"I Hope They Call Me on a Mission"

 At church, our kids sing a song that goes, "I hope they call me on a mission! When I have grown a foot or two!"

It appears our oldest son has grown a foot or two (or maybe three. He is really tall.) He's planning to start a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a few months. And while we are sad he won't be with us, we are proud he has chosen to serve the Lord and others wherever he goes.

When missionaries leave, their local congregation usually hang a plaque with their photo on the wall of the church building. This week, we've been working on making our own version of those plaques, and we're pretty happy with how they turned out for our fictional Elder and Sister.

Soon we will be making one for our oldest. So if you see a really tall, really good-looking missionary named Elder Butler sometime in the future, please take really good care of him for us. We really appreciate it.

Here are a few good ways to support missionaries:

* Stay in contact! Missionaries love getting emails, cards, or letters.

* Be encouraging. Missions can be hard. Let your missionaries know you believe in them.

* Feed them. If you have missionaries in your area, be kind. Invite them over for dinner.

* Suggest service opportunities for them. Missionaries are always looking for ways to serve others.

* Find friends for them to teach. A missionary's main focus is teaching about Jesus Christ, and they are always looking for opportunities to do that.

* Donate to your congregation's missionary fund.

Have any more good ideas on how to support missionaries? Let us know in the comments.

10 Good Ways to Kill Your Plants

This week we thought we'd post about something we are real experts on. Killing plants.

There are two growing seasons in Houston and we have not been successful in raising a garden, (or sometimes even just grass) in either of them. Seriously, the people at Lowe's garden center hide the herbs behind their backs when they see us walking in.

So, in honor of the searing hot days between the two Houston growing seasons, we present to you our top ten ways to kill your plants.

10. Forget to water them. Plants need water. Who knew?

9. Over water them because you forgot to water them for so long. They don't like that.

8. Plant them in the wrong season. There are lots of online calendars to help you, but so far we haven't found one that works.

7. Experience a "big freeze." Even when you coax those little seedlings to life indoors, as soon as you transplant them, you can count on one of those cold snaps to frost your crops.

6. Don't believe in chinch bugs. When we moved to Texas we thought people were sending us on a snipe hunt when they said our grass was dying because of chinch bugs. Chinch bugs are real.

5. Plant the same things you used to plant in other states and expect them to do well. Texas is a law unto itself, even for gardening.

4. Grow herbs indoors without a suitable environment. They need enough sun and don't like air conditioning, unlike their human counterparts.

3. Plant your tomatoes in the spring so they can shrivel and die in the heat of summer. Experts say the hottest part of summer is when the planting should be and then you'll (theoretically) have a great tomato crop in the fall.

2. Grow basil they said. Basil loves the heat, they said. 

1. Go away on vacation for a week to escape the surface-of-the-sun temperatures. We guarantee you won't have a living plant left if you do.

On a happier note, we have found that our banana trees grow like weeds. They've been through hurricanes, freezes, heat spells, and our son with the weed whacker, and they keep coming back! One day, we might even get a banana off of them!

Happy gardening!

How to Make a 3D Wood Sign With Your Laser Engraver

As an owner of an Etsy Shop that has run out of projects of your own to make, getting an order to make a sign creates an exciting rush of adrenaline, but it is just the start of the long process to make a laser engraved wood sign. Outlined below is the process we went through on a fun order we had recently.

Step 1 - Find out what vision the customer has for the sign, and create a mockup in the computer to make sure it is exactly what they are looking for before building anything.

Step 2: Find the wood that we will use to make the sign.  Since we like to use upcycled or reclaimed wood in as many of our projects as we can. This often starts with scouring neighborhoods, marketplaces, or any other places that people like to get rid of things they don’t need anymore, tearing the wood down to its pieces, and then prepping it to make it look like a usable board again.  For this project we had a leftover piece of mahogany from another project.

Step 3: Get the board into shape needed for this sign. For this sign, that meant planing the wood to the correct thickness, cutting the piece of wood we had into three pieces and then gluing them back together to make a square.

Step 4: Laser work. Cut out the letters, and laser engrave the sign onto the prepared piece of wood.  This step is pretty self-explanatory.

Step 5: Finish the laser cut/engraved pieces.  For this sign that meant painting the 3D letters we had cut out, cutting the sign into its final shape (a circle), sanding the edges to make it look cool, and finally putting a keyhole hanger on the back to make the sign easy to hang on a wall.

Step 6: Assemble and Finish the Sign.  For a 3D sign that means gluing all the letters to the sign and putting on the final coat of polyurethane.  This is always the most exciting part of the process for me because you finally get to see the sign take its final shape after all the work.

Step 7: Take an awesome picture of the final product and enjoy it for a few minutes before remembering you made it for someone else. Then get excited to send it to them so they can enjoy it as much as you do.