Getting ready for a party

(Don’t tell Peanut what we got)

Heath had the day off yesterday and met me for a Chinese lunch down by work. Afterword we went to my office and made a list of all the groceries we would need for Peanut’s Birthday Parties this weekend. Saturday lunch is a kids make your own pizza party and Sunday is a family grill up some hot dogs party.

Then Heath ran to Aldi and got everything so we would not need to know when I got home. So after work I worked on the lawn. Jenna came over to work on wedding flower plans with Heath.

Mostly I weed eated or weed whacked or whatever it is called when you carry around a machine that spins some plastic string around real fasts and knocks down grass and weeds.

Our machine is kind of a dud. We got the cheapest one I could find a year or so ago and I filled it with chainsaw gas and used it. Then Jon borrowed it and filled it with boat gas and cleaned up a really messy lawn near his house. Then I have used it ever since.

It has a big nob with 3 settings: full Choke, 1/2 choke, and run.  You are supposed to use the choke settings while starting it up then keep it in run but ours will not work in run. If it is in run you can not give it any gas or it will die. So I find it works best to leave it in 1/2 choke and never let off the throttle till it dies or runs out of string. Ohh yeah the string dispenser does not work either. So every 5 min or so I have to kill it and pull some string out.

Has anyone tried those plastic blade things instead of the string? If those work 70% of my problems would be solved with the thing.

Anyhow eventually my yard was all trimmed up and looking good for the parties. (I still need to sweep the drive and garage, mow the back and think about trimming it up. I was starving (the Chinese food stuffed me but didn’t stick with me for long) and decided to cook up some dinner.

I tossed a couple of chicken breasts on the grill and started cutting up peppers, onions, and celery. I found a box of pasta mix for some sort of jalapeno cheddar fiesta pasta or something like that and made it then mixed in some corn and salsa and the veggies and chicken.  It ended up as a giant pan of Mexican pasta and Jenna, Heath and I tore into it and some side salads.

I had also made some desert so got it out right away. I put some vanilla pudding in a bowl then added in fresh strawberries and blueberries then added some frozen berries to the top and then a dollop of whip cream on the top. We downed this light desert too.

I considered working on the back but Heath wanted to get some more groceries. She had forgotten food for a work potluck and we needed trash bags. She convinced me to go to Price Chopper with her but once there we got to talking about not having a birthday present for Peanut or ice cream for the cake or gallons or decorations. So we left and headed to Wal-Mart instead. Of course our handful of items turned into 4 armloads of stuff and we barely escaped without getting a cart. We got Peanut a giant Tonka Crane truck that he can push around with his dump trucks and a spider man scooter that he can run around with. We also got new king size pillows to put on our bed in our new fancy pillow cases that came with the new bedspread.

We got everything we needed but Wal-mart was out of 39 gallon trash bags so we still need them. After our trip I helped unpack stuff and Heath made rotel dip for her potluck and I showered off before heading to bed.