Hello again, everyone.

I received an e-mail today from Yahoo! that they are closing this 360 platform that holds this blog. The official end date is mid-July. I have been thinking about moving away from here for a while, so now is the perfect time to make the switch! What I would like to do is direct everyone to our Shutterfly share site. As you know, there I can post a little "journal entry" about what we have been doing, and of course all the pictures are there to browse through. Here is the link again:

http://ksburton.shutterfly.com

I will send out an e-mail to the whole family since some haven't been checking this site anyway. That way you can all keep up to date on our thrilling lives (ha).

Thanks for reading along with me here. Let me know if you have any questions, or trouble with the link.

Sorry for the belated post, this past week just flew by! Over Memorial Day weekend, we traveled to Iowa to see some family. As you can see, we took Zoe and Samson with us- they were stellar travelers as usual and enjoyed meeting everyone this weekend.

On Saturday, we went with Grandma and Grandpa Love down to Carlisle and Palmyra. We met Auntie, Uncle Don, and Aunt Poochie for lunch, then we took Auntie with us to see the cemeteries. Grandma had flowers to place at everyone's headstones. We also took a driving tour of Carlisle and Palmyra and the surrounding region. It was a great refresher of family history! For example, Grandpa told us he was baptized in Avon Lake in September when he was young, and it was very cold. And we went past all the houses and/or buildings where family members used to live. I thought the old store in Palmyra was pretty neat- the fact that it is still standing today says something! After that, we stopped in Ankeny for dinner and got to see Chrissy and Adam and their families.

On Sunday, Keith and I hosted everyone at the Ames townhouse for an Indy 500 Race Party. We ate, we watched racing, we fed fish in the ponds, the kids ran around the park- all in all it was a good day! A good weekend, actually. Now we will just have to find time to come back again!

Here is a link to our share site on Shutterfly where you can see more pictures:

http://ksburton.shutterfly.com

We are really looking forward to our next family gathering... Ocean City, Maryland, with the Finagin/Burns/Love clans!

This spring, we purchased a cute new hanging basket for our front porch, and filled it with Dianthus and Dusty Miller. The other day I noticed there was stuff sticking out of the basket, I didn't look real close at first, I thought it was a few random weed seeds that had sprouted. Then I saw it was some long thin twigs. No surprise there, we've had storms and all sorts of things have been blowing about. I thought to myself, "Self, it is time to clean out that basket, let's do it this weekend." So imagine my surprise this morning when I came downstairs, looked out the window, and saw there was a bird in the basket! Not just any bird, mind you, but a pidgeon/dove-type bird. Great. It looked like she (?) was nesting there. Surely there aren't any eggs in there, I thought? When the bird was gone, I took the basket down and tried to clean it up. No eggs, just matted down Dianthus plants. I took the dead blooms off and tried to prop up the squashed plants. I thought that by fiddling around with the basket, the bird would "smell" that someone had been there and would not come back. No luck. The bird is back tonight and sitting pretty in the basket.

I don't want a bird in my hanging basket, and definitely not a pidgeon! But I'm also not a meanie and if all of a sudden there gets to be a bird family in there, well, I'm not sure what we are going to do about that. Bummer, Keith and I were looking forward to our new basket this season...