it's a good thing punkins love hot weather. Things are growing like crazy here at the patch. Here are a couple of goosebumps, a unique, warty novelty variety, that is a fun one. Pretty soon I will be able to do the personalized pumpkins that are very popular. Let me know if you would like to have one done for a person, a wedding, or a business. I can personalize on a variety of punkins but my favorite little pie punkin works best. They are bigger than a softball and smaller than a volleyball.

I love June. I love June for various reasons. First of all it's my birthday month. So that's very cool. Second, I like June because the weather is delightful. For lots of years we would sit at softball games and the weather was usually just gorgeous, not too windy and not very many bugs. And that's always a good thing. This morning while I was hoeing I noticed that the vines are really starting to grow. It's one thing when they pop out of the ground and just have a couple leaves it's another when they really start to vine. That means in a week or two we will see little flowers. It also smells really good out in the patch right now. I'm not sure if it's because I have a pasture right next-door or what but it smells just fresh and clean.

Thanks again to everybody that has stopped out at the patch to buy their fireworks! We really appreciate the support.

I see it's been a little while. I've been busy and we open today! Stop out sometime and check out the new store and all the awesome things inside! I'm so excited and relieved! Wow! Ok, I gotta get to work.

Well it's been a long week. Where to start. We finally got the application for the fireworks license so we've been working on that the last couple days. It is a lot of work. There are many regulations and qualifications that need to be checked. I feel confident that will eventually get approved but it's just taking a long time. Because I've been working on this for the last month I've been neglecting the patch a little bit so I'll just hoed a few rows.

I recently started listening to podcasts. I have a few favorites that I always listen to you and one a couple of them are Girls talk ag and The Farmer and the City Girl. It keeps me entertained and gives me something to think about.
I also like to listen to The Dan Patrick Show which is a sports show.
So if you are bored come out and help me hoe. ( In my 18 years of having punkins, no one has ever taken me up on it 😜)

Nice front door, eh? The store is coming together, just finish work left. Got the water line in, electric stuff hooked up, all Sheetrock done. I have to seal the floor yet but will wait a bit till taping is done. Anxious to start laying out the store.

On the fireworks front, still waiting on the fire marshal😭. Everyone in the state is in the same boat but I'm hoping it works out soon.

We made a YouTube video with about 40 of our firework selections on it. That is up on our Facebook page.

And the requisite kitty pic. Meet Dobby.

Well, I'm back in the Hawkeye state and glad of it. We had a fun time in Georgia with the club College World Series. Claire's team was the lowest rated team (number 16) but they did very well and ended up in the top 12. The weather was delightful, a bit humid but still very nice. The girls played three games on Friday in pool play. The first game was Ohio State and lost 6-1. We didn't play very well. The second game we played Clemson University. They have been to the national series quite a few times and most people expected them to do very well. We ended up beating them 14-3 in six innings. It was awesome. The last game of the day was against Grand Canyon University from Phoenix, Arizona. They've only had club softball for two years and they've already made it to the College World Series. Their coach played with Jenny Finch, the great softball pitcher from the Olympics. We we lost 15 to 14 in eight innings after being down 13 to 1. The girls showed a lot of resilience in that come back but unfortunately we lost.

Day 2. After pool play Iowa State was seeded number 12 and our first game was against Florida State which we lost. The second game we played Pitt who was seeded number five after the first day and we beat them 9 to 7. The last game we played was against Virginia Tech another higher ranked team and we didn't play very well and we lost 14 to 4. Thus the end of our tournament run. And within a minute of getting our game finished there was a thunderstorm warning with lots of lightning and thunder.
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​That left a Sunday for a fun day. We went down to the Riverwalk and explored down there. We walked across the bridge to Alabama just to say that we've been there. Then we decided to go to Atlanta to a Braves game. They were playing the Washington Nationals and it was a gorgeous day for a ball game and the Nationals won 3 to 2.

Great movie about the perils of travel. Well, Claire and I lived it yesterday. Most people don't know that Claire plays on the ISU Club softball team. The club team is somewhere between intermurals and the division one softball team. So Claire's been playing this spring and they've done quite well. They made it to the College World Series of the club softball division and so we headed to Georgia yesterday.
The flight was at 5:40 AM out of Minneapolis so we decided to leave around midnight because we have to get checked in and everything didn't quite know how long it was going to take. The trip there went OK, it was a little bit rainy and I don't like to drive in rain and I don't like to drive at night but we got there OK. We decided to travel with another player and her parents from Spirit Lake and met them at the gate. There are quite a few other planes leaving from Southwest and everybody else leaves except us. Our plane had mechanical issues.

They delayed the plane of three or four times and finally just canceled the flight. So people are obviously are completely thrilled about that and now what do we do? The problem with Southwest flying out of Minneapolis is that they don't reciprocate with any of the other airlines and we can't just all hop on another flight and it won't be a big deal. No. They have only about three agents working on trying to help this plane load of people to get rerouted. As we stood in line I tweeted to Southwest Airlines about this and they responded very quickly. My first thought was that Southwest airlines hired some college graduate to sit in a cubicle and watch Twitter all day. Well they got lots of tweets yesterday. They responded back quite quickly every single time because my friend also was tweeting. Of course there's always the one guy that is really rude and vocal and made the attendant (male) cry. Fortunately our guy Aaron SAVED the day.

Aaron rocked the man bun and he got us on a flight with Delta from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Of course it has to be in the opposite terminal so that was another half hour trip to get from one side of the airport to the other. And another four hour wait to get on that flight. We finally got to Atlanta at about 6:30pm. Then we had to get a rental car and again escalators and walking sidewalks and above the ground train tram thing, half hour later we have a car. Then we have to get to Columbus. If you've never been to Georgia and I haven't - first time -my first impression is that they are crazy drivers. There were five lanes of traffic and some cars used every single one of them to try to get to their destination. I think we were passed by no less than 30 cars going at least 90 miles an hour. I was praying the whole entire way. So we made it and will see how the rest of the week goes. Stay tuned.