I decided to rake up some pine straw in the front yard this morning.  We have enough flower beds and trees to stack it around that it’s not a pain to try to find a place for it and we didn’t have to stack it up somewhere to burn later.  When I went up on the roof to knock off all the pine straw that had fallen up there, Amanda actually took over raking the yard while Milly played around.  I was surprised, because I thought that other than planting flowers she’s allergic to doing any outside work.

We followed that up by spending a good bit of the rest of the morning cleaning up.  It’s just one of those things that if we’re in the mood to do it, we keep on doing it.

My sister, Erin, and her friend Britt arrived with some Chick-Fil-A for us around 2:00.  They came down last night and stayed at a friend’s house.  We all went to the beach for a bit then went to Flaming Amy’s for dinner.

Back home, we waited for my youngest sister to get here with her family.  Amanda’s brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Jenn, got here before Andra and her crew.  They were going to play Funglish with us, though we didn’t get around to it for a while.

Jackson wanted to play some video games, but got bored of Little Big Planet.  The other PlayStation 3 games I have are a bit more complex, so Amanda had the idea of hooking up the Nintendo 64 that Adam gave me a while back.  I put that in the office and he played a few of those games for a while.

After a couple rounds of Funglish, Erin, Britt, Andra and Josh headed out to Brian’s (where Erin and Britt were staying) for a bonfire or some such.  Erin invited me and Amanda, but not only was there nobody to watch the kids (who were all in bed at that point anyway), but we were pretty tired too.

Zach Dotsey