Super Sunday Smilefest #3

Welcome to another Super Sunday Smilefest!  The rules are simple:

1.  Follow me in some way.
2.  Write a post that tells about what  made you smile this week.
3.  Share your post (just one per week) in the linky at the bottom.
4.  Go visit a few other people and enjoy their sharefest too!

Link  up at the bottom of the post.

Here we go!

So, we got a little visit from Hurricane Arthur.  I was really concerned that the wind and rain were going to destroy my flowers and gardens which have just started to look really good.

We got a lot of wind and some rain, but everything seems to be ok!  My pin wheels blew off the fence in the garden, but otherwise, things look pretty good.

And the gardens love a good soaking from real rain.  There's always a noticeable difference after it rains, compared to just the drip irrigation watering.

Always a smile for superb growth in the garden!

It was time for a new gas grill and I've spent months trying to decide what I want to do.  I had some gift cars to Sears from my credit card points, so I finally made the big leap this week.

I expected that I'd just get it in a box and k-ster would have to put it together, because that's what it said online.  To my great surprise, when I got there, the only thing they had were preassembled grills!  K-ster was pretty happy not to have to put it together and I was glad not to have to wait.

Smiles all around!

Because my car looked like this, it took some serious rearranging in the parking lot to make it fit, though!

And speaking of saddles.  After a years long search for a saddle that works for both me and for bony Jackson, I've found the magic fit!  I found this saddle on ebay at the beginning of June and because it was identical to one that someone has at the barn, and which the saddle fitter liked on Jackson, I bit the bullet and took the risk of buying it on ebay.

The planets were aligned from the moment I searched for it because it wasn't very expensive, it happened to be at a barn about 45 minutes from my sister a-ster's house and I was going to visit her like 2 days after the auction ended.  When I said I could pick it up, the girl refunded my shipping charge.

I tossed it into a suitcase and brought it home on the plane and rode in a few times before the saddle fitter came.  It seemed to fit well and Jackson wasn't acting like it was torture, so that was a good sign.

Getting this saddle fitter to come is like trying to find a needle in a haystack- completely impossible, but by some stroke of luck, he was in town on Monday and I was available to go check it out with him.  There's a correction pad that I have that allows shims to be added to the front or back to raise the saddle if it needs to be.  He fiddled with it a little bit and pronounced it a great fit and off we went.

Since I only use it on Jackson right now, and I'm the only one using it, it's made things one step simpler in getting him ready.  It's not the most comfortable thing for me yet, but it's not agony.  It's a feeling that I'm pretty sure I will get used to very quickly.

And it puts me in a better position than the saddle I was using, and that puts a smile on everyone's face.  It's like I can finally get out of my own way!

I will never comprehend potatoes.  You put one in the ground and somehow lots of others come from it.  This year, I have some accidental and some deliberate potatoes.  The reds are deliberate and yes, they were really that red. 

I have a wheelbarrow in the greenhouse where I've been growing potatoes for years.  The part that mystifies me is that I think I pull them out in the late fall and then in the spring, up pop some more green plants and low and behold, there are potatoes!

I pulled these out to make a potato salad and they were fantastic.  The plants are going completely crazy, I expect a lot more.  The part I never understand is what happens if I pull out the big potato that the plant actually grew out of?  How will I know?

And I read something about waiting until the plant dies back before harvesting but I paid no attention to that carefully removed these and then pushed the soil back up.

Smiles all around for potato salad from my own ground!!

Now link up your own smiles!