Happy Birthday Betty Bunny

Today marks a big day for our family. Whether we call you Cami, Camille, or Mom, you mean so much to each of us. You are a kind voice and a prayer when we really need it, a friend to talk about anything with, a great example, and a loving and caring mom, mother-in-law and grandmother. For me, you've also been the first voice I've heard for soo many birthday's, singing me your silly "Birthday Bunny" song. Well today you are the Birthday Bunny, and Betty, we hope you have a great one. We love you!

Our camper returns

We were so happy to get to pick Madison up from Texas A&M Swim Camp this past Friday. She had a blast and we missed her terribly. We were fortunate to be joined by our nephew, Jason (aka J-Dawg) who was a real help and surprised his cousin Madi at camp.

Madi's dorm/resort and transportation for the week.

YAY! Taking her home

A thoughtful present for the Beans who was waiting patiently for her friend all week.

Madison says that she really learned a lot, made new friends and had a great time but, she is glad to be back home...for now! She is slim, tanned and happy so, good deal, for her, all around. We'll have to see if we ever let her leave again. It was tough on us and we didn't learn much, make any new friends, get a tan or have a great time, either.

Madison even brought back a DVD that has film of each of her swim sessions . The DVD provides a critical break-down by her councilors of things that she can work on to improve her strokes. She also had a great time of jumping off of the various Olympic diving platforms at A&M's rec center. Not bad for someone who was scared to jump off the starting blocks at the Swim Belton Pool where she has her normal practices, before she left. She's pretty extreme, folks!

The best part of this experience - she's an Aggie fan now...

We also took advantage of being in College Station to visit my cousin Bill, his wife, Johnna, and their two daughters, Joy and Anna Kate in their new home. They gave us permission to post some pictures of their beautiful family.

Thanks so much, Bill and Johnna for letting us impose on you guys for the afternoon. We really enjoyed the chance to catch up and get to see the girls.

We thought that Madi and Jason were very good with Joy and Anna Kate and we enjoyed watching them be the big kids for a change.

Excuses, excuses...

So it's been awhile and we wanted to share some of the latest events before it starts to look like we've given up on this blog thing completely.

First, our excuse for not posting lately. Last week our house was apparently struck by lighting. Initially, I thought it must have been nearby and knocked out our power but, Olivia informed me that it actually seemed like it hit right above our bathroom window. As I walked through the darkened kitchen, I smelled burning and soon rushed brilliantly into the raging storm to see if the roof was on fire (sing the approprate song about the roof being on fire if you must). The roof was not on fire but man was it really wet out! I found a couple of tripped breakers and flipped them back thinking, alright, crisis avoided. Not so fast, my friends. Long story made a little shorter, no more desktop computer in the office, no more power supply on the laptop that I'm currently wasting my life on, no more DVD player in our bedroom, no more Nintendo Wii (poor Madi), and NO MORE FLAT SCREEN LCD TV!!!! That hurts my heart. The strike also knocked out our internet and satellite tv, as well. Fortunately, there was no damage to the house as the lighting seems to have hit the satellite dish rather than the actual roof. So, it was really quiet around here for a few days. We were not able to get a picture of the lightning hitting the house to post here but, that would probably have resulted in at least one of our deaths and then we really wouldn't have posted again for a while.

Garden Update: Last week we found that our Cubumber plants had been invaded by squash vine borers. Olivia did get a few pictures, horribly and shockingly gross pictures of these bloated sacks of protoplasm (Ren and Stimpy). *By the way, for those of you keeping track at home, all future quotes will be referenced for future generations. Cause, I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way (Whitney Houston, before Bobby and crack).

We'll just share one of these pictures, which I'm sure is enough to gross you out!

Squash Vine Borers (SVBs) are an especially devastating pest that feed internally on well, squash vines. They also apparently really like our zucchini and are known to infest other vining melons, gourds, and vegetables in general. They start out with black and red beetles (adult form) laying small reddish rust-colored eggs near the base of the plants. These eggs hatch and the new larvae drop down into the soil. At this point, if you haven't already halted this process somehow, you are in trouble. The larvae burrow into the stems and vine of the plant (which are hollow) and remain there, devouring it from the inside until it dies and/or gets enough to eat and turns into an adult. I think this is where they pupate, but I'm not sure about the whole life cycle anymore. Maybe Madi will learn about that next year and I can blog smarter. So that's where we are. Now you're asking, what can they do? Apparently, bubkiss. We should've planted radish seeds with our squash and zucchini to repel the SVBs. Nasturtiums also may have helped. Dusting the soil with Diatomeceous Earth or D.E. may have kept the larvae from re-emerging from the ground and burrowing into the plants. Dusting the plants with D.E. or spraying with Orange Oil or Neem Oil may have repelled the adults, as well. But now, we have to make the best of what we have left which happens to still be way more zucchini than we are eating. Live and learn, faithful readers, live and learn.

So, we wrapped this fantastically busy week with a frantic trip to the lake with the Johnston family and packed Madi up for her first summer camp experience. She is, as we speak (see its like I'm talking to you), attending an "Ice Cream Social" at the Texas A&M Summer Swim Camp 2009. She was super-excited about going but, Olivia and I had a tough time letting her go. Madison made it abundantly clear that we were needed only to carry her stuff to her dorm room and then should leave so that she could begin being an independent and really cool swim camper. Olivia and I spent an hour and a half weeping uncontrollably on our drive back to Belton. The camp seems like it will be a good time and we hope very much that she will have fun and be safe. We may be driving to College Station nightly for the remainder of the week...just in case.

The lake was fun and we had a really nice time with my family. I have some really nice girls and they gave me a great Father's Day.

Olivia spent as much time as possible huddled over small objects with a large camera. The results of this huddling are the following:

Well, I've been ridiculously busy at work lately but, maybe I can still get in a few minutes of watching our replacement tv. Hey, it's almost the same size as this laptop screen. For now, You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we're not back by dawn... call the president (Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China).

Friends with Benefits...

A Mantis hiding in our lime tree

"What you lookin' at Willis?"

Lady in Red

This Lady is checking out the

Cilantro

Funky Cold Cilantro

Tomato Smackin' Dog Lovin' Graduation

We wanted to post a quick update (like you haven't been waiting with baited breath). Really, this is just a way to give Olivia an excuse to post a few pictures of the first tomatoes in our little victory garden out back. This garden was started a little early this spring and has come along with sporadic TLC and a surprising amount of waiting around for a handful of produce. Edgy Gardening Tip:

I was starting to think we might have to give up on tomatoes after watching the plants get bigger and better looking for the past 2 and 1/2 months. Then, I read in an online forum on organic gardening (plan on hearing about this type of thing a lot) about the potential for literally beating your tomato plants into production. Yes, that's right, some gardeners believe that if you smack your tomatoes around a bit, they go into a state of distress and quickly bloom to try to reproduce before conditions become so harsh that it is too late. This soon resulted in my smacking our four tomato plants around like they owed me rent! I believe they may have quickly realized that I wasn't quite right and thought that if they didn't start giving up the good stuff quick like, I was crazy enough to get medieval on their (edited for content)! They might have just needed a little more time and a timely watering, though. You be the judge... Though our tomato's are just getting started, we have picked a few squash and zucchini already. We have also picked one green bell pepper so far.

Now, one of these is from our local grocery store and the other is from our garden. One is large and lovely, the other withered and repugnant. Can you guess which we are responsible for? Whatever, it tasted like victory. Tomatoes weren't the major developments around the Johnston house this week. Madison officially graduation from 5th grade on Wednesday, June 3rd. Wow! She received seven awards, one of which was for "Best Attitude". Now we have to put up with all that extra ego this summer. She's BIG TIME now.

Last day of fifth grade!!

Seriously though, we are so proud of her and can't believe she's going to be going to middle school next year. Belton Middle School, Tigers...Holla!!! Sorry, my wife tells me that I should throttle back on the exclamation points but, she doesn't realize that sometimes you simply must REPRESENT!!!

At this point, as I warned you earlier, please avert your gaze/gouge out your eyeballs quickly...its the first annual Bella Love Fest! The following pictures were sent from our family to the good people at the Williamson County Humane Society (where we adopted Bella) to give them an update on Bella's first year in her "forever home". Enjoy!

You just threw up in your mouth a little bit, didn't you?

Grand Opening...

Welcome,

This is our family's first blog although this has been something that we've been planning diligently for months. That is just the way we do things around here. We like to go back and forth on things like a blog name until we are so sick of even thinking about it that we wonder why we ever wanted a blog in the first place. By the way, have you seen how clever some people's names for their blogs are? That's just too much pressure. Anyways, we decided to use a name that symbolizes the many wishes, dreams (simple though they may be) and procrastinations of our life.

I think we should take a few lines to introduce this family before we get too far. This blog is the brainchild of my beautiful and very motivated wife, Olivia aka, Livvy Fay, aka, Little Mommy Poopie-pants. I am her sidekick and reluctant writer-husband, Jack aka, John, aka, the Kid.

Our daughter, Madison, aka Madi, aka, Madi-Girl,

who is a crafty scrapbooker/Guitar Hero Rockstar will chime in from time to time.

The silent partners (at least as far as what you'll see written here) are our two idiot cats, Tex and Cassie,

and our goofy dog, Bella aka, Beans.

You'll see so many pictures of them on this blog that I feel obligated to give this disclaimer:

WARNING: If you don't really love sappy pictures of other peoples pets you should probably look away now. Seizures or at least irritable bowel syndrome may result. Enjoy!

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I am a real hoot. Or at least, some sort of a moron. My wife is a budding wiz at photography and we hope to be able to share some of her hobby with our friends here.

So, that's the crew here and now your probably wondering about the name for our blog. The creative and symbolic explanation for our name is that the idea of a purple door represents a small step in reaching our dreams of making a life of our own for this family, of making our mark on this life and this crazy world, and, it represents a forum for sharing those dreams with friends, family and millions of random internet strangers. Or, it might be that we just painted our front door a really cool purple shade and that we are not very clever. Surprisingly, it actually was the first and as of this past weekend, the second is also true.

Before

a work in progress~

For the most part here at The Purple Door though, we'll keep things fairly straightforward (Sorry, deep thinkers). Maybe Olivia's photos will dazzle you enough that you'll be willing to check back now and then to deal with whatever I've been told to write about as well. It might come across as somewhat pretentious to suggest that our weird interests are important enough to post for all to see but, this blog will also serve as our forum to post on what we like, dislike, and think is simply fantastic. Again, for Olivia this will mean pretty pics, some school and other life events. For Madison, there's really no telling...but prepare to be AMAZED!!! And from me, you'll probably have to put up with Organic Gardening, Notre Dame Football, and an unbelievable number of idiotic projects. Hopefully, digging holes in the yard to bury dog and cat feces won't keep me away from the keyboard too often but, you really never can tell.

That's probably more than enough for now. If this hasn't driven you screaming in sheer terror from you monitor, we'll see you back here next time. Thanks for stopping by.