On the St. Croix with the Qualleys

A little over a month ago I found out that Britt has never been canoeing - NEVER. So we planned a date towards the end of September to take a trip down the St. Croix.

Saturday was the day - the day started out quite gloomy and I was really worried we were going to get rained out of our fun day. But when the time came to put the canoes in the water there wasn't a cloud in the sky. It turned out to be a beautiful day full of laughter and turtles.

We did not do the long trip from Taylors Falls to William O'brien this time - instead we took out at Osceola which is 'just' 7 miles instead of 17. Needless to say the boys (and everyone else) were over joyed when we saw the Osceola bridge come into view.

Mason holding a baby snapping turtle:
The picture Gabe took of the cliffs along the journey:
Owen and Brian competing to see who has cuter eye brows - Owen wins, hands down:
A picture from the Captains chair of everyone (except of course the Captain - Me):
Britt, Owen, Gabe and Matt paddling away:

Can this be considered crafting?

So it has been a while since I've done any 'crafting' and a couple weeks ago I saw some cool glasses at MOA made out of beer bottles. I decided I needed to see if we could do it ourselves. So today we produced what Brian refers to as our 'Proof of Concept'. As is, it looks like we may actually be able to make some more of these things. Now I just need to find some Glass Etching Cream, some cool beer bottles and we'll be able to monogram some of these for fun.

Wine Weekend

5 wineries, 45 different wines all in 2 days.

Wineries:
-St. Croix Vineyards
-Alexis Bailly Vineyard
-Cannon River Winery
-Falconer Vineyards and Nursery
-Northern Vineyards

Best part about the whole weekend - spending some much needed time with Mary Schuh!

Mary and Me at St. Croix Vineyards:


Mary and me at Falconer Vineyards:

Mary and me pretending to stomp grapes at St. Croix vineyard:


...I think my grapes are all stomped.


Evidently visiting wineries and tasting wine give you some abilities...
such as the ability to hold water fountains...


Or to squish bird houses with just your fingers...

Family BBQ

On Saturday we hosted our first family barbecue at our house. We had three grills going, tons of food and tons of fun. Our garage door broke the night before and thanks to three of my brothers we were able to get it back into operation.

Unexpectedly Rock Band was a hit with the kids and "Eye of the Tiger" was played over and over again with many singing, Jacob on the guitar and everyone else rotating through on the drums. ...it is a good thing Rock Band 2 has a no fail option.

The kids enjoying lunch:
Natalie rocking out like a rock star:
James loading up on food:
Brian keeping an eye on all the grills:
Ben, Rudy, Lisa - Ben does NOT like having his picture taken:

Family Camping!

I find it weird sometimes how our family has began to do more 'family events'. It seems as though once a month I get together with four brothers for lunch and once a month I get together with the majority of the family for some random reason. Thinking back it doesn't seem like we got together this often before, perhaps it was because I was in high school or college and for some reason too 'busy' to get together. Sadly I sometimes think that the passing of our mother was an eye opener to many of us. We realized the importance of family - even though we don't all get along the greatest - we still enjoy spending time just together.

Pictures from family camping weekend:

Camp fire popcorn was a hit:
Campfire!
Uncle Rudy makes the best cookies EVER!

BUCKTHORN!!!

Most of the people we know who live in the twin cities area don't have many trees in their yard, heck most people we know in the cities can COUNT how many trees they have in their yard. Granted, we could probably count ours too - it would just take some time and some creativity around the property line.

So having trees is GREAT - love it, would not want to live some where without a lot of trees. However it became apparent to us that we had many buckthorn trees - a very invasive tree (read about buckthorn here). So we decided it was finally time to remove many of these invasive trees from our yard. Turns out that was around 70 trees. So in less than 24 hours we removed 70 trees, rented a wood chipper for 2 hours, wood chippered all 70 trees (in less than two hours!), and then put stump remove on the trees we were unable to pull out. Needless to say we are beat.

...But now we have little to no buckthorn, which really opens up the woods around our place and a huge pile of wood chips. I'm sad about the woods not having as much coverage - but the trees that were getting choked by the buckthorn should start to grown better and it also leaves room for us to plant trees we want!

TC's new sleeping spot

I came in from outside today to search for something on the internet - I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I begin to hear something coming from the kitchen -- I look around the kitchen and I see nothing. As I'm turning back to look at my computer out of the corner of my eye I see TC (The Count) rolling around - ON TOP OF THE PANTRY! We have been able to train Pixel to not go on the counter but I'm beginning to believe there is no hope in TC's future.


Then after I took a picture of TC I decided I needed to capture the other animals too...