Welcome to the world Elliott Carter...

Last evening our daughter, Jessica gave birth to our 2nd grand child and her first baby... Elliott Carter arrived around 11 :38 on the 22nd day of August. 9 lbs and 21 inches long. We are anxiously awaiting pictures since we haven't seen him yet but with two of the most beautiful parents in the world we all know he will be a handsome boy! Congratulations to Andre! The proud father and wonderful husband to Jessica.

No Mark Martin clocks for Elliott's nursery, Andre, since he lost the race at Bristol last night...but second place isn't bad for an "old man".

A quick update on our eHow writing venture, we finally got a raise!! Our total earnings for the month of August so far now stands at $11.92 so we have made 40 cents this weekend. We haven't been doing much work on it over the weekend, but I am going to start working on some new articles next week. I have several ideas floating around in my head that I know will be perfect and easy articles to write so we can build up our library. It has been and will continue to be a learning process as how to market the articles to get the best exposure we can on the Internet. So far we are having fun and that is the most important thing.

My now almost famous recipe for How to make delicious spaghetti sauce is simmering on the stove as I write so I better go give it a stir...

http://www.ehow.com/how_5319742_make-spaghetti-sauce-fresh-tomatoes.html

Old trains and new babies!

The weekend is here! And it looks wet with another rainy day here in Magic City. Last week was a very disappointing week for me with our eHow venture. So far we have posted 14 articles and our views are way up over what they were at the beginning of the week, our earnings are stalled at still $11.52. A fellow eHow-er told me not to expect much in earnings until we get over 50 articles posted so we need to keep writing, only 36 to go!

Exciting news here that we received around 6 this morning. Our daughter Jessica, who has been expecting her first child at the end of August called and told us she had gone into labor early this morning. Wow!! We can't wait to see baby Elliot, it seemed like he would never get here. So far she is still at home with her husband Andre, counting and timing contractions and anxiously waiting for the hurried journey to the hospital for delivery.

No new garden news and it is to wet to go check it since it is mosquito land out there now. I did notice my watermelon plant I planted in spring has finally decided to take off. Maybe we will get one home grown watermelon before the end of the season, if we can keep the chipmunks and ground hogs away from it.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/216268

http://vmtmusings.blogspot.com/

One of my favorite trains here in Roanoke is finally off to be restored at our Transportation Museum here. This train has been sitting in the woods for so long, hiding behind an old scrap metal and recycling center that has been closed for years. I stopped several times to visit it and take pictures when I first discovered it shortly after we moved here. I really enjoy exploring old buildings and trains and towns. It's like finding a piece of history, very exciting I think!

Pest control Cat...

Not much success yesterday with the eHow venture but we did increase our points and views so today I am hoping they give us a raise!! So far we have 604 Views 1590 Points and 11.56 in earnings for the month.

We just added two more articles today

http://www.ehow.com/how_5260134_manage-small-daycare-small-house.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_5322866_use-chicken-easy-couscous-salad.html

No garden news today, it is doing it's thing and growing Morning Glories and Gourds. I See I have more tomatoes to pick, that is a good thing since I used up all of mine making spaghetti sauce.

I may quit giving them away to friends and keep them all for myself now that I know just how wonderful homemade sauce is! We wish we had more!

Starbelle is our pest control cat... last night around 1 in the morning she woke me up meowing in our bedroom. She normally doesn't do this so I got up to see what was the matter with her. She was all huddled up behind the chair in our room and I thought she might be sick.

At Diana's suggestion to turn on the bathroom light to see better, I did, and saw she was chasing some kind of big flying critter. She was so funny, she kept stepping on it and then it would disappear and then she would start meowing looking all around for it. Seeing light and a possible escape from the monster that was chasing him he flew, quite crippled into the bathroom. Of course it was no help for him since Starbelle was now hot on his trail. After stepping on him a few more times, I decided it was time to get back to bed so I helped her out and caught it and sent it off to a swirrling watery grave.

Starbelle is a great bug catcher, just don't let her give you any kisses after you see her licking her lips outside on the screened porch!

Google Success and Morning Glories

I am so excited!! I googled one of my Ehow recipes this morning and found my How to make Citrus Glazed Salmon on the first page, number 3 on the list of searches. So now I am praying that on the Internet today that there are several million people googling "how to make citrus glazed salmon" and reading my article. That would be so cool. No luck though in just googling "salmon" or "glazed salmon" or "salmon recipes" I didn't show up anywhere that I saw, perhaps page 20 of the search list but who ever goes that far into searches when they google things on the Internet. Not much earnings on the Ehow account yesterday, I did make 26 cents, now we are up to $11.52. I added another article last evening on how to make spaghetti sauce from fresh tomatoes.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5319742_make-spaghetti-sauce-fresh-tomatoes.html

Garden Notes... I wanted my garden to be a place this year of more than just vegetables. I have a mulch bin in the garden to put waste and to help create some better soil for next years garden, So I thought why not plant some flowers around it to help hide it. I planted a package of Cosmos seeds and also a pack of Morning Glory seeds around the bin. The Cosmos came up so pretty with their fern like leaves and tons of blooms.

The Morning Glories took longer to get going but now I am getting worried and wondering if I made a mistake planting them. They rapidly covered the mulch bin, so much now that I can't even get to it anymore and have started sending their shoots out to anything and everything they can grab a hold of. I am starting to worry that if I turn my back on them for a few days I will go out and find that my entire garden is covered with Morning Glories. I am wondering about how many seeds they are dropping on the ground for next years growth, and will I ever be able to get rid of them now that I started them.

I guess I will keep them in check best I can for this summer and worry about next year when it gets here. Meanwhile I will just enjoy the beautiful flowers that bloom every morning and have fun watching the bees, butterfly's and hummingbirds stopping by for a morning treat.

Making money and growing gourds

I have been so busy writing articles for eHow.com and learning new tricks on how to make money writing articles for money on the internet that I have been neglecting stopping by here.

I was quite excited yesterday to see my ehow earnings jump from $3.32 up to $11.26. I am still trying to get a handle on what generates the money, I am assuming it is from clicking on the ads more so than someone just stumbling upon the article. Anyway I have been learning a lot and meeting some new friends who have been helping me understand how ehow works.

Garden News... I was checking yesterday for more ready to pick tomatoes and was very excited to see that one of the squash plants had decided to come back to life. This one is a decorative gourd plant and already I am seeing a very unique gourd that has formed... lots of blooms are on the plant and it is climbing all over the corn so I expect to have lots of gourds from my first try at growing them. We actually ate one of the gourds earlier this season for dinner one night and found that it was delicious. I don't want to eat them all though, I want to try drying some and maybe making some bird houses or bird feeders out of some of them. But then again, they were so good maybe we'll just eat them all ourselves.

Hero Cat

The other evening, my wife and I were eating our dinner on our screened porch. It's one of our favorite places to be to relax and watch the birds stopping by for a drink from our bird bath and watching the hummingbirds and yellow finches stopping by for food. We have quite a large crowd of hummingbirds this year, they are flying in and out constantly now, and watching their antics is so amusing as they try and boss the other birds away from the feeders. They fly so fast and so frantically that it is amazing they don't run into things including humans more often. Our cat, Starbelle also enjoys watching them, she's an indoor cat and being out on the screened porch is her idea of being an outdoor cat. But she would love to get outside to play with all these wonderful birds.

So during dinner, suddenly Diana jumped up and exclaimed, oh my goodness!!! I glanced over to where she was looking and saw a hummingbird with his beak stuck in the screen on the porch. His little body was hanging limp and there was no movement at all. I thought for sure the bird was dead. Starbelle noticed the little bird at the same time and made a mad dash to the shelve below the screen, jumping up she batted the bird and at that instant it came free and zoomed off to a near by tree to recoup. Our little Starbelle saved that hummingbird's life that evening so now he can come another day to entertain us all at dinner time. I wonder if he knows he was saved by a cat?

TGIF!!

It's been awhile since I have written anything here, I guess you could call me a blogslacker, or maybe just lazy. Actually I have been quite busy, just not busy writing on my blog page. We started writing though for a website called ehow, http://www.ehow.com/. You are supposed to get paid for articles you write telling others how to do things. I have written two so far, one on how to make hummingbird nectar and one on how to start a blog page. Since I am such a pro at both, haha... So I am thinking to myself, here I am telling people how therapeutic writing is and how much fun blog pages are and mine is sitting idle in cyber space collecting cyber dust, so maybe I should dust it off and start writing again.

Summer is slipping away fast, already we are well into August. My lovely garden is showing it's age and slowly slowing down. Lots of tomatoes are still coming but the corn is mostly finished. All the squash got some kind of powdery mildew on it and had died off along with the cukes. I am starting to think about pulling out the dead stuff and adding some better soil into it for next season and tilling it as I empty it out to get rid of the weeds which have been a constant battle all season long. The flowers have been beautiful , huge tall Cosmos and Morning Glories grabbing a hold of whatever they can to keep climbing. The hummingbirds are loving it!

Also loving my garden is I suspect a hungry ground hog... he has been eating the tomatoes and stealing the corn. I see him in the yard almost everyday, but never in the garden so maybe I am falsely accusing him, maybe it's one of the cute little bunnies that hop around in the yard every morning. Luckily there is enough for all, I just picked almost 9 lbs. of tomatoes the other morning, pretty German Pinks, Yellow, and Mr. Stripeys. All delicious and wonderful for BLT's.

Yumm

So my plan is to come back here at least once a week add my thoughts and make this my therapeutic place to come...