New home exterior project started

For all of you wondering how Bragg Family South handled Favre and the Vikings losing in overtime last weekend, I can tell you this--we'd like to have seen Favre do well, but we didn't lose an ounce of sleep over the Vikings not making the Super Bowl... The picture above was actually taken prior to the Packer's playoff loss, but it was just too cute not to include... In addition to our kids Stephen and Beth (middle of the picture), a couple of their little friends (Elisabeth and Gabe) got into the act...

Our big news since the last posting was the beginning of a new home improvement project--this one focusing on the exterior of our house. With our recent purchase of a pop-up camper and the bringing of my Dodge Charger to Arkansas, we don't really have adequate protected parking for these vehicles (or my truck). So, we're starting an expansion of our carport, as well as moving a fence and getting some gravel brought in to firm up a portion of our yard. But, the first step we needed to take was to get the big pines in our back yard pruned up, which happened last Friday when I was at that archeological dig in Little Rock. Can you spot the arborist in the tree below?


We wanted to either get a couple of these pines removed, or have them heavily pruned, so they pose less of a risk to our house and utility lines, and they drop fewer pine needles and cones on our house and yard. Removing the two pines would have been WAY too expensive, so we paid to have them pruned up. Hope says they did a good job (I wasn't there to watch), but it still seemed a bit on the pricey side to me... We also had them take out the tops of a Bradford pear growing in our front yard:

We could have easily done this ourselves, but these Bradford pears have a LOT of large thorns, making disposing of the branches very painful. We had this crew remove them, and we'll get the base pulled out of the ground soon (I plan to burn the wood in our fireplace next winter). We needed to remove this tree because when we expand the carport, we're going to widen the driveway. This will allow us to park more vehicles, and should greater reduce the chance that someone will drive off of our concrete driveway into the ditch along the road. The gravel pad will be where we park our boat and camper (this will at least keep them out of our often-soggy yard). My truck and Charger will be parked on the concrete, and hopefully within a year we'll have a good carport built over the top of them.

Below, a picture taken tonight of Beth and Stephen (Kenny's at CCD):

Here's Beth and her friend Hannah the other night at Kenny's Pinewood Derby race:

This was Kenny's second Pinewood Derby, and the first that Hope ran as pack leader. Below are most of the cars that were being raced Monday evening:

Kenny wanted a squad car design this year (his was the black & white "prowler" being pointed to at the top). For those of you who've never been to a Pinewood Derby, these are race cars carved out of blocks of wood and rolled down an inclined track:

The woman walking towards the camera in red is our good friend Mandy Kuttenkuler (Stephen's godmother). Below, Kenny (the Cub Scout closest to the camera) watches as Hope and a helper get ready to launch his car:

Here's the proud mom with her excited lil' racer:

Yes, that's a microphone she's holding--she was announcing the races as she ran the show. The picture below shows Kenny with a grimace--he didn't get a prize for racing, but he was more sick of me taking pictures than anything at this point:

We printed out little pictures of Kenny, and taped them into the police car's windows. Kenny's already planning next year's car, which I think he will have a much bigger role in the building of... Maybe it will go faster then!