Squishy Soil

Alright, I've had enough rain. Please make it stop! Everything is so wet; the ground is squishy when you walk on it, the mulch is saturated and the plants are showing signs of too much water. But the grass is growing like crazy and it looks great!

If you don't believe me that we've had this much rain, check out this picture from my window well in the basement. I was getting our camping stuff out and just happened to notice this little guy just sitting there.



Here is his "vessel" for when I rescued him and took him outside and set him free tonight.



While I was releasing the crawfish, I happened upon this toad just sitting there with not a care in the world.



So anyway, all this rain has us thinking our camping and biking trip won't be too much fun on the camping side of the story. But we'll see; you never know until you actually get there. You have to have a positive attitude or nothing will turn out positive.

We got a phone call from the second online company that we ordered our bike rack from and they said they were mailing it today and that we'd have it on Friday. So I told them to cancel the order and I made a few more phone calls and found a bike shop in Barrington that had pretty much everything we wanted. The only thing that was different was one of the bike carriers was different than what I wanted but it seems nicer than what I wanted anyway so I think I'm happy. We'll know for sure once we get everything on the roof and try it out. I put the crossbars on today before we went out tonight and I noticed while we were driving that it did have some wind noise. They didn't want to sell me the air deflector that goes in front. They said to try it first; but I'm thinking I want it because that sound is annoying and we don't even have the bike carriers or the bikes up there yet.

Today was pretty good overall; we had to deal with the whole bike rack thing but otherwise things went well. Grace slept in again today and then her Aunt called this morning to see if Grace could come to a dance class she was having today at 6pm in the Lake Villa studio. I said that normally we would be in gymnastics on Wednesdays from 4-6pm so it wouldn't work, but today was fine. She said she wasn't sure how many students she'd have in the class this week and that would be great if Grace could come so we went. Then after that we all had dinner and went up to gymnastics to register for that which starts next week.

So Julie got to see Grace do dance today and she should be able to see Grace do gymnastics at least some times since she'll be working hard until 6pm each Wednesday. As long as Julie can avoid enough traffic to make it to Antioch before the class is over; traffic is horrible.

But Fairfield Road is open again. Grace and I went that way today to get to Barrington. They've finished redoing that road and the overpass is almost done for Gilmer Road. Also on Bonner Rd in Wauconda (at Fairfield) they've put in a stoplight. That's been needed for a while but not as badly as at an intersection near our house at Rte 120 and Alleghany Road. That is a deadly intersection if you ask me, but nobody has seemed to care until Grayslake built this sports complex just south of there off of Alleghany Road. Now all of a sudden we need this intersection improved to provide for the increase in traffic that will be going that way once the sports complex is finished. That's a silly reason considering the intersection is wholly inadequate.

Anyone else have GPS in their car? It's so fun to go down new roads that aren't on your map software yet because it looks like you're off-roading. I always say to Grace - look we're not on a road! She thinks it's the funniest thing. A few days ago we went down Fairway Drive in Vernon Hills which goes all the way through to Rte 45 now. That was an "off-road" excursion. Then today we went down the new Cedar Lake Rd in Round Lake and again we were "off-roading." Funny. I guess silly nonsensical things amuse me.

I started getting the tent and other camping equipment out today in preparation for our trip. With the bikes on top of the Escape I'm thinking we'll have plenty of room for all of this stuff in there, but who knows. When we took the Freestyle camping it was pretty loaded and it had more storage room than my new Escape does. I might do a dry run tomorrow just to see how much room all this stuff is going to fill up in there.

Oh today was our milk delivery and when I was changing my order last night so they wouldn't bring stuff we don't need this week I noticed they had hot dogs that had no preservatives, no fillers, no nitrates, etc. I'm thinking WOW, whats left? That's what hot dogs are all about, but I ordered them and figured we'd try them out just to see how they are. Anything with less fillers and useless "stuff" that we don't need is bound to be better, right?

I was reading through some of the installation instructions for our battery backup sump pump system and it's recommending that I purchase a deep-cycle marine battery for the system. But I had read online that marine batteries aren't good for this so I'll have to do more investigating I suppose.

I've got to go as I have to get some sleep.