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Philly/D.C. Vacation – Part II

As I mentioned before, the trip came together around a few things, so once we decided we were going to spend some time in Philadelphia, we also thought we could tack on a few college visits. Since colleges generally don’t run tours on the weekend, we had to schedule the tours for a weekday, and Friday was the most logical option. After that, it was a matter of choosing some colleges that were a). relatively close to one another; and b). had tour schedules that weren’t overlapping.

Brooke and I have been brainstorming some small, liberal arts schools for Meg to at least consider (we’re biased, I know…), and there are a few in that area. I had a friend from high school who went to Haverford College, so once I started looking into it, I found that Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr College are part of what they call the Tri-College Consortium, which allows students from each of those schools to participate in activities and take classes at the other schools. We ended up scheduling tours at Bryn Mawr College and University of Pennsylvania, giving Meg a “small, liberal arts school” to see, and an “elite Ivy University in the city” to compare to one another.

Unfortunately, wildfires in Canada were also happening and the air quality was rather hazardous. That meant that no one really wanted to be outside, so they didn’t opt to run the tours at Bryn Mawr or Penn that day. We still sat for a virtual tour with some other students at Bryn Mawr and got a feeling for the place, but then we rushed to Penn so we could get to that tour in time…even though that one was also canceled. Instead, they didn’t bother with the virtual tour but had their tour guides form a Q&A panel where they could address things.

I don’t know that Meg made any firm decisions based on so little information, but we’re still pretty early in the college search. I think she got a few of her questions answered and at least got a “feel” for those two places, so if she decides she wants to re-visit one, we can always make that happen (probably a plane flight next time, though…)

The next day was a Saturday, but we were going to see all the Philadelphia things and be tourists! Brooke scheduled two tours: one of Independence Hall for the afternoon, but another one for the morning at Reading Terminal Market. That tour started mid-morning, so we stopped at the Philadelphia Mint first (no pictures allowed). There wasn’t much to see, honestly, as it was a Saturday, so none of the equipment was working. It was cool to see some coins and how they’re generally made. They had some brand new quarters there that were minted for the 250th anniversary of the US, so we got some of those!

The Reading Terminal Market thing was really cool, though! It reminded me of the Soulard Farmer’s Market in St. Louis, but this one is mostly food vendors. We went because Brooke got some coupon as a part of using Airbnb so much that included a guided tour of the vendors. We probably would have been overwhelmed just walking through it, but our tour guide walked us around, provided some history for the space, and gave us her opinions on most of the food options. Calvin and I shared a Philly Cheesesteak from Uncle Gus’, and on the guide’s recommendation, Brooke got a roast pork sandwich from Tommy DiNic’s – both were excellent! Meg got a baked potato, because she’s boring….(she said it was good, though).

So yeah, Reading Terminal Market was a nice surprise! Very busy on a Saturday, but definitely worth checking out if you’re in the area! From there, we stopped in Elfreth’s Alley on the way back toward Independence Hall for our tour. Elfreth’s Alley is a cobblestone road between houses built as early as the 1720s, and people still live in them! We took a quick tour of one of them (like, $9 for all four of us) and, yep, it was an old house. High ceilings, wood floors, fireplaces in rooms for heating, no modern kitchen or running water. Most of the houses along Elfreth’s Alley are modernized because, again, people still live in them, but the one we walked through was mostly kept as it was in the 1700s/1800s.

The tour for Independence Hall was run by the National Park Service, and Brooke and I are always fans of those: inexpensive and informative. A lot of the furniture in Independence Hall is era appropriate, meaning it wasn’t actually there during the signing of the Declaration or the Constitution, but that chair in the background behind Meg and Calvin was the one George Washington sat in, so that was cool!

At multiple points during the trip, though especially once we started talking about Independence Hall, it started becoming painfully obvious that the kids really hadn’t learned all that much about the American Revolution in school. Not to say they didn’t know anything, but the timeline, which documents were signed where, why the Bill of Rights exists… I was hoping they would have a bit more grounding in those areas, but alas, they still had questions (usually good ones! …just surprising, at times…).

After Independence Hall, we went and saw the Liberty Bell, as it’s displayed in a separate building just outside. I’m glad we saw it, but Brooke and the kids questioned the point of its existence. I learned that the crack in the bell was actually the result of a repair to the bell – there’s a separate crack coming off of the iconic one, though, that caused the bell to not be used anymore.

The Liberty Bell didn’t take all that long, but there was rain coming in, so we went back to our Airbnb for the night. The one in Philly was in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood, but we didn’t have any issues. We were staying relatively close to where the World Cup Fan Fest was occurring, so there was a lot of traffic and loud cars going just about all night. Still, it was nice to have a kitchen, separate beds, and more space to spread out. Unfortunately, this was really the only spot where we had laundry service available, aside from the errant hotel laundry options, so we caught up on some of that, too.

The next day, we headed toward…Delaware! When we reorganized the dates a bit to fit in college visits, it shifted things between the Airbnb in Philly and the one in D.C., so we had another day in between. I don’t remember how it came up, though I imagine Brooke was probably talking to the kids and threw out: “Hey, maybe we should go to Delaware,” and they cheered with “YEAHs!”

So, the decision was made to go to Rehoboth Beach, DE. It actually gave us the opportunity to drive through New Jersey on the way, adding another state to the visit. We really just drove through, but ended up traveling through some seaside towns on our way south, along the coast. There were some nice beachside towns along the way, but it seemed pretty clear that these were second/third homes for New Yorkers, etc. where their kids were down for the summer while the parents still worked in the city. A lot of expensive cars and nice condos and houses all over the place. We got out and walked to one of the beaches on our way down, but didn’t stay all that long.

Brooke found a ferry that features a 40 minute ride across a bay between Jersey and Delaware. It also had limited meal service, so we could have lunch while we enjoyed the ride. We hadn’t done one of these since our last Madeline Island trip, so it was a neat return to something from one of our earliest vacations with the kids.

After the ferry ride, the drive to Rehoboth Beach wasn’t all that long. We were there by mid-afternoon, arriving before we could check in to our hotel. We asked if we could park the car there even though we weren’t technically checked in yet (they graciously said “yes”) and we walked about a mile down toward the beach. Rehoboth has a boardwalk, shops, restaurants, and some arcades (we played a lot of Skee-Ball).

After we got something to eat at Dogfish Head Brewery (not their main brewing location in Delaware, but a nice secondary restaurant space about half a mile from our hotel), Brooke, Calvin, and I went to a beachfront state park a few miles away so Calvin could swim a bit. Meg had just started an online class, so she needed some time to get some homework done when she wasn’t riding in a car. The water was chilly, but pretty clear. No seaweed or jellyfish or anything like that along the beaches we saw. There were some seashells, but mostly fragments. It also wasn’t terribly crowded, though Rehoboth Beach itself definitely featured a lot more people. Still, the thing I detest about Florida beaches I’ve been to in recent years (e.g. Destin) is how the beaches feel fragmented by the condos and hotels that are there, with their own chairs and umbrellas you have to pay extra for. I’m sure that exists in Jersey and Delaware, but we didn’t see that here. It was a traditional “first come, first serve” beach space, which I appreciate.

The next morning, we got up relatively early (we were really running on Central Time this whole trip, so everyone woke up in the 6:00-7:00 Eastern Time frame most days), went back to the boardwalk to check out the morning vibes (a lot of cyclists and joggers) and have breakfast before driving to D.C. Rehoboth was a good time, though it’s a hike to get there, so I can’t imagine we’ll go back any time soon.

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Philly/D.C. Vacation – Part I

This trip was a long time coming! Early on, we knew we wanted to take the kids to Washington, D.C., but we knew we’d have to wait awhile, until they were old enough to have some sense of the history of the area, an understanding of what’s in the Smithsonian Museum (and the ability to read…), and a willingness to walk (a lot!). Meg had Missouri Scholars Academy for three weeks in June, so we signed up Calvin for his “sleep away” camp at YMCA Camp Wakonda around that same time, leaving July open for a driving vacation out east!

As this trip evolved, we tacked on a few other things. Calvin had been asking to go to Hershey, PA ever since he found out that Hershey was a real place (with a theme park). We also added Philadelphia, PA to the trip, since none of us had ever been there. While we were in Philly, we also stopped by a few colleges that Meg may consider (more on that later). So yeah, we saw a lot of stuff in 11 days!

On the way out, Brooke had heard from a co-worker about Casey, IL, a small town whose claim to fame was a collection of some of the “World’s Largest ______________” things. For example, here’s a giant chair (with Calvin next to it, off to the left, for scale). We also saw windchimes, a mailbox (below), a golf tee (at the country club, naturally), bird cage, see saw, and pencil. It was a relatively short detour off our course, but we like to add in those bits of Americana into our road trips where possible.

We stayed in a hotel that night (one of many…) in Ohio and got up the next morning to head into Pennsylvania. We weren’t originally thinking about it, but as we drew closer to looking at the route, we realized we could stop at the Flight 93 National Memorial while we were making the trip in. The kids knew about 9/11, but mostly the Twin Towers portion of the story: not the Pentagon or Flight 93. It allowed us to talk about it a bit, and it was also an opportunity to cover what Brooke and I were doing as everything unfolded 25 years ago.

Honestly, it was a pretty somber visit. There isn’t much to see, and their museum is mostly covering the entire 9/11 story, not just the Flight 93 portion of it. There were some artifacts, but a lot of it was news broadcasts, pictures of the passengers, and a timeline of the events on that day. We’re glad we stopped in, as we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go otherwise.

It did end up adding a few hours to our travel time than we were initially planning for, though. The Memorial isn’t exactly “right off the highway,” so navigating to Hershey from there took longer than we planned, but it ended up working alright. We had tickets for the next day, but like other theme parks, after 7:00 pm the day before you have tickets, you can go ahead into the park and check things out for a few hours.

There are actually two “Hershey” things to do at the park: one is Hershey Chocolate World, which is free (mostly) and is basically a big candy store. The ride above was the only thing we did in Chocolate World, aside from looking around at candy, t-shirts, and having a light dinner. After that, we had to drive the car from the free parking lot around to the paid one to actually enter Hersheypark Amusement Park. As it was relatively late, and we’d been driving all day, we got our bearings and rode Comet (an old-ish roller coaster), the Tea Cups, and Brooke and Calvin went up Hershey Triple Tower (there are three towers, gradually increasing in height – you are shot up the tower, you get dropped, you go back up…you get it…).

Hersheypark feels very compact, like they had limited space to fit in all the roller coasters, so they’re kinda weaving in and out of one another. There is a water park associated with it, too, but that’s more at the back of the park (think of it more like a rectangle than a square, so you park in the lot, and you have to walk through a lot of park to get to the water section).

It was very hot, so that ended up affecting some rides. We waited in line for Coal Cracker (log flume) and got pretty far, only to have it shut down while we were in line, so that was disappointing. Great Bear (kinda like Batman: The Ride at Six Flags St. Louis) was pretty good, but we were delayed as we were ready to load onto the coaster by someone who threw up on the seats, so we had to wait for their cleaning protocol to be carried out.

I think the ride we all liked the most was Candymonium (pretty smooth, relatively new, coaster), but that was the first thing we rode that Thursday morning, so in some ways it was down hill from there. Brooke, Meg, and Calvin did Skyrush (I looked at how high it was going to go and said “nuh uh”), and Meg wished she had taken my lead. She said it jostled them around and forced their heads down. We also rode Trailblazer and soopersdooperLooper, and both were “fine” (the latter only had one loop, so it was mostly intended for younger kids, we think).

Jolly Rancher Remix was the last thing we rode, and it ended up being a solid bookend to Candymonium that morning. Jolly Rancher is also pretty new, so it is smooth, but what it does is backs you up on the coaster, then drops you down the hill, through 4 or 5 loops, then you go up the other side….only to be dropped down backwards through what you just went through. I normally don’t like those, but this one was pretty fun!

One nice thing is that they let you leave the park and re-enter. They have workers taking pictures with a cell phone (essentially…), so when you return, they compare using facial recognition to allow you back in. We had some lunch stuff in the car, so we went out and found a shady spot. It was also nice to just sit for awhile before going back in.

Ultimately, Calvin had a good time at Hersheypark. Was it as good as Disneyland? Uhhhh, no. But probably nothing is. The experience was marred by some delays and broken down equipment, so that wasn’t great. We paid $27 for a refillable soda cup that we could all share, but more than a few self-serve stations weren’t working, making us question whether the cup was worth it in the end. We didn’t pay for the “Fast Pass” they were offering, but it seemed like most other folks weren’t, either.

Would we go back?? Yeah, I think so! One day was enough, though. Disneyland benefited by having 3 days in the parks to walk around. There are a few rides we would have gone on again, but the heat and lines had us focus on the rides we hadn’t gone on yet. After awhile, I think we were all pretty over it, so we stopped in to Hershey Chocolate World, filled up on some candy bars, and headed out toward Philly!

….but that’s a story for another post. 🙂

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Garden Update: 07.13.26

I can’t say the garden has been all that impressive this year, so there really isn’t much to report, but I figured I should get something posted here mostly for the record’s sake. Weather has finally been consistently warm, but June was very wet, frequently cloudy, and just generally bleh…but that last week of June, we were finally in the 90 F range for much of the week. This week is a bit cooler, but it seems like the rain has finally slowed down and may continue that way for the rest of July.

This past weekend, I chopped down the remaining lettuce and spinach. We hadn’t been eating it for weeks and it was mostly going to seed, so I chopped it down and am leaving it to compost in the garden. We’re keeping the kale for now, as it’s in the most shaded spot (clearly not in this picture…), but we aren’t optimistic we’ll get much more. Maybe we’ll be surprised!

The tomatoes are looking good! There are ‘maters on there, but they’re still green and small. The cages Brooke’s Dad made for her birthday are holding them in pretty well, allowing us a change to keep the weeds in check around them. Given the size of them, I’m still betting it’ll be a few more weeks before we can pick any of them.

The peppers look pretty good too, but they’re mostly long and skinny…and hotter than Brooke intended (again). A few of the plants haven’t produced peppers yet, so we don’t know for sure what we’ll ultimately end up with. I thought she planted some bell peppers, but I haven’t seen many (any?) of those yet.

The zucchini straight up died. Dunno what happened there, but it just shriveled up. Brooke planted a few more seeds in that spot, so maybe we’ll get some late-Summer or early-Fall?

Calvin planted watermelon plants, also. Three plants came up and they appear to be doing alright. There aren’t many flowers, so it remains to be seen if we’ll get anything out of it…

In the rest of the plot, we tried planting some beans, but nothing ever came up. Brooke went ahead and planted some green beans in a few rows, since that plot did mostly nothing (more on that in a second). The big story for this year is that the green bean plants just didn’t do much, which is something we never have happen.

The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing as well as they always do! We’ll have plenty of them, but assuming they remain on the usual trajectory, we won’t start picking those until the end of August at the earliest, if not September.

Four sad, pathetic, green bean plants. They at least have some flowers, but at most, we’d get a handful. We think the rain hit in such a way that the ground hardened after planting, preventing the (new!!!) seeds Brooke planted from getting through the surface. That’s speculation, but it’s a reasonable theory. Regardless, Brooke planted some more seeds this past weekend that clearly won’t be ready until Fall, if at all. It’s a “Hail Mary,” but at this point, we don’t have anything to lose.

And last, but not least, Brooke and Calvin did a bit with the bees this past weekend. They took care of the (copious) weeds around the hives and put down some paving stones out in front of them to try and keep some paths open for the bees to come and go while keeping weeds out of the way. The size of the hives prevent me from getting too close with the weed eater, so this seems like a reasonable solution. Calvin took a peek in the big one and is pretty sure it’s all capped honey up there, so if those three supers are full, we’ll get a good harvest this year! The small hive still may not amount to much, but any swarm is a gift, so we’ll take it!

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The Ceiling Project – Part II

It was late March/early April when the biggest disruption was happening at the house. Thankfully, weather wasn’t spectacular, so staying inside to get work done was fine, but the kids still had a lot going on and getting involved in a project like this wasn’t trivial.

Again, after our bedroom and the landing were done, we rearranged a bit upstairs to get the other bedrooms completed. Brooke, Calvin, and I were still messing with the living room downstairs while the workers were taking care of the bedroom ceilings. As I mentioned previously, Meg didn’t really like having a roommate, so the logical solution was for Brooke and I to sleep down in the dining room for a while while Meg and Calvin moved their beds into our bedroom while their rooms were being completed.

Their rooms didn’t take a ton of time, since the workers had a “groove” going by this point. As they waited for ceilings to dry (you know, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, trim, yada, yada, yada…), they could complete skim coating of the living room, and put up new, era-appropriate trim. The ceilings in the living room were generally fine, though we were going to paint them again and make sure everything feels more cohesive. Still, the kids were sleeping in our room, Brooke and I were sleeping in the dining room, and everything was still constantly disrupted…

It was around this time that we also got to painting the upstairs. The nice thing about the workers we settled upon was that we could have them do part of the work while Brooke and I would take care of the rest to keep costs down. So, we bought the paint for the walls, the ceilings, and the trim. We did the priming, and got creative about how we would reach across a cavernous expanse to paint the trim (pictured above…)

In the process of dewallpapering everything, we didn’t come up with too many discoveries, though we did find this hand-written note on the west wall by the main door to the house. “Melora P. Leonard lived here March 19, 1927” is the best we could make out from this note. It was unfortunate we had to paint over it!

By April 26, we were putting the finishing touches on. After upstairs was mostly “feature complete,” we moved the beds back to where they belonged and everyone starting getting the appropriate amount of sleep again. It was basically April 7 to 26 that someone was sleeping in the wrong place. It was a harrowing few weeks…….

Once the trim was up downstairs, the bulk of the work from our contractors was complete, so it was just a matter of painting and rearranging furniture again. Just like up on the landing, they had to try to level the trim with “the world” rather than with the ceiling, so they filled a bit of a gap between the ceiling and the trim on the main western wall of the living room.

The painting didn’t take all that long. Generally, I use the roller and Brooke “cuts in:” she’s a bit more detail-oriented and she gets bored using the roller, so it works out. Calvin helped out as well, mostly with the roller, but also with a paint brush. Maybe he’ll work summers as a painter eventually – he did a good job!

By May 3rd, we removed the coverings from the floor downstairs, just in time for me to enter Final Exam week and then head off to Utah. In total, from the time when Brooke first started, the project was nearly complete….after three years…

Most of the house is put back together now. The kids’ rooms have been done for a bit and the furniture has been put back where it all belongs. We’re taking our time on the walls, since some of the frames Brooke had put up over the years were specifically there to cover holes in the wall or other blemishes! With all of those repaired, everything looks pristine, so we aren’t in as much of a hurry to put new holes in the walls for picture frames.

Everything just feels new now! It feels like it’s a new house, in many ways, though clearly it isn’t. I still wake up in the morning and look at the ceilings and remain impressed with just how nice it all looks. Again, it’s still a work in progress: as we have the need (or inspiration), things will get hung back up on the walls. The landing is starting to take shape, but it isn’t done yet, either. The plan was to try and create a “reading nook” and a “work area” that was a bit more centralized. Our laser printer has lived in my closet for years, so we wanted to move things like that out into a shared space. We also have a desk so if someone wants to do some typing in a space other than the living room or a bedroom, it’s available.

Brooke’s had crafting materials up in the house attic since this whole process began, so she’s starting to go through things she thinks she needs (but hasn’t needed in three years……), and how to make items more accessible for various projects. Is it going to stay like this – probably not?? But my Dad came and installed a four-port electrical socket on the western wall here, so we have capabilities in this space that we didn’t before.

We’re using a red chair we inherited from my parents for now in the “reading nook,” but eventually, my antique La-Z-Boy is going to get reupholstered and move to this spot. We aren’t sure about the lighting in the space, either, as the sun has moved into a favorable angle for the next few months, so it is harder to judge what we want this to look like in January.

At least, the house is livable now! Brooke and I spent last Saturday morning going through the attic, mostly clearing out the electronics boxes I kept (hoarded?) in case I’d need them. We can move through the attic now, at least, so this Fall will probably be the time that we go through baby clothes and toys, old beds, crafting materials, luggage, and more that have accumulated for about as long as we’ve been married.

We’re running out of projects! Next year, the plan is to work on the landscaping outside, redo the concrete steps in the front, the flower beds around the house, maybe put up a fence around the garden, and so forth. Eventually, we hope to make the house attic somewhat livable, so a bed could fit up there, but that’s further down the road. For now, we’ll focus on putting some things up on the walls and enjoy the space that’s finally, mostly, almost done!

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The Ceiling Project – Part I

In 2023 (!!!!!), while I was in Utah with Field Biology, Brooke started to peel wallpaper upstairs on the landing. The last bit of wallpaper that we wanted to remove was the living room downstairs, but in order to do that, we had to do the upstairs and the stairwell, since it was all one continuous sheet. Of course, this was a daunting and disruptive task, so we hoped we could kinda take care of it “piecemeal,” and to a degree, we did. She took down the wallpaper upstairs and I primed the walls before our Alaska trip last Summer (…that I never posted about, apparently…whoops!).

After that, we got busy, school happened, band camp, robotics…you know, the usual “life” stuff that happens when you have a 12- and 16-year-old in the house. Fast forward to January and we decide “okay, this needs to happen.” But, we had talked for years about doing the ceilings simultaneously with the walls. If we could find someone who would put something up to cover the hole in the ceiling (pictured above) that had been there since before we moved into the house, and also deal with the wallpaper-covered plaster ceilings that had cracks in them, then the trim could come down at the same time and we could deal with the walls.

Brooke saw a sign for a guy in town and started a text exchange. We got an estimate, talked timelines, and decided to go for it. We’d tried for years to get an estimate on the ceiling(s) and no one would ever come through, but this guy finally did.

So on January 6th, while I was on Christmas Break, I started on the wallpaper on the stairwell. Brooke and I finished it about a month later, since I wanted an adult to be home to hold the ladder while the other adult could get the wallpaper in the upper left portion that was hard to reach. After the stairwell was taken care of, Brooke could then work on patching the worst bits of plaster.

The weird thing was that there was only one layer of wallpaper on these walls! There were multiple layers in the music room and upstairs on the landing, but once I started on the stairwell, only one layer.

More time went on as Brooke plastered here and there. We also had to clear off the landing and start moving things to the garage and the attic of the house. To make this all work, we effectively had to move everything out of the spaces that were getting the new drywall ceilings, so what we decided to do was move everything off the landing and do our bedroom first.

It should be noted that, we really do mean everything had to be moved out, so it took time to pack the house attic as full as we could with furniture, and we also took things out to the garage. My car is the one that routinely has its own dedicated bay, so for about a month or so, my car stayed in the driveway while my bay was taken up by bed frames, dressers, end tables, and other things.

By February, the stairwell was dewallpapered and Brooke was busy working on the plastering. The plan was to start the upstairs bedrooms in early March, so this time period mostly just featured limited disruption and consistent movement of furniture and other things to the attic and garage. There were a few days we had available to move large chunks of items, but it was basically “carry a box out that you know you won’t need for awhile.”

It wasn’t really until late March that we dewallpapered the main floor, necessitating the movement of the rugs, couches, TV, etc. into other spaces. The music room became the the living room on March 28, giving us at least some space to live in for most evenings. It was also around that time that I was given a roommate in the form of Meg, who moved down to the dining room. Her bed and box springs were brought downstairs, the table was moved against the wall, and for about a week and change, she slept down there. I’d stay up later than she wanted watching TV (though I was quiet…….), but it wore on her pretty quickly.

This, of course, had to happen because there could be nothing in our bedroom or on the landing while the contractors put up the new drywall ceilings. They would put the ceiling up, do some mudding around the seams, sand, mud, sand, mud, etc. The ceilings themselves were up pretty quickly, but the mudding process took days. For the most part, they would put up ceilings on the landing, move all their equipment into our bedroom, then the next day, they’d put up ceilings in our bedroom while they mudded and sanded the landing. Then, they’d hit the bedroom ceiling and return to the landing for crown molding, and so on. It was about a week and a half for them to do the ceilings on the landing and the crown molding, and put the ceiling fans back into place.

Of course, any time they needed to mess with anything electrical, I’d have to go down to the basement to cut power before I went to work. The cats were kept in the basement any time the workers were here to keep them out of the way, so there was no access to the circuit breaker unless I took care of it.

The fact they got the drywall put up so quickly above the stairwell is still probably the most impressive feat to me. They had some equipment to hold up drywall sheets, but again, the height of the space and the lack of flat surface for said equipment to sit on is still crazy to me… Again though, the biggest deal was getting the crown molding up in those spaces, and making it seem mostly level with the house. On the landing, the workers had to add an extra board along one of the walls to make sure the ceiling ended up level with the world, but not with the house. The house had settled over decades, and the ceiling was “bowed” on the landing (very, very noticeably…), so there was more to do than just put drywall up.

After that was all done, it was time to switch everything up so they could do the kids’ bedrooms, but that’s a story for another post!

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Garden Update: 06.03.26

Long time, no post, eh? Gotta say, it’s been a crazy (checks notes) 6 months. I’ll post an update on what has taken up so much time, but figured I should get something up about the garden before we get too far into June!

Our neighbor was kind enough to use his pull-behind tiller again on the garden. We have had a shockingly large amount of rain this Spring, so it took a bit to even get much going. We burned the regular stuff in March, but didn’t get the tilling done until mid-April, and even then, it still took a few weeks to get things planted due to weather or us being busy with various other things. Really, though, due to the other “project” that I haven’t posted yet, we had to spend most of our extra time inside the house working on it.

We got kale, spinach, radishes, and a lettuce assortment planted the first week of May. Tomatoes didn’t go in until a few weeks later when Brooke’s Dad brought some tomato cages for her birthday (she’s wanted them for years). This picture is from a few weeks ago (more recent shot down below).

Calvin and Brooke picked the radishes on May 20th, so it didn’t take all that long for them to be ready – and they were pretty good this year, too! Not too spicy, but still had some flavor. Calvin and I are the only two that really eat them, though we did include some in a wilted spinach salad one night.

So yeah, we’ve been picking lettuce for sandwiches, salads, and Barnaby for a month now. It’s started getting warm, though, with some days reaching 87 F. It’s relatively cool today, but it’s supposed to start heating up this weekend and continue into next week. We’ve already had some of the lettuce bolt out to seed, so the days of picking fresh lettuce are probably numbered. The kale is still looking pretty good though, so hopefully it continues for awhile longer.

We ended up with a reasonable strawberry haul, though they were ready earlier than we’re used to. Brooke has some frozen downstairs for tossing in drinks sometimes. She also made some jars of strawberry jam. And of course, Calvin just went out to the patch to pick some from time to time!

The asparagus took off pretty well, too, but we’re told we shouldn’t eat it in the first year after planting, so we just let it grow outside the strawberry patch. More on that next year, maybe!

And unfortunately due to a freeze, we didn’t get any cherries this year. Around now, we’d have buckets full of them, but alas, not in 2026!

Here’s what the lettuce looks like today. More overgrown, but still some good stuff in there. Brooke will probably pick this weekend to do something with it. She already dehydrated some kale for making more powder since she’s out, but there’s clearly more where that came from! The tomatoes are liking this hotter weather, too, so they’re just truckin’ right along. But yeah, maybe another week or so of lettuce left, if I were to guess.

Brooke and Calvin made some mounds this past weekend for planting watermelons. We’ve never really had good luck with them, but Calvin insisted, so there are some planted. I think Brooke’s also putting garbanzo beans in this plot. It’s our “catch all,” or “plant weird stuff” plot for 2026.

The bean plot has started, though only the soup beans are up. The rows are marked for the green beans, but I didn’t see many pop up yet in my cursory look. Once they’re up, I’ll work on putting grass clippings between the rows, but we’ve got a long way to go on them.

As far as the bees go, like last year, on April 19th, one of our hives swarmed, and yet again they went to the apple tree. I think it took three tries(ish) to get them to stay in a hive body. It was difficult to figure out if they had the queen or not. I don’t think Brooke or Calvin ever confidently found her, but after multiple tries, they got the swarm situated in a new hive body.

We’ve got three supers on there now and Calvin took a peek yesterday. The swarm hive is the unpainted one to the north of the “bee plot.” That one doesn’t seem to have much going on, but there’s a solid amount of capped honey in the bottom super on the south hive. There’s a lot of stuff flowering right now and it’s still been raining at least once a week, so I’m not sure what the holdup is. Brooke will probably need to get in there with Calvin sometime in the next few weeks to get a better sense of where we’re at, but it looks like a promising year for honey!

That’s good for now! Stay tuned for another productive garden year!

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State Park #31: Montauk State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

The last state park we visited this past summer was Montauk State Park, the next morning after we visited Grand Gulf State Park. By this point in the trip, we’d had a whirlwind tour of a bunch of parks, some more interesting than others, so by the time we were at Montauk, we were all about ready to go home. We at least knew Montauk wasn’t going to feature a long hike or anything, so that powered us through the morning.

The biggest thing about Montauk State Park is that it is located near the beginning of the Current River, where the spring feeds cold water into the river system and provides a perfect site to raise trout. It also means that a bunch families were there fishing.

Montauk State Park is one of three “trout parks” in Missouri, primarily featuring daily stocking of rainbow and brown trout. The different reservoirs being maintained at the site have fish at different stages of development. Reservoirs need to be emptied and cleaned (like the one above) occasionally, but it sure looked like millions of fish growing across the different tanks.

There was a little bit of hiking, but very limited. Really, it was a flat, gravel bike trail that went around the bodies of water in the area. We did a 1 mile loop around the pond, and that was basically the only “hiking” available at the site. Again, fishing is the primary draw, so not a ton for us to do, unfortunately!

If fishing was of interest to us, it would be a cool place to be! They’ve also got cabins on site, so it’s relatively easy to stay close to the fishing, making it convenient to get up early, if that’s your thing. For what we tend to be interested in, though, Montauk probably isn’t a park we need to return to any time soon. It was an easy stop to cap off the trip, though, so glad we saw it!

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State Park #30: Grand Gulf State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

After we spent the morning at Lake Wappapello State Park, we took a journey to one of the more remote options in the system: nearly in the middle of the state, a few miles from the border with Arkansas, lies Grand Gulf State Park. Again, if the goal was to hit the parks that we otherwise are highly unlikely to randomly cross, we had to make sure we hit this one! It was a two hour drive from Lake Wappapello, so that allowed a bit of rest time in the car before seeing what Grand Gulf had to offer.

The park itself features a cave system that collapsed thousands of years ago, leaving behind Missouri’s “Little Grand Canyon.” Before checking out the landmark itself, we took the 0.75 mile Natural Bridge Trail, which was among the easier ones we’d been on over this trip. There were some ups and downs, but it was generally suited to a wide audience of visitors. We always appreciate loop trails like this, too, so we don’t have any backtracking and are otherwise seeing a new landscape the entire time.

After the hike, we descended as far as we could down the hill toward the opening to the canyon. The history of the area was rather interested, though it is disappointing no one can go into the cave system. In the late-19th and early-20th century, there are records of folks attempting to explore the cave system, but a series of collapses over the millennia have made it mostly impossible. Aspects of the system were accessible into the 1920s, but a series of storms and floods washed trees and other debris down into the caves, shutting off sections. Even today, rains that get heavy enough can collect water in the canyon as high as 100 ft, taking weeks to drain.

While we were there, there was water down in the depths, but nowhere near that high. The “100 ft line” is essentially where the bottom of the deck hits here, so it’s crazy to think of what it looks like with that much rain!

I should note that this cave system has been traced another 9 miles away, emerging in Arkansas at Mammoth Spring. Apparently, that’s a state park, too, but for now, we aren’t planning on adding parks from other states to our list!

All in all, it was an interesting, albeit brief, visit. I think we’re glad we knocked this one out while we were down in southern Missouri, since making a special trip down there to hit this park may have been more disappointing. The trail just isn’t that long, and you can’t go deep enough to see much of the cave like you can at Rock Bridge State Park, so while it’s a beautiful view and an awesome sight to see, in a state where you don’t normally see formations like it, there just isn’t much to do there after you’ve seen the sight. Glad we went, but probably won’t return any time soon!

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Bee Update – Summer 2025

Like I said back in June, we ended up catching a few swarms for the first time ever. Early on, we weren’t entirely sure they would decide to stay or anything, but we kept an eye on them all summer. Brooke and Calvin added supers, and at one point in July, Calvin and I added another one to the south hive (the one that survived last winter).

Back on July 26, Calvin and Brooke took a look and claimed maybe 8 or 9 frames from the south hive that had capped honey (in the bottom super), and at the time, the northern hive had honey in it, but it wasn’t capped yet, so we didn’t take anything.

Flash forward to today, but we got more honey! They got another 11 frames, this time mostly from the northern hive, with a few to supplement from the south hive. Brooke said there’s more honey in that southern hive, but it isn’t capped and the bees appear to be feeding off of them, so they removed the queen excluder and are just allowing the bees to move up into the super that we left behind.

Last year, we didn’t get any honey, so it has been a few summers since we got to use our extractor! Brooke de-capped the frames and Calvin loaded two frames at a time into the extractor.

Calvin likes spinning the hand crank, of course, so that’s how he helped. Is it annoying to do this manually when we could use an electric one by taking the frames to Hannibal??? Meh. It’s fine. When we only have 8-10 frames to deal with, packing them all up into a cooler or bins would be worse, so using this cheap extractor is just fine for our purposes.

In the end, Brooke thinks we got maybe 5 gallons of honey this year! Ironically, this may be our best harvesting year at our house, which is crazy because two of the hives were collected from our apple tree in the yard! It’s always interesting the color that late-summer honey turns. It’s substantially darker (right) than what they collected in late-July (left…obviously…).

Speaking of the middle hive, we didn’t get any honey from it, but that’s partially because we didn’t have another queen excluder, and we don’t have that many supers. Since we didn’t get anything last year, Brooke was ready to throw in the proverbial towel (until she caught the swarms), so she’s still pretty hesitant to make any investments in these hives. Given this year’s haul, maybe she’ll change her mind! It’ll probably depend on if any of these survive the winter, though!

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State Park #29: Lake Wappapelo State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Having not traveled far with the kids this summer, we opted to throw in a classic man-made Missouri lake beach excursion onto the trip. Lake Wappapello State Park is about 20 minutes outside of Poplar Bluff, MO and features camping, fishing, boating, hiking, and a beach area. It isn’t all that dissimilar from Long Branch State Park near Macon, MO, which we’ve visited a few times just before school starts. Lake Wappapello feels a bit bigger, though, and aspects of the park seem a bit more spread out.

Lake Wappapello, like many (all?) of the lakes in the Missouri State Park System, resulted from a river that was dammed for either electricity generation or recreational purposes. Given the fertile Mississippi River basin farmland down here, you can imagine that there were communities that were not all that pleased with the prospect of the lake going in, but ultimately the lake went in and it has been here ever since.

Still, weirdly, there weren’t many people there! We went to the beach, first, and saw another couple eating breakfast at a nearby picnic table. We drove around to the marina to see about renting canoes for an hour or so. They ended up being $50 a day to rent, and we didn’t want them for that long, so we skipped them this time. Still, they have 3 canoes to rent and one of them was spoken for. There was a pontoon being put in, but otherwise only two other trucks/trailers in the parking lot putting in. This was at 9:15 on a Saturday morning in early-August: prime time to get in a camping trip, some boating, some fishing, etc. before school starts and before the Fall hits. It was just surprising to feel like we had the park all to ourselves!

The beach itself felt a bit smaller than Long Branch’s. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it probably can’t handle a crowd like Long Branch or even Thousand Hills (I never really visited that beach, so could be wrong there…). The depth of the water was very reasonable for kids, where 75% of the swimming space was 4′ or less in depth. I went out about as far as I could and the water only got up to my chin, so we’re talking maybe a little more than 5′ of depth at the most?

Behind the beach, there were multiple picnic tables, a pit toilet (with decent space for changing clothes), a water fountain and a spigot for washing off sand from feet, and a small playground. The parking lot was bigger than could probably support the beach, honestly, so I’d be very curious to see what it’s like on a “busy day.”

We didn’t drive through the camping area, but there were campers around. Compared with the other parks we’ve visited on this trip, it sure seems like it should be a pretty popular location for this region, and has some fun opportunities to check out: it was just surprising that there weren’t more people there!