6th Grade Sunday School Golf Outing

Rob has been soon extraordinarily blessed when it comes to teachers in his life! All the way thru the 6th grade, he's had excellent teachers who have understood him, understood his competitive nature, understood his "wordiness" and so on.

Blessed I tells ya!

And that's just thru the public school system...

Then there's Sunday School thru our church, Lutheran Church of the Cross in Altoona, Iowa.  He has had wonderful instructors of the Word in each of the years he's been there, the weakest likely being his own father...  yikes!

So Friday night, his teachers from this year decided to have a miniature golf outing for the class.  Here are those lovely people!

I have taught, and taught with, many of these peeps and this picture tells me that my village is a good village!

The Joys Of Summer

Summer! The time for jobs and hurting your back and mowing and allergies and vacations mowing and hurting your back and gardens and mowing and flowers and landscaping and hurting your back...  and mowing...

You know, summer.

The boys are getting old enough to take on more responsibilities as well as individual responsibilities.  Robby can handle the zero turn mower by himself now.  Caleb can push mow now.  They can both handle watering gardens, doing the dishes, cleaning their bathrooms and so on.

I had Robby tear apart the flower box over the septic tank since it was falling apart and starting to look quite ridiculous.  He did that and stacked the wood up in a relatively nice fashion.

So the next day, Lesley assigned Caleb the job of staining the flower boxes off the deck in back of the house and I assigned Robby the job of hauling the wood down to the creek and burning it. By himself. 

How'd it all go?

The Chinaman with paint brush in hand.  He did a fantastic job of re-staining the boxes.

Larger American boy admiring his fire as a man should.  Proudly.  He also did a great job and I showed him a trick towards the end where you fire up the mower, turn the blades on and point the discharge from the deck at the fire to get the remainder of it to burn up really, really fast!  We both liked that!

A job they're doing together.  We need to remove all of the river rock from the area between the sidewalk and garage.  They've been experimenting with both wet and dry techniques.  Wet is far messier, but they got more done faster that way.

My job... washing the North side of the house...

She cleaned up quite well after a good few hours of work!

365 Long, Hard Days

A year ago today, we lost our Molly.

I've started typing 100 different things here, but I can't seem to finish a thought. I'll let some Molly pictures tell the story and just leave it at that. 

 

When sorting thru the last of her belonging's a couple of weeks back, we found a tub with probably 100-150 hand written notes from students over the years and how she affected their lives.  Pretty amazing stuff and I only bothered to read a few of them as it was pretty emotional...  Here is one that I liked since I was a weird kid!  :-)

Signed "your unique friend".  Gotta love it.

 

A Little Love for the Beast

Our dog has lots of names:  Juno Pepper Schmitz, Junie, Pretty Kitty, Honey Chicken, Fuzzbutt, Junie B. Beast, The Beast, The Terrorist, Devildog and so on and so forth.

From those names, you can likely devise a bit of truth about her personality.  She can be the sweetest thing in the world, or the most crazy, terrorizing beast you would ever meet.

We have some recent good pics of her as she is truly starting to settle down a bit, which is quite welcomed!

We were cleaning the house on Saturday due to expecting some company on Sunday.  Caleb was folding blankets and decided to make a stack for Juno.  Juno immediately took to it and then he covered her up to make sure that she would be cozy.

The "Honey Chicken" and her human.  She had been engaged in a wicked game of fetch and was tiring out.  Not quite enough to drop the tennis ball, but tiring out a bit.

And her favorite spot;  in a sunspot after getting her belly filled from breakfast.  She could easily kill two hours on "her" rug.

25 & Counting...

Sometimes love is forced for fear that you will never find that "certain someone". Other times, there's no love at all involved in a marriage.   There's other situations where people claim they "fell out of love" with each other (which I don't believe in...).  And best of all, there's the situation that I stumbled into back in May of 1990.

I was working at a Toys R Us store in Clive, Iowa and was decent merchandiser who was NOT good enough to be a manager (the hair...  so I thought!) but was plenty good enough to train all of the summer temp employees.  That used to drive me up the wall sideways when it happened as they would hire people right off the street for the management program, but would not promote me from within.

Year's later, I get it.  I cussed like a sailor, a really bad cussing one, at that, and I didn't present myself in a very professional manner outside of the cussing either.  Easy to see now, but at the time it honked me off like you wouldn't believe.

But not only would I train the summer employees, I would also be tasked with training all of the Manager Trainee's when it came to the sales floor. There were several times that the company saved money by not having a sales floor manager and letting me handle the more menial tasks while the store room manager would handle the more important stuffs.

Drove.  Me.  BAAAATTTTTTTTTTTYYYYYYY!!!!!!

However, I soon discovered that I was training a LOT of young ladies who were looking for a summer job betwixt college semesters.  Perhaps this training thing wasn't so bad after all?  The bad thing was, I didn't really click with any of them.  No spark, as they say.

Then, one day in May 1990, a young lady walked into aisle 3C where we displayed remote control cars, trains and a very wide selection of Tonka trucks and tractors. 

I was sick and/or tired of training temp employees, most of whom last a month or less, and I was NOT happy to get another one for my current shift.

But then "SHE" walked in.  

Lesley Kay Bushman walked into the aisle where I was working a U-boat full of merchandise onto the shelves.  My first words to her were, "Prepare to learn".  No real introductions as I couldn't be bothered with such trivial things.

The first memory I have of her, other than my most intelligent introduction, was her smile.  I love a good smile and this young lady had a REALLY GOOD SMILE (still does!).  Not only that, she had pretty eyes too.  Those eyes could find a shred of good in someone like the devil. 

While I don't think I was quite at the devil-level, I was not what you would call a great catch either.  Most fisher-wo-men would have thrown me back. 

Lucky for me, she didn't.  

She helped me move from a small apartment shared with 2 other loose cannons and that didn't scare her off.  We sat on a couch, facing the wall, outside of our apartment building til all hours of the night just talking and enjoying each other's company.

We stayed up all night, talking, laughing, playing Tetris, spilling orange Kool-Aid on white carpet, walking and truly just enjoying our time spent together.  I didn't really know it at the time, nor was I emotionally or mentally equipped for such a thing, but I was falling in LOVE!  

HARD!!!!!  

27 years later, 25 of those as married, we've been thru a lot of great, good, not-so-good, horrible and worse times together. 

Key word, together.  

We've been mad at each other but have never really had a fight.  

We fought thru a crazy pregnancy together while remodeling a house and were entrusted with a baby, of all things, Robert James Schmitz! 

Went thru adoption courses and to China together (with Robert James Schmitz in tow!).  

Changed careers multiple times together.  

Supported each others hobbies (she supports my guitar addiction more than anything!!) and interests.  She once went with me to a record show as a highly uninterested guest and when I was confronted with a couple of late '70s KISS promo records issued specifically to radio stations only, she offered up her watch to help pay for them.  The fella was so moved, he accepted my cash and handed her watch back to her!

And the list goes on and on...  

I hope and pray that our marriage and friendship do the same!

Summer #1, For No Other Reason...

These three...  From left: Caleb, our neighbor Ryan, and Robby, taking a break from a vigorous 3-man baseball game in the front yard, to enjoy some frozen fudge bars delivered from our "other" neighbor, Diane Lund.  She's the delightful person who snapped this picture.

Mowing 'Til The Cows Come Home

A few weekends back, I wanted to get Robby outside and teach him how to run the push mower. It's a job that all kids should learn and execute while they're growing up.  Not too mention that it's good exercise.  

So I got Robby on the push mower and he did 4 or 5 rounds before declaring that he "would be no good for anything else the rest of the day".  This declaration was issued around noon.

So once Robby was done, as I only had him mowing around the edges of the yard, landscaping, gardens and such.  Caleb was hopping like a madman because he was SOOOOOO excited to get behind this new-fangled machine.

He finished the section that Robby started and wanted to do more.  He's mowed a few times since then and still gets just as excited.

Now if we can just keep that attitude until he's ready to move out and head to college, we'll have done alright!

That is a happy boy!

He has a bit of trouble turning the corners because he's not really tall enough to push down on the handle to take pressure off of the front wheels.

Turns out Rob was good for something the rest of the day.  He got himself a drink of water and crawled on the tractor to finish mowing the big parts of the yard.

And then there was this...  first victim of the mowing season.  Hopefully the last as well, but I know better...