Author: Scott
We Elfed Ourselves
It’s that time of year again when the officie supply stores bring back their heavy-duty viral marketing campaigns. ElfYourself.com is back! Here’s a lovely video of us (as elves, dancing the Charleston). Enjoy! Better yet… make your own!
Send your own ElfYourself eCards
Another National Cake Day Comes and Goes
Whew… four holidays in one week! Ok, three of them were the same (Thanksgiving), and one is made up (National Cake Day). We drove up to Phoenix to see Grandma Jean on Wed night after work, and had a big Thanksgiving dinner on the actual day. Then on Friday, Jess had to work 🙁 but Scott got the day off 🙂 and did a little Christmas shopping. When Jess got off, we celebrated National Cake Day with a delicious whippped cream-topped angel food cake (see last year’s post on the origins of National Cake Day). Saturday we had to put on our Thanksgiving hats again and head over to Aunt Nancy and Uncle Robert’s for another dose of the Gobble-gobble Bird. It was a house full of people again, fortunately there was enough food to stuff us to the gills once again. We went home full. Sunday we headed back to Nancy and Robert’s with Brian (he had to work on Thansgiving) so he could celebrate with everyone as well. As always, there are new photos in the gallery. Needless to say we’ve had a lot of food in the past few days! Turkey + Cake + Turkey + Turkey = VERY FULL Scott and Jessica.
Visitors from Iowa and Wisconsin
We had some visitors in from the midwest recently. My parents, and my aunt and uncle came downto spend some time in the Tucson area. We had our first overnight houseguests (in our house!) the first night when mom and dad got into town, and Brian also came down from Casa Grande for the night. Tom and Marj came in the next day, and everyone (excluding Brian, who had to go back to work) moved to a condo in Marana. We had a good time while everyone was here. We went out to one of our favorite restaurants in the area, Poca Cosa, with the whole gang plus Nancy and Robert. The following day we took a trek up Mt. Lemmon, did some geocaching, and of course, everyone had a big piece of pie (pie coma photo). My parents headed back to Iowa, but Tom and Marj stuck around for the rest of the week. They explored the area a bit more, and took an overnight trip up to Sedona before heading back to Wisconsin. It was good to see everyone, and have some visitors. We’ve got a load of new photos in the gallery.
Random Pile of Photos
We’ve been collecting a few random photos fro a little while now. They don’t really have a specific place of their own to live on here. Several are from our anniversary last month. We kept the top tier of our wedding cake (it survived 2 moves!), and ate it on our anniversary. We’ve also got a few new house photos. We’ve been adding storage shelves/brackets/doors to provide some places to put our stuff.
More Painting
It was another busy day for housework today. When we bought the green paint for the kitchen last month, we also bought some tan paint for the living room. The paint found its way out of the bucket and onto the walls this morning. Like before, we put together a time lapse of the process. I wish it had gone as fast as the time lapse makes it look.
Music: Kevin MacLeod
84 Pavers & 4.5 Tons of Rock Later
It is done! As of this morning we’re mostly done with the backyard! We moved four and a half tons of rock from a pile on our driveway through the gate to the backyard (after a short interruption from a thunderstorm). As you can image we were very tired once everything was moved and spread. We got most of it spread out last night, but it got dark, and we finished it up this morning. So now all that we have left to do is find some plants for the back portion against the wall of the yard. Hopefully that won’t be as tiring as the last parts! You can see the final shots of the 90% finished backyard in the gallery.
Yard Work
It’s time for another catch-up post. We’ve been busy since moving into the new house. We took a quick vacation in DC after Jess’s work trip. Photos from DC are up in the gallery. Since then, we’ve been getting settled into the house. This includes a lot of work in the back yard recently. We wanted to get things taken care of out there before the Monsoons come in mid-July. The first task was digging in the HARD NASTY Arizona dirt to install drip irrigation so we can grow a few plants back there. This weekend, while Jess is in Chicago for her sister’s bachelorette party, I did a few other jobs in the yard, including laying pavers out from our patio (thanks for helping Will!). Now we just need to cover the rest of the ground with rocks. Later this week four and a half tons will be dumped in the middle of our driveway. I guess that plans out our weekend for us. After the rock goes in, the last item left to do is plant a few things out there. I’m sure we’ll have photos up when everything is finished. It will be nice to have the yard all said and done so we can move onto new projects (painting!).
I set up the laptop to capture a time lapse of the pavers going in.
Music: Kevin MacLeod
We’re In!
Everything successfully made it from the old apartment to the new house with relatively little hassle (for a move). We moved in all the non-furniture items after picking up our keys last Tuesday morning, then movers took the furniture over on Wednesday. We have been unpacking boxes, and hooking stuff up since then. The keys were turned in for the apartment over the weekend, so I guess we’re official now. There is still a good load of boxes yet to unpack (we can’t park in our garage yet), and after things settle down a bit, we’ll be doing some painting. If you haven’t found them yet, new house photos are up in the gallery.