How I Spent My Summer

    It's been quite a while since I put up a blog.  For whatever reason, the summer just got away from me.  Me?!  And I'm semi-retired???!!!  So let me explain in pictures what I've been up to.

    Of course, being a grandpa, I spend some time with the grandchildren.  In fact, on one of my days when I play the retiree, I become grandpa's day care for Grant, the eldest grandchild in the picture above.  No way could I handle both Grant and his baby brother Luke, shown with his prison green stripes in the picture above.  More on Grant later.

     I'm also trying to get a handle on my garden.  Some vegetables, such as the pumpkin below, thrived while others literally never got off the ground.  And I neglected to label some of my vegetable plants so now I'm not sure if they're a pea or a pepper.

    And this pumpkin is growing in the middle of my backyard.  Pumpkins need their space, lots of it I found out too late.  So it was either having a nice, neat manicured lawn back of our house or two pumpkins, both like the one pictured.  Since I love all things Halloween, I picked the pumpkins.

     Grandson Grant really gets a kick out of my pumpkins and I hope he got a treat out of watching them grow.  He has his favorite routines at bumpa's day care:  check out the 'lawnmower house', turn my bike over so he can spin the wheels with cardboard pieces making motorcycle noises, play at the 'castle'--an elaborate play structure at the local park, and engage in long coloring sessions of Oso the bear.

    He loves all things Oso, a character on the Disney Junior channel.  Just when I thought I was on easy street with 20 episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse recorded for playback, he decided he didn't like Mickey any more.  Oso was his new fav.  So I have 20 episodes of Special Agent Oso recorded and spend almost as much time drawing him on whiteboard as we do watching him on TV.  Grant draws him too.  See if you can tell which Osos are mine and which are his in the above picture.  "Draw Oso," he tells me.  If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that . . .
 

    Wendy and I did manage a couple Michigan trips too.  I mentioned one in my previous blog.  Our second trip took us to the Upper Peninsula where I took the picture below.

     What happened was that while we were driving on a busy, tricky road in the U.P. a bug landed on our map of Michigan which was open on Wendy's lap next to me.  Wendy hates bugs and panicked, quickly opening her passenger side window and pushing the map to the open window to get rid of the bug.  Both bug and map got sucked out the window, and it was too dangerous to try to retrieve it on this stretch of highway.

     As far as the picture above, here's the caption I put on it in Facebook:

When your map gets sucked out the car window, you rely on a free tourist map. When you rely on a free tourist map, you go down unfamiliar roads. When you go down unfamiliar roads, you end up in Bigfoot country. Don't let your map get sucked out the window.