our yard is about an acre.  as we get deep into the dog days of summer, everything is lush, very green and beautiful.  

here are the pictures of our front and back yards as promised....

this and the next pictures are the garden in the front of the house just past the porch.  to the right you can see the backside of Petey, our gargoyle. he looks weird because i took these pictures just after watering. this bed includes a butterfly bush, shrub roses, spiderwort and stella d'oro lilies surrounding the gazing ball.

i got that for mother's day a few years back.  it's gorgeous!

when i was watering the gardens the hose made a rainbow....i love rainbows....

this bed is in front down toward the street.  just some perennials and grasses under an oak tree.

the backyard has a couple of willow trees that we planted a few years ago.  they are getting so big so fast....we also have a large retention pond where we have been breeding our mosquito population this summer.  and since the mosquitos need to eat, i usually stand out in the yard for a few minutes every evening so they can pig out...  ugh!!  have the mosquitos where you live been worse than usual this summer?  it almost makes me want the colder weather just to get rid of them.  (almost).

this bed has russian sage and black eyed susan.  there is a small lilac bush just to the right of that bed and a golden curly willow to the left. 

this jungle, i mean, garden, is don's pride and joy.  i would try and point out where things are planted but i don't know where they are anymore.  my machete is on order...

don likes to grow sunflowers in his vegetable garden.....he thinks it adds interest and i guess it does.  he is constantly hacking off the bottom leaves so the garden actually gets some sun.....and yes, i painted the wire fence surrounding the garden turquoise.....

this year he had some help planting the sunflowers from the birds.  they dropped seeds everywhere in the yard..... 

randomly in the flower beds...

in the flower pots, and yes, that is a sunflower in the flower pot.

they also grace either side of the steps leading to the kitchen here...

and on the other side.  this ones head is so big and heavy it is in a permanent state of "bent over".

the blue jays love the sunflower seeds and will hang upside-down to get at them when the heads are like this.  you can't see it very well, but don has this sunflower staked with a hockey stick...

there is a huge one growing near the window too!!!

on the east side of the house our purple robe locust has a companion this year too....

another sunflower....

entwined in the crook of the tree trunk and branches....

underneath the kitchen window is our very tall rudbeckia plant...it is about 3 feet taller than me.

the large tree on the left is a river birch and is really beautiful, with its cinnamon colored peeling bark. to the right is the vegetable garden and, last but not least,

the incredible encroaching pumpkin plants.  our neighbor's property starts where the black lava rock is on the right side.  their deck is just to the right of the big pine trees.  there is usually a pumpkin growing near their deck every year.  we let them keep that one.... :)

so that concludes the tour of our little piece of nature......thank you for stopping by.

weird sky at night, sailor's delight....

i have seen some weird skies in my life....living in the midwest we have lots of active weather with 

thunderstorms, tornados, hail and blizzards....

but this one was about the weirdest i have ever seen.

the sky was an orangish brown and encompassed the entire western skyline.  we had just had a threatening rainstorm that actually was not as bad as the weather men were predicting but i have never seen a sky like this in michigan.  it gave the entire area a very strange yellow glow.

this was the view out of my laundry room window, the only west facing window we have in the house.  the glow was so bright that i thought that the light was on in there.  

the storm brought a much needed cooler breeze that night.

 in the east, we were graced with a rainbow that was so big,
 i didn't have a lens wide enough to capture it all....

we woke up the next morning to this...

foggy site.  

it was really quite still and peaceful.  this is the road that leads out of our neighborhood.

the yard looked very ethereal too.

what are those large vines growing outside of the garden, you ask?

why, those would be don's pumpkin vines....encroaching into the neighbor's yard to the far right....

here is a closer view....

they also grow into our vegetable garden where we have tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, tomatillos, rhubarb and more tomatoes.  we have a separate herb garden back behind there, where the pumpkins haven't quite invaded, but they are surrounding the bed and i expect a full scale attack to occur any day now.  don also planted tons of zinnias and sunflowers in the vegetable garden, so it's kind of a jungle in there.  but, that's how he likes it and we have about 6 or 7 pumpkins going....

i will do a post on the sunflower explosion we had this year very soon!

the night view....

  and the morning view...

what a view!!!!!  weird...

taking one for the team.....

austen had his last baseball tournament last weekend.  it marked the end of his season this summer....

but he will be remembering one of his games for at least a couple of more weeks.

for sure....

 he was hit by a pitch in one of the last games.  those little squirts can really throw the ball hard.
we love that it is the perfect ball shape.

i'm not sure if the red zig zag is from the stitching on the ball  

or

maybe a little harry potter action...

hmmm, i don't remember voldemort being there...

and yeah, he's going to kill me for posting a picture of him in his boxers.....but, he is going to be graduating high school in 4 years and i need pictures for his grad party slideshow.
shhhh!

the lovely days of summer.....

since the weather around here has become a bit more temperate, it is starting to feel like a real summer.  

this has to have been one of the most unusual years for weather in our little corner of michigan.

winter was unusually snowy, probably the most snow i remember since i was a kid.

spring was unusually cold and wet and we were left feeling like it would never get warm....it was kind of like the dementors had invaded our city.  

summer came and we went from cold and wet to hot and humid.  i think the weatherman said that our area had seen more days in july over the 90 degree mark than below it...and my electric bill confirms that fact. totally not normal for southeast michigan.

last week, after not having had rain for about a month except for a little rain shower twice, we had 

a storm that dumped  6-7 inches of rain in one night, caused a power outage and flooded our basement.

fortunately, we don't have a finished basement.  we use it for storage and since we had had a flood when our house was 4 years old and the 4 year old sump pump broke, we got smart and put most of our stored things in plastic bins and up on shelving. 

we only had carpet in a small are of the basement where don has his exercise equipment.  

 there is still a bit of organizing to redo since we tried to get some of the stuff up off of the floor in a hurry.

 our poor neighbors weren't as lucky.  they had a finished basement and their back up battery powered sump pump (that they installed in the event of a power outage) failed as well.  there was just too much water.  too fast.

our neighbor curtis came over to the house on thursday morning and told us to check our basement for flooding because theirs had flooded.  when i went to their house a few minutes later, they and their kids were bailing water out of the basement egress window.  what a mess.  i was too overwhelmed to take any pictures of this debacle while it was happening, but lets just say it sucked!  

today, things are back to normal for the most part.  

austen is done with this:

(ooh, just look at that face, that determination)

(good form)

  and they got second place in last weekend's tournament.

it was a fun season, they lost more games than they won but the boys were great.  i was a great baseball mom and never missed a game and i will miss the other moms and dads.  

football starts soon though, so i will be just as busy with that, i'm sure!

for right now, i am going to happily live what is left of summer and enjoy the little things....