Playin' Around

At the risk of looking like a couple of overgrown children, I thought I would share a random afternoon around here.  After he came home from work, Christos and I hopped on his 4-wheeler.  Let it be said that my favorite place to be in all the world is on the back of that 4-wheeler.  We have spent many an afternoon riding for hours and hours, getting lost, exploring, finding new places, and just enjoying each other, the wind in our hair, the fresh air, and the sunshine.   This particular day, however, we went down to our little piece of land just to play around and to find some potatoes that his mom wanted us to take home.  And I had my camera.

And, guess who we saw?  Looking out over the back of our land, you can see a piece of land that belongs to Spiros, Christos's older brother.  He and his wife, Katerina, were over there picking potatoes.  Do you see her behind the fence?  Spiros was already on his way over for a chat.  And see those horses between us?

The little one was only a week old. 

After our chat, we played around...a lot.  I will spare you all of our glamor shots, but here are some of my favorites. 

Christos wanted to take pictures in the corn for my dad.  My dad also grows corn.  Well, we were playing amongst the stalks, and, you know that really soft, silky hair that grows at the top of corn?

 When I took the next picture, Christos looked like this....

Is it just me, or does he look an awful lot like his good friend "little man with glasses and a moostache"????

This is NOT to say, in any way, that my husband is a pansy.  In fact, he is the manliest of all men....

Isn't he dreamy?   It is possible that somebody on that tree called him a pansy, and this is the action that was taken.  You would have to be nuts to call him that.  In fact, you may actually have to be walnuts....

Anyway, after much playtime, we never had seen those potatoes that we were supposed to take home.  We looked ALL around.  And then, I saw this

Christos was certain that was just a pile of weeds and grass, but I saw a few tell-tale potatoes that had rolled out and given the whole lot away.  He lifted up the grass and lo and behold!!!!

There were about 4 crates of potatoes under all that grass.  Despite the fact that the land is fully fenced and gated, his mom had camouflaged the pile of potatoes.  How adorable is she? 

So, all of our missions accomplished, we headed home.  On the way back, I made Christos pull over to pick a handfull of these.

He was kicking and screaming that they "stunk" and "were weeds" and "what did I want with those things?"  But, remember this ole trick?

The ole food coloring in the water gag?  This is quite a treat around here, as food coloring is fairly hard to come by.  I finally found some at the British supermarket they have here, and I was eager to use it.  It was right next to my favorite find thus far....liquid vanilla flavoring.  Here, in all the normal supermarkets you can only get vanilla contained in little capsules in powdered form or in its natural state...little sticks that you peel down the outer skin from and scrape the flavoring off.  Because opening the capsules is hard and hurts my fingers, and the whole process entailed in the natural stuff is absolutely not worth the few drops you need for a normal baking day, finding the easy, pourable, liquid vanilla was not at all unlike unearthing a valuable treasure.

Anyway, back to my magic....  A day or two later, Christos was pretty impressed with my alteration of nature.  Of course, he had never seen such a thing before and was impressed.

I rather liked they way they looked as well.  Although, the passing days did nothing to smooth that bump in the back of the cloth on my cupboard.....but that can be (and obviously has been) overlooked. 

So, that was our little afternoon adventure of the day.  More on the way in a couple of days.  Hope y'all are all having a happy summer so far and are managing this heat okay!!!!