The Missouri Nugents!

Hey, Family! This is the Nuge clan in MO. We haven't posted here before because we just got the internet at our house. We went 7 1/2 months without internet at home. We still don't have any television, and we are going to keep it that way for a while at least. It's amazing how much we get done when we can't pick up the remote for entertainment! We're going to try and post a video in a few minutes, so you'll probably see one of those boxes with an "x" in it below our post. It might take us a few tries.

We're staying pretty busy these days. For instance, tomorrow night Luke has a baseball game, Mika has to skip that for Boy Scouts (he's the Weblos leader!), and Jessie has to go to her sister's high school graduation. Whew! We're having to enlist our friend Chad to take Luke to his game. Luke only has a day and a half left of third grade. He's pretty excited for summertime. This will be the first year he hasn't had to go to summer school to save on daycare. (Doesn't he have the meanest mom? hee-hee...) We finished a big landscaping project this weekend. Both of our lawn mowers are broken down, so we had to borrow Jessie's dad's push mower to cut the front lawn and part of the back. We don't have it in us to do the entire yard that way. We planted gladiolas, lillies, dahlias, and strawberries in our front flowerbed. We planted caladiums in our other flowerbed and lined it with landscape lighting. And Mika had to have his very own hydrangea bush right in the middle of the two! (He's probably named it, too.) We also planted a new oak tree out front by the road to replace the other one the last owners murdered. We're like real live grown ups!

The dogs and goats are doing pretty well. We had to line our picket fence with an electric fence along the top because Esmerelda and Isadora learned to jump it. It's over 4 feet high! Then, Trio started digging under the fence and helping the goats escape. Most of the time all four of them would just go to a pond behind our neighbor's field, but more than once the police/neighbors/animal control have had to call Mika to come get them off of someone's porch. Yeah, animal control has us on speed dial and we don't even live inside the city limits. Fortunately, the neighbors seem to like them... for now. Mika ran another strand of electric fencing along the bottom of the picket fence so Trio won't dig. Trio had some social retardation from being in a shelter for so long, so he now grazes with the goats. He has some identity issues. Sorella is a good dog. She jumps the fence every morning to walk Luke to the bus and then comes home and jumps back into the back yard again. Jokomo, our parakeet, still hates us with a passion so fierce we're almost afraid to feed him/her. It looks like Flashlight found his match! With the onset of spring came the onset of field mice... in our cabinets! Mika actually found a family of them in a BRAND NEW bag of rice! We were mad. Rice is expensive here. Anyhow, Luke and Mika are trying to talk Jessie into getting a cat. She's terrified of those little monsters. (They are, after all, miniature tigers.) Fortunately for the boys, her hatred for rodents trumps her fear of felines. We may have a cat in the next few weeks. It will be living outside. Way outside.

Okay, back to the humans. We're planning on going camping soon. Poor, poor Mika has only been fishing a few times this year. Our weather has been insane. It's tornado season, so we have to be really careful. We just had two towns practically wiped off the map the Saturday before last. There's a lot of mourning going on right now. Mika and his coworkers are having to rebuild a few of their billboards. One of the tower transmitters at Jessie's work got hit by the tornado and is still spread all over a field. The Director of Homeland Security came here to check out the damage. FEMA is helping the people who lost their homes. Jessie's mom drove right behind the tornado and saw some of the worst destruction she's ever seen. Boats were in trees, concrete slabs were left bare where houses used to be, and cars were thrown across fields. It's truly one of the saddest things to happen here in the last five years. (Five years ago, our town and another town were all-but-destroyed by tornadoes.) Mika has yet to figure out why we live here!

Well, we don't want to shoot our family news wad all at once, so we'll just get to the video...

That was our semi-psychotic goats. We're not sure if they were playing or doing some bizarre goat-hierarchy ritual. Cute, though, eh?

We'll be back to post another video of Mika here in a bit. (Mika has to get himself ready for the camera first.)

WE LOVE YOU ALL!