Why I Oughta...

I warned you yesterday.  There's a few of these Lemax Christmas Village / Mantleburg posts in the hopper here.  First was the Draft Bros. Craft Brewing Supplies store .  Today is The Elf Workshop that features a few cute elves around the place.  Again, Mantleburg won't be annexing one of these, but if you had a Christmas Village scene, it seems like this would be a good addition. Below is the box at Menards - with this one listed for $10 more than the Home Brewing Supplies structure - at $49.99.

Another year, another display of Lemax Christmas Village buildings at Menards has arrived!  Here's the post from 2017 that heralded the return of the Christmas Village at the store .  And that means a whole series of posts are about to arrive here on the blog showing off some of the new buildings.  The first one, here, is the Draft Brothers Home Brewing Supplies store.  Very topical, eh?  Here's the product listing on the Lemax site  that provides the description including the fact that this structure was released this year.  Alas, Mantleburg is full of libertarians and there is a initiative on the ballot this fall to disband the local municipal government.   Which means, for now, the Mayor and Village Board are not in a position to make any sort of annexations or additions to Main Street.  This Draft Bros Home Brewing Supplies store is listed for $39.99 at Menards this year.

About a month ago, I posted a photo of what appeared to be 'new' growth on our struggling Chanticleer Pear Tree that we had planted out front of our house.  Here's that post that shows new green leaf growth emerging on the tree in early October .    The full history of this tree is long, despite that we've only been in our house a little bit over a year.  It starts with the first tree - a 3" caliper version of this tree - being planted before we moved in our new house in June of 2017.  That tree didn't survive the year and was ripped out and replaced earlier this year .  The new tree struggled, too.  But I worked at it.  I did some radial trenching and used a post hole digger to break down thru the clay layer to allow the tree to breath a bit.  I took a very similar route with the Bald Cypress we planted this Summer - you can see the details here .  And the tree managed to survive all Summer.  I stopped watering it all together and just monitored it for

A few weeks back, we piled into the Swagger Wagon and went to see my Illini take on Purdue for Homecoming.  We now have two nieces that are Freshman down in Champaign, so this was a family affair.  My sisters threw a great tailgate in Grange Grove and then we went into the Loyalty Lounge inside of Memorial Stadium to watch the game.  Well, I went in well before the game because I wanted to see warmups and all the pre-game what-have-yous.  We were lucky that the specialists for the Illini warmed up (for the most part) on the north end of the field, so our spots in the patio in the northwest corner tower of the stadium was a good view. Just about every game that we go to as a family, Nat and I disagree about the 'time to enter' the game.  I enjoy the pre-game festivities almost as much as the game.  I like to see the operation unfold, watch the support staff take action and watch the stadium come to life.  A little weird, yeah.  But, that's why I want to get into li

Just like I did last year, I'm going to try to track our firewood usage over this Winter in an effort to understand how we are using it and to help plan for next year.  Here's an example of a post I put up in February of this year showing the progress . As a reminder, we had two face cords delivered in mid-September.  One face cord of Cherry.  One of Birch .   And today, you can see that we've made quite a dent in the pile.  The photo above shows the wood pile that is outside that is about half-way down from the top.  And if you look back at the original photos, you'll note that there was a pile on the left that they stacked on the ground .  But, the inside racks are still intact - and not changed.  We've been burning fires almost everyday.  Or every night, I suppose.  We go through three pieces of wood most nights and the weather hasn't been too terribly cold at night.  I'm fearful that we'll blow through our two face cords before winter is ove

Back on Earth Day of this year, we planted a few trees including this Red Maple "Sun Valley" tree that is maybe 3/4" caliper.  Here's the photo of that tree when it went in - before it leafed out this Spring/Summer .  By June, it had leafed out and grew a bit - topping out at 96" tall in our tree inventory .  The top continued to grow up and now I am thinking it is taller than 96".  But it also is starting to show it's fall colors.  If you look closely at this photo above that I took a few weeks back, you'll see some reds/oranges starting to emerge on the leaves.  This Fall has been funny with leaves - as we didn't get a ton of colors (yet?), but plenty of leaves have fallen.  I'll keep an eye on this one and see if it shows off it's full fall spendor with a red/orange show.  More importantly, I'm thinking that this thing as established itself enough with some new branching that it has a good shot at surviving the winter and comin

My...how the mighty have fallen.  That list above is our sad tally sheet from last night.  It only has five marks before we went out trick-or-treating and ended up with 24 total.  Oh,  and a big drink stain on it.  Twenty Four.  And that's being VERY GENEROUS by counting all the little ones that live on our block who came over to our house with their parents for a little post trick-or-treating party.  The five were kids that rang the bell and I dropped candy into their bowls/bags.  Mostly middle school kids.  The 19 others were kids who did, indeed, take candy from our bowls, but also stuck around for a while. We then went out with the kids to hit up the neighborhood.  And we put out a bowl.  About 150 pieces of candy (based on the bag having 300 pieces... I poured in about half) in the bowl.  Set it out on our front porch.  And put our Nest camera pointing towards it.  You can see the little orange bowl just off our front door mat below: It didn't take long for kid