Already the end of September, nearly.

Oldest son is going to be celebrating his birthday next week.  We won't get to see him, unfortunately, since he has moved away, but we'll have a video phone chat.  Technology helps a tiny bit in dealing with loved ones moving away, but it's hard to get everything in in half an hour a week.  :-/   Here in Kentucky, things are moving right along.  We've got half the kitchen floor done and maybe will get the other half done this weekend?  I don't know.  The young adults have a game tonight that they'll be attending, at 5 and they haven't started yet (it's noon-ish), so I don't know how much they will be able to get done.  We've gotten used to the construction zone and weaving our way in and around the tons of furniture in the living room.

Kitchen construction mess with gallery wall (still unfinished) in the background.   Fun times.  

My front yard buddies.  They are there every day when I go to work.

Just a pretty end of summer day - the view from our mailbox.

We've changed our board game nights to weekly, the girl is joining yet another D&D campaign that one of her friends is starting which makes her have 2 on Monday, board games on Tuesday, 1 (D&D) on Thursday, 1 on Friday and an occasional 1 on Saturday.   Her brother has one less that he is in since he has college classes on Monday.  A bit much maybe, but as you know, socialization WAS an issue with our homeschooling, so I am glad they are getting out there and socializing now.  They need it.

With board games, we had 1 family who does a lot of sports and their attendance is very sporadic, one family who moved away, one kid who drives herself who can't afford gas money to come all the time and so we've been kind of struggling to get an 8th player for a while.  We've had 7 regulars which is kind of an odd number :-)  and finally, we convinced a young lady from church to start coming and the first week she was there, we picked up some extra kids from the game store and the sports kids came back and we ended up with 12 players!  Who knows what will happen this week, but I think moving it to every week has helped.  Nobody has to contact me and ask if it's this week or not.  They can just show up.

My dog is going to miss me when I am at work all the time.  

I'm getting ready to go into a season of working 5 days a week for 6 to 8 weeks, which I am not looking forward to because it's too much for me, but I can (barely) handle it for a few weeks.  I admit it, I'm a wimp.  I'd love to have a work at home position, kind of, but I do think getting out there, walking a lot and meeting and talking to people has been good for me.  I know I need the money.  We've had some expected and unexpected expenses this month with the remodeling, finding out our fridge had been leaking and having to buy a new fridge and having to pay a large portion of our son's tuition since he dropped a class - my savings is looking pretty low.  I've still got plans to go to Ikea and get a new entertainment center and then after that, I'll be ready to share some before and after (or before and middle because we aren't done) pictures of the kitchen and living room.

All of this is going on in our lives and it is good, but I have a friend who had open heart surgery earlier this week and has not been able to come off to the ventilator and may have a blood clot in his lung, so there's kind of been a heaviness hanging over us this week as we wait to hear about him.  Praying it's good news.   If you pray, pray for him, please.