We went to the Amish Country (Sugarcreek, Ohio area) this past weekend with a group from my sister-in-law's church. We had a great time. Awesome food as always, and Kim picked up a few things that she wanetd to get for decorating the house. We saw quite a few Amish folk out and about doing business and such while we were there. They have such an interesting lifestyle. I think it would be quite interesting to learn more about theur lifestyle. I would like to try it sometime, but definitely could never do that full-time now having known all the luxuries we enjoy. But they seem quite content, and they definitely know how to enjoy the simple things. Hannah really liked seeing all the horses all over the place. She loves horses, so it was like a dream come true for her to be around so many. She got to pet one of the ones pulling an Amish buggy. I thought that was really nice of hte gentleman to answer such a simple request from a little girl. I took a few photos while we were there, and I have posted those in the photo albums area.

One final note: the Kaboom game is finally done, and I will be posting it to the site here really soon. Be on the lookout.

I spent most of the morning today making repairs to our gutters. The previous owners obviously no idea how to install gutters. As a result, we have been fighting various problems with our roof on our porch, as well as gutters that basically did nothing but watch the water run past them. So, we have been working on getting all of those items fixed little by little.

The first problem we had was with the roof on our porch. Since shortly after moving in to our house about 7 years ago, we have been working to resolve a leak in our porch roof. After a lot of tar, and various other attempts, we bought metal roofing, and I installed that this summer. We thought that would solve the problem. Nope, the leak returned. We knew now though that the leak was not coming from the roof on the porch though. During a heavy rain storm, my wife, her sister, and their dad found that the problem was from water coming off the main house and running behind the new metal roof, so with some aluminum, he created a flashing to divert the water away. Problem solved, right? Well, it was for a while. But it returned. We finally solved the problem though by adjusting where he had placed the flashing. He was on the right track but had not fully stopped it. It's stopped now though.

Along with fixing that, the front gutter on the house didn't do it's job eirher. When we bought the house, we stipulated that we have a new roof installed. We got that, but the roofers obviously didn't understand that you really need to have a little bit of an overhang on the shingles for the gutter to work. Add to that, the fact the previous owner didn't understand that the gutter really needs to be near the roof for it to work, and that the gutter needs to have a flashing to make it work correctly. So, while we were finally fixing the porch roof problem, I took some more aluminum and created a nice flashing that extended the flashing above the gutter down into it. No more leakes there.

But hte gutter problems are still not gone completely. Fun, isn't it? Yeah, that's the way I saw it too. Ad yes I was being sarcastic. So, now that hte gutter on the front of the house doesn't leak, and hte porch doesn't leak, a new problem arose. See, I didn't mention that the gutter that was leaking didn't run to a down spout. Oh no. It just run open onto the porch. Remember, we replaced the normal shingle roof with a metal one. Well, water flows very fast down the channels on a shingle roof, and doesn't dissipate like it does on a shingle roof. So, now we had water from almost half of the entire roof flowing down into the gutter and onto a single channel of the metal roofing, so we ended up with a real nice water fall over hte front porch. Well, when it would shoot over like that, it filled the front gutter so fast that it overlfowed, and would flow down off the gutter and backwards onto the porch, and our porch was once again soaked, but not from a leak. So I had two more problems to fix: 1) the overlfowing gutter, and 2) the drastic amount of water being sent to the porch. Well, I solved those problems today. First, I installed a new downspout so that the water that ran into the gutter on the front of the house would not end up on the porch. And then, I intalled some curved guttering and runoff boards under the gutter off the front porch. See, the previous owner thought that it was ok to run the gutter straight down and not away from the house, but directly onto a flat rock. So when we got a heavy rain it couldnt drain from the gutter fast enough, and overflowed it over hte top and onto the porch.

So, most of my gutter problems are solved. I still have a new gutter I need to install on the back porch. It doesn't even have one, and we get a lot of water on the back porch as a result, and had to replace it once, and I am going to have to do some repairs to it as well. Lesson learned. Gutters are very important to have on a house, and even more important to have them installed correctly.

Just got back from Kings Island once again. This was our third trip there this summer, and should be our last for the year. Of course, you just never can tell. We had a great time as usual. The weather was perfect. The most odd thing I had ever seen there though was that the kiddie-land was crowded and all the big rides were pretty close to walk-on rides, or had very short lines. Hannah rode the Vortex for the first time today. She really liked it. She rode Top Gun for hte first time today. She thought the ride was too short (So do I!). Kim and I rode Flight of Fear. That's the first time we have been able to ride that together in a long time. Kim's sister Brenda came with us, and she watched the kids while Kim and I rode. That was a huge help. Austin rode the pirate ship for the first time today. He really liked it. He rode the Shake,Ratte, and Roll too. It's like the Scrambler, but you go up in the air. He really likes the "air-time" type rides. I posted some new photos as well, so check those out too.