Great to be home again...

Hey all! Our family had a WONDERFUL time at the beach. My brother Austin and his friends Eric and Trey enjoyed fishing and skim-boarding and wake-boarding and playing video games. My mother and I cooked huge meals for them, but they stayed hungry! (You'd never imagine how much three teenage boys can eat until you live with them for a week.) I absolutely LOVED crabbing, and overall I think I caught three crabs. :) Not exactly a success, but it was really fun anyways. (Hey, we only spent a total of maybe 3 or 4 hours crabbing all week.) I also caught a pretty big catfish.
My mother and I spent most of our time together beachcombing. We looked all week for sandollars, and FINALLY both found two on the day before we left! My favorite shells are definitely scallops. They come in SO many colors and varieties, and most look so antique! We also went two hours to Panama City to watch Night at the Museum 2 on a rainy day. We all enjoyed it, and had a wonderful time playing road trip games coming and going.
We had a bonfire on the beach, and Ausin and Trey buried Eric in the sand! It was pretty hilarious. Also, since my dad has been vacationing at this beach his whole life, we got to spend some time with his mother's dear old friend. My father's mother (my grandmother) died when he was in colledge, so I never met her, but I had a wonderful time listening to her best friend Mrs. Dorthy talk with my parents. She also is an avid gardener, and when she heard that I was planning on getting some muscadine vines, she gave me a little muscadine plant in a pot!! I was sooo excited! I still need to decide where to plant it. Anyways, here are some pictures of all this!

Here are some pictures of the guys being silly while crabbing at the beach. (The one in blue is my brother Austin.)


Here's my favorite picture of me. (I think I had just caught a crab!)



And here's the lucky crabs we caught. (Lucky because we never caught enough to keep!)



And here is Eric buried in the sand right next to the bonfire. (No, they wern't trying to catch his hair on fire, he laid there himself to look at the stars, and they just started covering him with sand!)



My beautiful MUSCADINE!



The Old Soda Fountain and ice cream place!


Beautiful, yet random shot of the town.


Lovely tree in front of a yellow house.



The estuary! (A marsh where saltwater and fresh water come together.)



The GRILL! (We eat here every summer.) (Except for this one! :( I was sad that we didn't get to go this year.)



The RAW BAR!! (We ALWAYS ALWAYS eat here. It is a MUST. I even have two of their T-shirts. They sell mostly beer and raw fishy things like oysters. BLEH. How gross. But their regular food is good, and it's a tradition. It is also so close to our beach house we could walk!) (But of course, we are at the beach, and it is hot, and we are on vacation from exercising... so we drive.) :P

(Sorry, it's a terrible picture. I took it from inside a moving car...) :~)

At the BEACH!

Hey all, I'm gone for the week down to our family's favorite vacation spot. It's my brother's senior trip (he just graduated last week), and we're going down to Indian Pass, FL with some of his good friends. My mom and I are the only girls, so we'll be doing a lot of cooking, crafts, and probably some shopping while we're there. It's not a commercial beach, so there aren't as many malls or restaurants, but that's what we love! Going on-shore fishing and crabbing, hunting for ghost crabs with flashlights at night, doing board games, watching movies together, and making huge, scrumptious summer meals are all the wonderful things we love doing down there. We're going to have a great time!

P.S. Pray that we have good weather! (It's supposed to rain several days that we are down there!!) I want it to be as fun and memorable as possible, since it is one of the last vacation's that we will have with my big brother!!

Done for the summer!

Finally! I'm finished with my piano and fiddle recitals and school!! Today (Thursday) I finished my Algebra, and I think that I brought my grade from a B+ up to an A! (It was the only subject that I didn't have an A in.) I had my fiddle recital on Sunday afternoon, and piano Monday evening. I'm sooo happy to say I did great in both! I wasn't nervous for my fiddle recital, as both my songs were so much fun, and I knew them both really well. The first was Star of the County Down, (my favorite "slow" song, as played in the chorus recital) and Stinky's Blues (which is a silly name, but truly, it is my favorite "fast" song).

The piano recital however, I was really nervous about. I was playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G Minor. I played it for my GMTA competition and did really well, but had stopped practicing it afterwards. This last month I had been scurrying to get it ready. Thankfully, all the hard work paid off! I had plenty of fingerslips, but the song is pretty fast, and very loud, so they weren't very noticable. At one spot in the middle I completely blanked, but I just kept pressing keys for maybe a measure, until I regained my place. My mum didn't notice, so I'm hoping no one else did! So I am finally, totally, completely, DONE!

Hiya Yall

Hi everyone!
As some of you know, I'm Madison's cousin.
(from MyMusingsandThoughts)
This isn't my first try blogging, but hopefully I'll be able to keep a blog going this time! I won't be posting much this week, or next, as I'm not finished with school yet. Once I finish, I'm free to blog!
My blog is named Greenhorn Homestead because I'm just getting my feet wet with homesteading. I don't even have any chickens yet!! :) (I view chickens as the true initiation into homesteading.) Hopefully we will get some soon. I am a Christian homeschooler, and I do have a wonderful garden growing that I'm enjoying immensely, and today I've just begun my first batch of jam ever! (I didn't have enough blackberries to finish it... I just cooked and strained what I had, and I'm waiting for some more to ripen.) I hope to learn quilting from a neighbor of mine soon, and I already knit, crochet (sort of), and dabble with embroidery and sewing every now and then! Most importantly however, is, I want to learn!! I can't WAIT for summer so I can start learning! :)