Happy Decoration/Memorial Day!

In many parts of the South, Memorial Day used to be known as Decoration Day, a day when communities gather to clean and decorate their local cemeteries. Listen to this National Public Radio story about it at http://www.npr.org/2011/05/28/136742729/decoration-day-the-southern-way-to-honor-the-dead?ft=1&f=1003

It's also a great day to honor and recognize the millions of men and women who have served our country in the military for their bravery and commitment to the United States of America! Hope you've had a great Memorial Day!

Follow the red brick road

This is another simple pleasures post. We've added a few more landscaping features to make the front of our rental house look a little nicer. Apprarently, a previous tenant had a rock garden in front, so it's been difficult to plant any shrubs. We bought five red bricks and some pebble stones for less than $10 and set them up.

The bricks don't form a road but a small path in front of our house. In the fall, it will lead to our scarecrow decorations. I think Dorothy would be proud! :)

I'm the proud owner of a ceiling fan

Yes, it's the small pleasures in life that make us happy, and a ceiling fan is one of those this week. As we've moved farther north, we've realized ceiling fans aren't as common as they are in Florida. I remember my parents installing ceiling fans in our bedrooms, family room and play room during the 1980s, and all the apartments we lived in during college in Florida had ceiling fans in each room. When we moved to Tennessee, there was a ceiling fan in the master bedroom and one in the living room, but in Kentucky, there is only one ceiling fan in our living room.

When we moved last fall, the weather was already turning cooler, but now that it's warming up again, we miss having a ceiling fan in the master bedroom, so we bought one, and electricians installed it Monday afternoon. It's a great addition, and we're hoping to save money on our electric bill by using it this summer.

I know my parents and many people throughout the South grew up without ceiling fans and air conditioners, but I am very thankful for these inventions. Ironically, we have some friends who just moved to upstate New York, and their house doesn't have an air conditioner, just a heater. As I've said before, I think Kentucky is as far "north" as we want to live.

This weather is for the birds

A family of geese seem to be the only ones walking in the rain, but I'm enjoying the cooler temps.

It has been a wet and rainy spring in Kentucky, and this week, it has felt more like winter. Lexington had a high of 49 degrees Tuesday, which was the lowest high temperature for that date ever recorded, breaking the previous "low" high of 58. It's only been in the 40s and 50s for highs this week, and it's been cloudy and raining every day. I love it! :) It will warm up into the 60s and 70s by the weekend.

We waited until after my birthday to plant flowers outside since there were frost and freeze warnings during the first week in May. We potted a plant in my sunflower pot that broke during the storm (David glued it back together), and also put a planter on our back deck railing.

We tried to plant two small shrubs in the front, but there are tons of small rocks when we dig down. I don't know what happened, but someone must have created a rock garden at some point.

I finally figured out a way to keep my small flag from flying away by putting a binder clip on the end of it. Several flags have flown off, but I've been able to recover all of them except an adorable Easter flag I had.

Here is a short video of the planter we have on the back deck and our bird feeders.

I hope some of the rain makes its way south to Florida, where I know they really need it. Also, I am not complaining about the cool and rainy weather. I prefer it over humidity and temperatures in the upper 90s, the weather we'll probably experience when we visit Florida again!

Family celebrations

There are several days to celebrate in May for our family. There is Mother's Day, and then my birthday (May 9), which is always close to Mother's Day. Even though I wasn't with my family for these occasions, we still celebrate by sending cards and flowers!

Due to a mix-up at a local florist, I received two birthday arrangements. The first one was beautiful, but it wasn't the birthday-themed arrangement with sunflowers (my favorite) my parents had picked out, so the florist arranged to pick up this first arrangement and exchange it for the birthday one.  They both are beautiful! Thanks Mom and Dad!

The birthday flowers have sunflowers, yellow roses and lilies and smaller green and yellow flowers. The only down side is that Cash, our cat, loves to eat any type of flower, and since he is a jumper, he has no problem launching on to the mantle above the fireplace to indulge. At night, the flowers "go to bed" in the spare bedroom, so they won't be a midnight snack for him.

The birthday flowers lasted for almost two weeks. Here is a photo of them more than a week after I received them.

David bought some balloons for my birthday, and Cash enjoyed trying to eat the ribbons. I told him that I can't have anything nice for my birthday because he tries to eat my gifts! :) Here is a short video I shot of him playing with the balloons, Sammie trying to take a nap, and the flowers on the mantle.

Below are the flowers we sent to our mothers for Mother's Day. These are the ones I sent to my mom, a variety of colors and flowers in a reusable green and white bag.

My brother and his wife also celebrated their third wedding anniversary May 17. Happy anniversary Jason and Kristen! Here is a photo of them and my nephew taken on Easter. What a happy family! :)

Happy Easter! Happy Spring! (A letter from Sammie the cat)

April 2011—Happy Easter! Happy Spring!

This tree bloomed outside the front of our house. When we moved here in September, it had green leaves and then lost the leaves during the winter, so it was a surprise to see the dark pink and lavender leaves.

It’s Sammie Ann Beutke DeVito writing. I know how much you all love and adore me, and my clever writing skills, so I thought I’d give you a quick update about how we’re doing in the Bluegrass. 

I went to the vet's office for my annual check-up, and this picture was in our exam room. Too cute! It reminds us of Dolly. I think she would have liked Kentucky.

Easter is so late this year, but it’s finally starting to feel like spring up here in Kentucky. We even had a dusting of snow at the beginning of April. 

We had a little snow just as the trees were starting to bloom. It has snowed here each month since November, so six months out of the year!

It has rained and rained and rained this month. One night, the winds were so bad that the chairs on the back deck blew across the deck and smashed into my mom’s flowerpot, and it broke into several pieces. The wind also destroyed the umbrella on the porch table.

After the storm, my parents surveyed the damage. In addition to the broken pot and umbrella, the grill cover blew off and flew into the neighbor's yard.

My dad used super glue to fix the flower pot.

Cash and I slept through the whole storm. We were dreaming about the two bird feeders outside that attract many types of birds. We could sit for hours watching them and thinking about how tasty they would be for Easter dinner.

My parents both finish teaching for the spring semester at Eastern Kentucky University on April 29, the day of the Royal Wedding in England. (By the way, I was invited to the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate, but I really dislike those long flights across the Atlantic. I hear airplane food is horrible, and now they charge you for a blanket and a pillow, and you don’t even get to keep it!)

My mom hopes to teach at EKU again in the fall. EKU’s mascot is a colonel like Colonel Sanders who started Kentucky Friend Chicken, but the mascot is an angrier version of him. Maybe this colonel is upset that he doesn’t know KFC’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.

My dad starts dental school at the University of Kentucky (Go Cats!) on August 1, and he is quite excited. Before he starts this crazy, I mean awesome, adventure, my parents are planning to leave us here all alone so they can visit Florida this summer. My mom thinks we need a cat sitter, but I’m trying to convince her that we’ll be fine on our own. She said if we could learn to use the toilet and flush, we wouldn’t need a sitter. I don’t know how easy it will be to learn that, especially for Cash.

We’d love for you to visit us if you haven’t already. There are lots of exciting things to do. People love horses up here. I haven’t ridden one yet, but Cash and I might go to the Kentucky Derby in May. It’s actually in Louisville, not Lexington. Don’t you think I’d look so cute in one of those big hats the ladies wear at the Derby?

We hope you have a wonderful Easter! I really hope the Easter Bunny brings us a baby bunny and chick, but I don’t think that will happen. My parents look forward to seeing some Florida folks in June. They can’t wait to simmer in the heat and humidity! :)

Love,

Sammie, Cash, David and Allyson DeVito

Say Cheese!

I grew up around cameras. My dad purchases a new camera every few years, and I remember several film cameras that he used when I was younger. My Aunt Vada also takes tons of photos of everything, and at one point, she told me she kept all the negatives (I wonder if my students know the meaning of this word in this context) in one box in her house, so if there was a fire, she'd grabbed that box and not the dozens (probably closer to a hundred) photos albums. My grandpa had a Polaroid camera that we loved to take photos with and wait a few minutes for our images to appear. (One time, Papa took some Polaroid shots of the TV set, while the music group, The New Kids on the Block, appeared on the American Music Awards on TV, so I could see them. He was afraid I wasn't watching the live show at my house. Little did he know that I was recording it on a thing called a VCR!)

I also have memories of my dad setting up a giant projector and screen in our family room, so we could watch "silent" films of me as a baby in the late 1970s. When my younger brother was born in 1985, my dad bought our first video camera. It was the bulky kind that required an assistant, usually me, to hold part of it in a camera bag while he filmed. We lugged it to Disney, Dollywood, beach trips and family gatherings. Part of the camera was actually the VCR, and it never failed that we couldn't find a blank tape to record something on when we needed it. I'm fairly certain the final episode of "Dallas" on TV erased one of my birthday parties.

I even found a camera in a cow pasture once. It was a bright yellow underwater camera in a bright yellow bag, and I discovered it one day while helping my day feed the cows in the field in back of our house. There was a roll of film in the bag that we developed, but it was hard to tell who had taken the photos since they were mainly of buildings in a large city. I'm not sure if it fell out of a plane or someone walking through our property dropped it. It's still a mystery, but I used the camera to take many underwater photos at the beach and in my grandparent's pool. 

I remember dropping off rolls of film and waiting for several days or even a week before we could pick up our prints, and we would always get two sets of prints. Then, a radical new way of processing prints within an hour happened. Now, I cannot remember the last time I actually had printed photos made. I guess it was for our wedding and honeymoon in 2004.

During college, I was a telecommunication major (fancy way of saying broadcast journalism), and we used very heavy and expensive cameras and tripods for reporting the news. One of my friends accidentally backed over a tripod while driving, and it cost several thousand dollars to replace it. Recently, I purchased a Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera for $120 from Amazon.com. It has a built-in USB arm that plugs into a computer, so it's easy to download good quality video and edit it in a matter of minutes.

Everything is much less expensive and easier to use now, and I am very fortunate that my family is camera and computer literate because my parents are keeping my nephew each week, and they send photos and video of him to me via email. My dad has a digital camera now that also records video, and it fits into his pocket. I guess he doesn't need an assistant anymore.

I am so thankful for these advancements since I am able to see the little guy smiling, laughing and growing into an adorable little man. I also can see how much my parents are enjoying their first grandchild. I can't imagine waiting weeks at a time for my parents to take photos, have them developed, and then mail them to me.

Here are a few of my recent favorites. I know I am biased, but I think he's probably the most adorable baby ever! :)

Here are a couple of videos. 

My brother and his boy....

A heat wave in Kentucky...highs in the 50s this week

The last time I didn't wear socks in the house was mid-November. Since Thanksgiving, we've had cold temperatures and snow on the ground each week. For more than two months, highs have generally been in the 30s and lows in the 20s or even colder. We've even had lows in the single digits near zero and wind chills below zero. It's 50 degrees outside as I write this post, a temperature we haven't felt in a while.

According to Lexington's LEX 18 chief meteorologist Bill Meck (read his weather blog at http://www.lex18.com/bills-weather-blog), Lexington has had 27.4 inches of snow, which is the 9th highest on record. This is almost three times as much snow as an average winter. The average high since December 1 has been 35 degrees, and there have been 53 days when the temperature did not rise about 40 degrees. We've had 32 days when we didn't get above freezing.

I started taking photos of the ice and snow in early December.

This amount of snow on our back deck was enough to get me excited. Little did I realize what winter had in store.

This first dusting happened while I was decorating for Christmas, which was nice. Within a few days, here is what the back deck looked like.

Remember the sunflower...how about snow flower.

We had a white Christmas. It started snowing Christmas Eve and continued through the morning.

Cash went outside in some of the first snow.

 During a period of melting, giant icicles hung from the roof.

I really like to see the snow fall at night. It makes everything so bright.

Spring is technically more than 30 days away, but we're having a warming trend for now. David and I agree this is as far north as we'd like to move at this point. Last Wednesday wasn't a fun driving day, but I still think I prefer this much cold and snow for a couple of months compared to many many months of Florida's heat and humidity.

There is a small amount of snow on the back porch now, but it will all be melted by tomorrow. Happy Valentine's Day!

Exploring Kentucky

The nice thing about family visiting is we also get a chance to explore more of Kentucky. It's been a month since David's family visited us for the New Year, so I've been a bit lax in posting some of things we enjoyed during their visit.

One day, we visited the Acres of Land Winery in Richmond and ate lunch. It was delicious, and they have a nice selection of wines and scrumptious entrees on the menu.

We traveled to Berea that afternoon to do some shopping at the many arts and crafts stores. Allison found a rather large chair to sit in, and the owner of the furniture store will make one for your house for $5000.

Kentucky is known for its Bourbon--an American whiskey. There are six historic distilleries in our area, but most were closed on New Year's Eve. However, Wild Turkey was open, so we ventured to Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and took a tour. It was interesting to learn how Bourbon is made.

 We had a great tour guide who explained the entire process and answered questions.

Wild Turkey has built a new distillery, but we toured the old one since tours aren't happening yet in the new one.

The Bourbon is stored in barrels until it's ready.

Sometimes, the barrels leak.

Our tour guide let us taste some from the leaking barrel. It was rather strong.

When we returned to the visitor's center, we had a more formal tasting of the different kinds of Wild Turkey Bourbon. It's definitely an acquired taste.

In addition to seeing the distillery, it was a nice drive through the country parts of Central Kentucky.