Springtime seems to have really arrived to stay. We had the a threat of snow this past week, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Looking out my window just now I see the trees greening up and the lilacs are within a hair's breath of bursting into full bloom.

I'm thinking we're going to be spending some more time at the punch press today making sure we get done with the bed hardware punching. We do between four and five thousand pieces of hardware every month. Any hardware bearing the initials LAC and R&S have been personally handled by one or more of us (multiple times!). Paul's parents and we have the pieces cast at a local business. We then pick them up there, bring them home, and then run each and every piece through the punch press to give it holes for fastening onto bed posts and rails. We then fill the orders from furniture makers from several different states, arranging for FedEx trucks to come pick them up here at our place. Paul's dad does some locally deliveries as well.

Someone needs to give the outside basement walls a coat of sealer and then the backfilling can finally happen. This might also mean we'll be getting a yard back!!

It's been pretty much unanimously decided that we are discontinuing the front garden in favor of a front yard. We'll move the garden out to the patch in the field. I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea of yard and the children really do have their eye on it as a level place to play volleyball, but that place has been garden since Paul's mom was a little girl. In fact, the place where our house and theirs sits right now used to be apart of that same garden but they sacrificed the space way back then. We'll leave the small rhubarb patch at the upper end because Paul's grandmother planted them there waaaaay back when. Her old hollyhocks are there, too.

Logan and I may have a trip to the greenhouse today to get garden seeds. Blake was chisel plowing out in the patch yesterday.

I may also "help" Blake rearrange his many (MaNy!!) mechanical projects out by the shop building. He's a mad scientist type.....

~Colleen