garden and herb garden

When we first moved to the house, one of the patio's had a planter filled with ivy. We never particularly liked it, and I was always concerned about the way it drained. Later on, we decided that it would be a good to have an herb garden and this seemed a place that was available and relatively close to the kitchen.

I dug up all the ivy and dirt down to ground level and put in plastic liners to assure drainage away from the house. I also mixed the clay dirt in the box with compost, peat moss and vermiculite.

A new store opened up that had a variety of herbs for sale. Here is how it turned out.


In this pciture you can see some lemon grass, sage, sorrell, marigold thyme and some ornamental flowers. These all started out as small little plants. They like their new home and have grown quickly.


There is more lemon grass in this picture, some basil, fennel, curry.

Somewhere in the mix is chamomile, chervil, thyme, parsley, majoram, oregano, lavendar, savory, rosemary and chinese chives.



I've rearranged the planter boxes in the garden. Here is a long view of the garden, some closeups are below. There is eggplant, beets, carrots, basil, onions, tomatos, cabbage, kale, brocolli visible.

I also planted some hills with various squashes, melons and cucumbers.

More on Hairy Wumpus

You know - I think there may be some cosmic signicance to the whole Hairy Wumpus thing. We now are living in Bowling Green Ky, home of Western Kentucky University.

(for those confused on who Hairy Wumpus is - look down a couple of posts for a complete history)

WKU sits atop a hill in the middle of the city and students there are known as "Hill Toppers" - yes I know - it inspires nearly as much fear into opponents as "Corn Huskers" but at least the Corn Huskers in Nebraska do pretty well in their sports. - not that sports are really all that important. (I'm not sure how they are in academics though, I've heard one story that the "N" on their otherwise unadorned football helmets stands for Nowledge)

A lot of our family dollars go to WKU and we've earned a few dollars working for WKU.

So how does one make a mascot for a Hill Topper. Well - they didn't really try. They made up the mascot "Big Red", which is kind of a hairy red blobby fellow.


Little did I know as a 9 year old that my stocking would end up looking like the mascot of my adopted home town... Makes you wonder

singing at the mall

Barbershop in the mall from Levi Schuck on Vimeo.

I've had a load of fun singing in the Caveman chorus. We did renegade caroling at the mall last week. They won't let you officially sing there, so we went to 5 different places and sang 2 songs and then dispersed before the mall cops could kick us out. Loads of fun.

I didn't know they were going to film us, so when the camera got in my direction I did look away, since they spent a lot of time on the guy next to me, it looks pretty stupid, but I was singing.

Merry Christmas

A Merry Hairy Wumpus Christmas

Well - this bears some explaining..

Many years ago - around 1977 if I had to guess - Mother decided she would do something nice for us and make us special Christmas stockings. We got to design our own stockings - nothing standard like a plain old sock would do for us..

Matt and I had these really cool shark shirts - Matt ended up with a Shark stocking. It was really something special. Don't know what Santa thought of putting toys and candy in a shark - but hey - he left stuff there anyway.

I think Rebecca had a raggedy Ann doll type of stocking - don't remember as it didn't make a huge impression - but it was girlie. She was at most 5 years old.

One of my younger siblings had a coloring book at the time - being 9 or so I was far too old for coloring books myself! In the coloring book was a rather rotund looking bigfoot like creature walking through the woods with the caption "Hairy Wumpus". He wasn't very scary - in fact he kind of looked like a hairy pillsbury doughboy. Nevertheless, he became the model upon which my most awesome stocking was to be based.

Mother did marvelously and Hairy Wumpus was the envy of every kid who managed to catch a glimpse of him (I think in retrospect they may have been even more impressed with the shark). He had sleek red fur and bright green eyes. A rather marvelous stocking.

Hairy is over 30 now - he's definitely getting over the hill. He lost an eye somewhere, not exactly sure where or when, but I think it just lends more character. Santa doesn't bother leaving anything in Hairy anymore - but he usually gets to hang out for a few weeks around Christmas for memory sake.

Merry Christmas.

Thanksgiving 2010

There's nothing quite like the excitement of getting together for Thanksgiving. This year was a little tamer than previous years. We just drove the 6.5 hrs to be with the Missouri cousins. It's really strange not having Levi with us. Even though our kids are quite a bit older than some of Matt's kids, they were pretty excited to see us.

Getting ready to eat. Thanks to all who helped prepare the food.

It was really cold on Thanksgiving - all we really did was sit home and watch TV. It was darn cold. It was in the 40's and Sunday on Friday - so we went to the park. We had a fun hour before we were just so numb and came home.

Matt and I were reminiscing as we watched the girls on the teeter totter. When I was around 6 and Matt was around 4, I jumped off a teeter totter while Matt was at the top. He still proudly wears a scar from where his teeth impacted his hand. Mother was not happy with me (and justifiably so). Those teeter totters seemed so big back then.

Trip to Utah

Been quite a while since I've posted anything. Here are pictures from when I took Levi out to Utah. It was a long drive - over 25 hours. We saw parts of the country that were quite a bit different. The trip was mostly what you would expect - boring.

To summarize - We've been to Missouri a bunch of time - nothing new here. Kansas City was hot and flatter. Nebraska just kept getting flatter and dryer. Wyoming? wow - lots of nothing. Utah - finally a little green. Great to see friends in Utah. Had a wonderful time.

Other unique things about the trip: stopping by some church history sites. Almost getting in a wreck in Nebraska. Pirating into someone wireless with a rather crude name in Nebraska. Getting gas in a town in Nebraska where everything reeked of cow manure. Funny bumps in the road in wyoming - guess they are to help semi's stop when it's icy.

Hard to see - but there are like 30 rail road tracks below in Lincoln Nebraska

Windmills - guess they have a lot of wind in Wyoming
Wind break along the interstate.
Beautiful cloudscape in Nebraska

Very tame prairie dogs. This one would eat out of my hand

Beautiful sunset in Nebraska - complete with bug smeared windshield

Levi in his new place of employment - BYU housing. He has to dress up everyday.

Levi's apartment building.

Gotta love fotune cookies.

Eating oriental food with our good friends the Johnsons.

I eat this stuff everytime we go out there. Unbelievably good.


We stocked Levi up pretty good. He was alone for 3 weeks before his roommates moved in.




Levi's new room

Here's how Levi left his old room. Didn't quite meet expectations here I'm afraid.My good friend Clark Schaffer and family. Always wonderful to see him.

Levi's Eagle Court of Honor

We were able to have Levi's Eagle Court of Honor shortly before he left for school. It was touch and go to see if we could fit it in. My brother Matt recommended that instead of doing it at the church that we should just have a campfire ceremony. That worked much better for us - since Levi was just ready to move on and the whole idea of some kind of formal party-celebration thing really wasn't very appealing to us.


We decided to do it in our backyard - for two reasons - one - easy to organize and two - gives people an excuse to see where we live. I figured it wouldn't be much work, but I ended up taking the day off and working all day long to get set up for it - oh well.


We had a good showing and it went well. It was beastly hot and the bugs were out and about chewing on everyone, but it went OK. Levi wanted to roast marshmallows afterwards and wanted tortilla pizza with grape juice mixed with sprite. OK - doesn't sound like the most appealing grouping of refreshments - but it worked. We also had a cake - the new oven cooks weird so both cakes completely collapsed. We filled one with pudding and put icing on it and it came out fine. We had a second cake, but I bought the wrong kind of pudding and well - we just did without.

Here is the flag ceremony. The shop in the background is our neighbor's shop.

Here is the campfire, it got really hot really quick.

This is Michael Smith who really really helped Levi get to Eagle Scout. He wouldn't have gotten there without him. He's been a great help to the family in many ways.

Levi getting ready to be presented.Greg Waddell explaining what each of the awards is.
This is just a sunflower - nothing to do with the eagle scout thing - but it was very pretty, so here it is.