Happy first Mother’s Day to the best wife and mommy in the world!

(And happy Mother’s Day to my mom 🙂 And any other mothers out there)

I woke up way early this morning to the sound of… nothing. Seriously, I like noise when I’m sleeping, so silence is as effective as any alarm clock. The sound of nothing was the result of the power being out, which was the result of the winds that blew through last night and this morning.

Since we have a basement in our new house, I went downstairs to check the sump pump, which apparently was not installed with a battery backup (I know what I’m doing this weekend). This of course meant that to avoid a flood, I had to empty the pump well by hand. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining, otherwise I’d have been fighting a losing battle. In the end, the water was rising slowly, so I only had to go down every few hours, though when it was all said and done, I probably lugged up about 100 gallons. Good times.

In between the water-lugging sessions, I read, played with the boy while he wasn’t napping, read some more, and ate chips. And I went outside, but there were no puddle curses uttered today – the grass seed is finally starting to germinate! I know the picture looks sparse, but I’ll take it. It’s a step in the right direction.

On a fun note, since the power was out for 12 hours and there wasn’t much else to do, I was able to start and finish a 400 page book today. That’s what I call making the best of the situation.

Hello. After many months of perusing numerous blogs, I told myself, “Hey, I can do this too,” and thus the decision was made to add even more clutter to an already cluttered blogosphere, so here goes…

My family consists of my wife and our eight-month old son (whom I’ll affectionately refer to as “S” and “C”), our golden retriever/collie mix Sadie (whom I’ll affectionately refer to as the mutt, the rat, or dummy as the situation warrants), and various other woodland creatures. We live on a few acres in Northeast Ohio, twenty miles or so east of Cleveland. We lived in a suburb for the past several years, and, in October, just moved into a new house, back out in the country where I grew up (S is also a country gal, from just a bit further south).

I like to play outside and enjoy being dirty, which my wife just cannot comprehend. I also like to cook (or more accurately, eat the results of my cooking), and enjoy music, sports, photography, reading, and relaxing, the latter of which I don’t get to do enough of. Since we just moved in recently, there are still more than a fair number of projects that I’m working on, and as the weather warms up, the project focus has shifted outside. However, we’re currently in the midst of the wettest April on record, so much of my ‘project’ time outside has consisted of looking at the yard and cursing all the puddles.

Anyways, there’s the first post. I’m sure I’ll look back on this someday as the point where the magic began, but for now, I have to go back to work. So, I’ll try to get some posts out in the next couple days regarding current projects, seeds that I’ve started, and various other gardening activities. Until we meet again…