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Even though the calendar may say it’s spring, the snowstorm 2 days ago reminded us that we still live in Minnesota. We had around 8 inches of wet, heavy snow at our house. Well, it can’t last forever and I’m looking forward to warmer weather.

We bought a new/used car a couple weeks ago. Holly is trying to learn how to drive a manual transmission in our 2006 Mazda 5. It’s sort of a mini-minivan. I’ll get some pictures of it soon. It’s kinda cool looking. It’s a rear-tire eater, though. To make it handle kinda sporty, Mazda put too much negative camber in the rear, which wears out the inside edge of the rear tires. I bought some adjustable arms to install to straighten it out since the camber is not adjustable from the factory.

Thinking about making LED lights and USB charger for vehicles

I have been selling some of the video camera remotes lately.

Thinking about building a guitar tube amp.

Thinking about yard work coming up.

I’ve been feeling better all around. The cold is mostly gone – just a cough is lingering on. My back is back to normal. We’ve had a couple days of warmish weather to give some hope of spring coming.

I was at Menards a couple days ago and saw some cool ideas for a grill/kitchen/entertaining area outside, built out of brick. There was space for a grill, countertops, seats, lighting and even a TV. These pictures aren’t really what I saw at Menards, but somewhat similar. There was a book with outdoor grill/patio ideas that had some really nice pictures.

Today is a bad day to be around me. Yes, it’s already been 2 years since the daughters God gave us were taken away. I still hope to wake up and realize it was just a bad dream. I will refrain from blaming anyone, which doesn’t do any good now.

All I can do now is pray for Jessica and Erika, which I do daily, bringing my prayer requests and petitions to God. I have confidence that He hears me.

We had an uninvited guest living in our garage for a week or so. Brenda got a big bag of sunflower seeds for her bird feeders and  the raccoon got into the bag a little bit, but since just a little corner of the bag was chewed up, it looked like it was just mice. The next day, a much bigger part of the bag was chewed up. I knew mice couldn’t have done that, but wasn’t sure what kind of animal it was yet. I put the sunflower seeds in some plastic buckets, but one of them didn’t have a cover so I stacked them up and put that one at the top. The next day it was tipped over and I knew it had to be a pretty large animal to do that.

I had to go to work the night of January 1st and that’s when I saw the raccoon. It heard me opening the door to the garage and it started climbing some metal shelving and went up into the ceiling of the garage. I went to Fleet Farm to pick up a trap. The guy working in the sporting goods department used to trap when he was younger and I got a short education on trapping, and picked up a live trap (Brenda didn’t want me to kill the raccoon). On the way home, I stopped at Cub Food and picked up a can of sardines at the recommendation of the guy at Fleet Farm.

The trap was set up on the garage floor as I was at work and the first night nothing happened. Nothing happened on the second day. The third day, I was looking at the trap and thought a little trail of food going into the trap might help, so I put some carmel corn leading up to the door of the trap. That did the trick. Before I went to work Tuesday night, we had a raccoon. Not wanting him too close to the house when I let him go, I went a few miles out into the country by a small lake and let him go. Hopefully there was only one raccoon, but I think setting the trap up on a permanent basis may not be a bad idea.