Summer

It has been an interesting summer. A really hot and dry one, more than normal.

Last year when we went camping we had just laid some free sod we got from our friends. We bought a water timer and set up sprinklers to make sure the grass would get watered. I envisioned lush green grass upon our return...only to my heartbroken dismay, the grass not only wasn't green, it was brown. Everyone told me not to worry, and that it would come back, but I knew in my heart that it hadn't just gone dormant, it had died. (People with black thumbs like myself have an intuition about these kinds of things!) And, I was right.

The water timer had malfunctioned, and the grass all died.

This year when we went camping, again we set up the water timer, only this time it was for my flower bed, because I told Shane if we came back and all my flowers were dead, I would be even more sad than I was about the grass. As a backup Shane asked our neighbor to monitor our flowers and make sure they got watered.

The water timer malfunctioned AGAIN.

So, what is the lesson here? Don't buy a water timer that is for use with hoses and sprinklers! :) Thankfully, this time, because of our neighbor, our flowers did get watered, and weren't completely dead when we got home.

While we were camping we experienced the first bout of hot temperatures. In Salt Lake they were experiencing 100+ degree weather. Where we were, at our camp spot it was about 92 degrees, and everywhere else it was 98-99 degrees. Shane took one of our window unit air conditioners with and attached it to our trailer since we had electricity at our campspot. I was so glad he did! Also because of the hot weather, we went on lots of outings in our air conditioned SUV.

We had fun, but it was very HOT. I really don't do HOT very well.

Then on the drive back from camping, we drove through an area with a tornado warning (unbeknownst to us at the time) and had quite the drive through horizontal rain and heavy winds. I told Shane after that I had started praying the whole way through the storm because the wind was blowing hard enough I was worried it would flip the trailer and our suv with it. He told me that I wasn't the only one praying. :) We made it through safely, which we were both grateful about. All the kids were fast asleep at the time, which was also a blessing.

We ended up coming home a day earlier than we had initially planned on originally, because Harrison was leaving for scout camp that Saturday morning. We were glad that was the case though, because it made it so we could go celebrate some things with our friends that we would've missed out on if we hadn't come home early.