Family project - Clean Grandma's Garage

Raquel decided that it was time to clean grandma's garage. I'm going to do a little backtracking here. At the beginning of the year I told Raquel and David and Vanessa that we were putting new pews in one of our churches and they were getting rid of the old pews. They both jumped at the chance to own their very own Church Pew. So I had three of them delivered to my house. They have been in my garage ever since. The pews were very 50ish and not quaint and churchy as we had hoped and no one was very excited about them. My garage is not very big and they took up a lot of space. Also over the past few years that I have been here I have collected some junk that just needed to be gone. Russ brought over this very big, very very very big farm truck. I figured what I had would maybe take up about a quarter of the truck. We practically filled it!!! There was a lot of stuff that had gotten ruined in this old rickity garage that leaks badly so we just threw it all away. It's nice to have it all gone and now I can work on organizing the garage. Sometime.... David and Vanessa came down to help. David is like a machine. Once you get him working, he is like an energizer bunny on steroids. He sweats and he works. Anthony and Jeremy also worked very hard. They found one of David's youthful pastimes, his paint ball guns and equipment. They were so excited and they spent a good hour checking it all out. Their Mom said NO because evidently they have some little air guns and when they get mad, they cannot contain themselves and they shoot each other. Besides, they might shoot the house and paint it in an unsightly way so she said that they had to wait till they were much older and could go to the paint ball park themselves. So I guess I will be storing the paint ball guns for another couple of years. David and Vanessa slept in the Blue Room with clouds and sometime in the middle of the night David felt something odd next to him in the bed. He picked it up with his hand and it started to wiggle. He yelled and jumped out of bed and hit the light. Vanessa was out of bed pretty quick too and when they looked in the bed they found that they had been sleeping with a lizard. A pretty big one too. David took it outside and they went back to sleep. You never know what will turn up in the blue room. It's quite a fascinating place. One thing we found in the garage was our old flag from when my Dad passed away. It was what they give to all the families of veterans of war. He served during WWII. The flag had been attacked by termites or something and was in very bad shape so we decided to burn it and have a little ceremony. We gathered around and David put the flag in a metal drum and squirted gas on it (he also got gas on the ground around it). We set the flag on fire and prepared to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but the fire spread on the ground as well and then caught the garage door on fire so quick you couldn't even think. Everyone started screaming and running every which way. Raquel grabbed one hose and Anthony the other one and they got the fire on the garage door out, but there was so much gas on the ground that it wouldn't be put out and it spread to the gas can and the gas can was on fire. After a lot of crazy yelling and screaming David got the gas can into the metal drum and let it burn itself out. After a while he poured dirt into the drum and eventually things calmed down. I hope that wasn't desecrating the flag. So it was a very exciting event that I won't soon forget and I have the blackened garage door to remind me every day. I'm very grateful for the quick action of Raquel and Anthony. Thanks to them I still have a garage. Well that's it for this week. Have a happy life. Love Diane/Mom/Grandma