Kelly's Driving, Heather moved, and our lawn mower sucks!

I took Kelly to get his Learner's Permit on Tuesday!

It freaks me out to think that 'My Little Kelly' is DRIVING! And, of course, he drove home from the Drivers License Division. Then we went for more practice on some of the dirt roads around our house. He actually does very well (for a beginner). Starting out from stop signs is the roughest part, but that's normal. Our vehicles don't have automatic transmissions. Around here, you learn to drive with a CLUTCH and a stick shift. After the rural roads, we headed down the Highway to Ogden, and into city traffic. He even handled that with a great sense of humor.

After some sort of an episode that I don't fully understand (or need to), Heather decided to move out of the apartment with her 'friends' and has moved in with Grandpa Fred in Brigham City. Obviously, I'm QUITE HAPPY with that decision. She's seems to be healthy and I think she's doing fine now. Last I talked to her, she is STILL looking for a job (It's a tough market out there). Grandpa is a great guy and I think this will be a good arrangement.

Our lawn mower (the BIG one that you ride on) has not been running right for a few months. We've tried tearing it down and cleaning the carb, replacing ALL of the filters, new spark plugs, fresh clean oil, new gas, the whole kit-and-caboodle. STILL running wrong. I've called a couple of repair shops, which all seem to be run by pig-headed jerks, and found that they are back-logged anywhere from 1 week to 3 weeks before they can even diagnose the issue, then they'll order parts and go from there. No thanks. First, I have a really hard time PAYING other people to fix our stuff. Second, if you choose to treat me like crap when I call your business, you can bet that someone ELSE will be my choice if it comes down to it. Craig & I are both very mechanically savvy, and we can usually fix anything that shows up around here. So, our next step is to try a total carb rebuild (instead of just cleaning) and if that still doesn't fix it, THEN we'll cave-in and get it fixed by someone else. For now, we have been able to borrow our neighbors' mowers to keep our small jungle under control. (We're lucky enough to have nice neighbors on both sides of our place.)

On Monday (Memorial Day), we're going to have a few friends over for a BBQ at our place. I think that will be fun. I'm going to try doing baby-back ribs... my first attempt at ribs. We'll see how it goes.