Football/soccer season

Well soccer season started about month or more ago with practices for Clay.  Sage's practices started last week.  Soccer consumes most of our free time.  Clay is playing on the U10 travel A team and Sage in the U8 rec. league.  The farthest travel for Clay is to Gainesville (which we have done already-about 2 hours).  He will also play in 3 tournaments in Oct, Jan and Feb in Tampa, Savannah and Orlando/Disney.  I am helping out as the team manager (so I have a coaches card)-so far we still do not have the correct uniforms for everyone (Clay still has the wrong size) and with things like the "go between" the hotel coordinator and the parents, etc.  John got background screen also and has a coaches card also incase Gerrit, our coach, has an emergency.  So far Clay's team is 1-1 and Sage's team started the year against the hardest team in the U8 group so they are 0-1, I will keep everyone posted through out the season.

U10 Fury White team:






U8 Fast Cheetas:

Key West or Jacksonville, FL

We have a well producing key lime tree in our back yard.  But that is not where it started.  The key lime tree was give to us by my brother sometime during the first year John and I were married.  The poor tree was moved from GA to VA to FL (living on the patio of 4 apt. and 1 rental house).  The tree was snowed on and covered with big blankets to be moved in and out of cars every time we moved (key limes have huge 1-3 in thorns).  Finally after we moved into this house we put it in the ground.  The tree had never produced fruit and we were afraid we had damaged it by leaving it the pot for so long.  It was about my height when it went in the ground (around 5 ft.).  Well 6 years later the tree is about 15 ft tall and produce pretty much year round.  During T.S. Fay the tree ended up in a swampy area and in the path of the wind causing it to start to fall over.  This week I finally found a person that could come help us pull the tree back up and tie it to another tree to keep it upright.  In the mean time John and kids have been de-liming the tree to keep some of the weight off of it.  I (and John too) have been squeezing limes.  Mostly to make lime aide, but I have made jerk chicken this week and a mellon and jicama salad (the family did not like it much, but I loved), no pie yet.  I was laying in bed the other night and figured that I have squeeze more then 500 hundred limes (remember key limes are small, although mine are on the bigger size) and produce 30-50 cups of lime juice, not including the bags and bags I have given away.  Last year I froze the juice in ice cube trays, some of which is still there.  Here are some great conversions for you (other things to do with ice cube trays):How much liquid does a cube hold? One ice cube is generally the equivalent of one ounce or two Tablespoons. Here are some conversions to help you determine how many cubes you’ll need to use in a recipe:

2 cubes = 1/4 cup
4 cubes = 1/2 cup

6 cubes = 3/4 cup
8 cubes = 1 cup

Tree after T.S. Fay, I am hoping to find some picture of the tree when it was a baby.

One the children took the picture artistically crooked.

Artistic design by Clay, Mark and Ramon of lime with limes.

Squeezed limes made into juice

This is a pretty big pitcher

Recipe for this picture:

2 cups Key lime juice

3-4 cups sugar (remember key limes are very sour)

water to top of picture

stir and serve over ice

T. S. Fay

We have been adopted by a kitten/cat.  We are going to try to find out if it has any owners this week and if not; I guess we are hers.

Looking past my house at the flooded street, the drain was not draining correctly.

Leaning lime tree

Flooded woods

Here is a street light we saw in front of the mall while out driving during the storm today.  The streets were not too bad.  We only ran into two that we could not drive down.  There were only two traffic lights out-due to power outages, and then this traffic light.  Oh and there was a down line of some sort in front of our neighborhood.

Here is the rainfall from wunderground.com.  If you look in the lower right quadrant you will see a circle with an cross in it, just above the interstate 95 sign, that is around where our house is.  You can see all of Jacksonville area has gotten a min. of 8 in, some are in the 15-25,  we are in the 12-15 inch area and it is still raining.  It stopped for awhile this afternoon and we cleaned up a bunch of branches in the back yard.  The woods area is flooded, but nothing close to the house. 

1st day of school 2008-2009

I forgot this morning to take picture of my children on the way to school so we took picture tonight.  We always get a new lunchbox, so we remember the year-2008.  Can you believe they are in 2nd and

 4th grade

Cookin'

Today it rained most of the day so the kids each invited a friend over to play.  Tomorrow is the last day of summer fun.  We have teacher orientation and the PTA has ask that we bring cookies to go with lunch.  Each of my kids made a different cookie with their friends.  We made almond, peanut butter with herseys, energy bars, and chocolate bar cookies.

zoo day

After the zoo we went geocaching for a couple hours.  My friend Trina need 6 caches to get to 500.  We finally got #500 for her.

 

We decided to go to the zoo before school started.  We woke up this morning to pouring down rain.  Our zoo day had already been rained out once and Sage had been really sick the other time, so we decide to go ahead and go today.  We took off to meet our friend Trina up there.  It was still pouring when we got there.  After walking through the gift shop we took off through the park.  It was still drizzling. The animals were so active, we had a great time and there was no one in the park.

Animals we saw in Colorado

This is an Abert squirrel, we saw at the Air Force Academy.

While walking around Sprague Lake we saw a mommy duck trying to keep up with her 6 babies.  It was funny listening to all the noise they were making.

 

You might not see it, but there is a big horn sheep on the rock on the left side of the lake.

Two different colorful birds, we saw of the many birds in Colorado.

     

This is a video of more humming birds at a bed and breakfast.  It was amazing how many humming birds there were in the area.

                                                   

This is the beautiful humming bird feeder my aunt had.  The humming birds would land and drink from it.  We missed the bear the humming bird feeder attracted.
     
  

By the time John pulled over and I grabbed my camera the moose was in the woods.  You can kinda see its tail.

   

Male elk, they have big antlers.   

At Alluvial Falls we saw a few deer.

  Here is a picture of Clay playing with a chipmunk.  They are so cute.  We do not have chipmunk in FL.

Elk were everywhere.  We saw them walking down the street.  They were in the yard next to the townhouse.  In the picture here are 3 mommy and 3 babies playing by a stream.  When we were driving through RMNP we saw fields of them.