Still not finished

Here is the photo of the deck before we started painting. It features the new and improved benches which I LOVE.  

And, here it is looking finished but, sadly, if you look really closely, you will see that it still needs one more coat....

It has just been too busy or too hot or too wet or we have been gone and that last coat will hopefully -  maybe - get put on at the end of this week???? In the meantime, the deck decorations stay lined up against the house.

We did give it the "old college try" early in the week with deck painting. We worked Monday evening until we ran out of the expensive grit-filled deck paint. Tuesday morning, instead of doing my usual yard work at the cool of the day, I used some of the older deck stain that is in the same color on some of the out of the way spots. Later that day, while Steve was at the temple, I went to Home Depot to get another gallon of the fancy stuff  ($50 per gallon!) and we spent Wednesday evening painting until it got too dark leaving just the second coat for the flat, walking part of the deck to be done at another time. 

We came in Monday evening with some time before bed so we watched "The Net". Yes, the old 1995 Sandra Bullock one that both Steve and I had seen before. Almost 30 years old and it still holds up. And, it is still paints a picture that is as terrifying as ever of the hazards of the internet.  Between that movie and the frustration with not finishing the deck, I didn't sleep very well that night.

Aside from deck painting (or not painting) the rest of the week went quite calmly and smoothly. I finished a "chapter" in my Billion Graves efforts. Section 11 photos have now been compared with the cemetery spreadsheet and chart of the same section and about twenty individuals were identified as not having a marker. So, I wrote what information I did have on them - name and death date and age at death - on an erasable white board and set it down on the plot where they were buried and took a picture.  I am now working on section 14 doing the same thing with the photos I have already taken and entered into Billion Graves.  It is a slow-going job - I usually do about four photos per night after I have written in my journal - but slow and steady wins the race, right? 

I ended up teaching the 10-11 year old Afghanistan girl's class at the Welcome Center Thursday night. They usually have mother/daughter team teaching them but the daughter was racing in a two-person canoe in the MR340 and the mother wanted to cheer her on. I looked up MR340 and it is a race on the Missouri River for the 340 miles between Kansas City and St. Louis. The race takes at least two days. Wow!  So, the I had the three attending girls draw a picture and write a few words of commendation for the daughter and then we played Spot-It. 

I have picked two gallon bags of green and yellow beans so far and more are coming. We have beautiful cucumbers this year - long and green instead of fat and curly.  The yellow squash has slow and steady output but the zucchini has produced only one fruit so far. The blackberries are all but finished. I am hoping to complete weeding the pumpkin patch this week as the plants are beginning to spread. As I dig up volunteer violets and other unwanted growth out in the pumpkins in the mornings, the bees are buzzing all around me - queueing up for a turn in the many blossoms.  The bottle gourds have produced three gourds so far but they are climbing all over the fence and have multiple blossoms so I have great expectations. 

Steve and I spent the weekend in Greenwood with Juli and Alex. We arrived Friday evening and left for St. Louis mid-afternoon Sunday. Alex was in a full-of-energy phase so he joined Juli, Steve and me at the temple on Saturday.  And, rather than go up to his room to crash after we returned home, he and Steve went out to the garage and puttered around with a plasma torch to lengthen a trailer!!!  We really didn't do much aside from the temple. Juli and I always make a Costco run to fill up our gas tank and to pick up food for dinner - usually a rotisserie chicken. Steve stayed with Alex through the night on Saturday so Juli could get a full night's sleep in her office. Alex caught Covid on the 4th of July and it has been a rough month. One of his regular aids is Type 1 diabetic so he has been staying away and the other aid has had his hours cut due to bureaucratic  red tape so Juli has been carrying the ball for much of the time. We hit some dead-stop traffic just outside of Effingham that delayed our trip back home by an hour but otherwise, it was a great trip. We brought Sally along and she is such a good little road-trip doggie. Below is a photo of her at one of our stops and I close with a picture of the four of us after the temple.