Pack your bags!

These past few weeks Dan has been busy working, and with my friend Jennifer coming twice to visit and me going to Dallas for a few days, we haven't seen each other nearly as much as we thought we would this summer. He told me Monday night he would be helping me with the things I needed to do around the house on Tuesday since he needed me to be ready to leave the house for a surprise around 5. I just assumed we were going out to eat somewhere nice. But he had something better planned. He told me I needed to pack a bag since we were spending the night somewhere. I got super excited because I was totally unsuspecting of all this. He wouldn't tell me where we were going, but once we started driving he told me he was taking me to the Beehive Restaurant out in Albany which is about 30 minutes from Abilene. It's one of our favorite places to go eat. He also booked a room at this bed & breakfast out there for us. We had a nice dinner, and then we drove around Albany for a little bit. We found some interesting things as we were exploring. This is from this labyrinth maze we found in a park. I cheated and just got in the center once I saw how long it was going to take. We found a bunch of random stuff to explore in this little city. It was fun!
Then we found this park that had longhorns. The weather was cool and the sky was so pretty!
Dan brought stuff to make margaritas, so after it got dark we headed back to the room and he was nice enough to let me watch the Rangers game. The next morning the lady who owned the place made us a huge breakfast that we ate out in the gazebo. It was such a nice relaxing trip and I'm so thankful for my husband who planned it for us!

Ra'chel's Wedding

I love weddings! They remind me of my own wedding, and that was a very special day for me. I got to go to Ra'chel's wedding this past weekend, and I'm so excited for her! Your first year of marriage is so fun because it's the first time you do everything as a married couple like holidays and everything. I'm also excited for her since she's in Hawaii right now...or maybe that's jealousy I'm feeling.

It was a sweet wedding and a fun reception. It was fun seeing girls from college I haven't seen in awhile. And of course I love wedding cake! Here are a few photos from the reception.

The happy couple

College friends

Nicole and I

Congratulations Ra'chel and Jonathan! Hope you celebrate many years of bliss!

Happy Father's Day...a little late!

I would have thought summer would have been the best time to blog since I'm not working, but clearly I'm finding plenty of other things to keep me busy. So here is my belated Happy Father's Day post. I got Dan a Father's Day card and we went out to dinner at Outback (Charlie is his kid if you are wondering why he got a Father's Day card). Neither of our dads live in Abilene so we didn't do anything with them on Father's Day. I celebrated a belated Father's Day with my dad the weekend after. I met him for dinner at Humperdink's Friday night. Then I took him to the Rangers/Astros game and we watched them lose. It was still fun and it was a fireworks Friday so that was even better. He's a nice guy and I'm glad he's my dad. He may be a bit goofy sometimes, but he's a pretty cool dad. I may have almost killed him though...I drove the wrong way down a street on the way home from the Rangers game because it was kind of dark. He said he saw his life flash before his eyes. So that was a cool Father's Day present, a second chance at life!

Dan and I are both so lucky to have such great dads. I can't wait for Dan to be a real dad someday, but for now I'm happy he's Charlie's dad. :) Here is a photo from the Rangers game and then some random photos of my favorite dads.

Nothing too terribly exciting...

To start off my summer, my friend, Jennifer, came into town. We had our usual fun times together going out, laughing, shopping, eating, the usual. Nothing too exciting. I have our traditional picture of us taken by us in the car. It's what 90% of our pictures are since we hate asking strangers to take a picture of us. And then I do have one that one of our husbands took of us. Since Jennifer's husband was in town at the same time working, we had a bar-b-que last Sunday with them and some other friends. I felt bad because it happened to be one of those really hot days and my sweet husband had to be outside in front of the hot grill. We made way too much food which was kind of good because I didn't have to cook anything for awhile. We forgot to make the corn while everyone was over, so as soon as they left Dan grilled it and we ate some. It smelled and tasted so good! I almost was going to post this other picture of me eating the corn that Dan took after he had me shut the open kitchen drawers behind me, but then I realized cute Charlie was in the picture looking kind of cute so I thought I would post this one- even if two of the kitchen drawers are open in the background.
We also celebrated Dan's mom's birthday last Friday night with dinner at Dan's restaurant. It was fun...I do love birthday celebrations! Dan's dad drove in from Austin yesterday and we had dinner with him. We hate that he lives 4 hours away and we're hoping to either go see him this summer or meet him in Arlington for a Rangers game.

Well, that's all that's going on around here...nothing too terribly exciting!

Yay for everything summer!

I am so glad summer is here. It is a perk of being a teacher and I will be so sad someday if I ever have a job that does not have a summer.

I am going to attempt to cross of some items on my summer to-do list. I gave myself a week of enjoying summer (aka being lazy, reading, watching TV, laying out, etc.) and now I need to get busy. I have a few little projects around the house I want to get done. And I have some closets I want to reorganize :)

The garden needs some attention, too. I've slacked off on the whole weeding thing these past couple of days. Things are growing like crazy. We're going to have way too many tomatoes here in the next couple of days. Dan built a scarecrow because we suspected birds were getting into the garden. That doesn't seem to be working so we are moving on to plan Z. Something called 7 dust? Some people told us to try that so it's on our shopping list. I am finding myself getting frustrated with the garden since something keeps eating our stuff. I decided maybe next summer it would be easier to just go to the grocery store and buy the produce. Although the tomatoes we ate yesterday were pretty good!

And so I don't become a couch potato, I'm working up at Dan's restaurant a little bit. It's fun and it gives me something to do and oh yeah, I make a little extra money, too! Always a good thing because I'm sure I'll get bored with the whole summer to-do list pretty quick, and then I'll probably start doing some summer shopping!

Well that's what I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks. I also have a fun trip planned to Plano to see my friend Ra'chel get married. Then mom and I are heading up to NY for a couple weeks and before I know it, Dan and I will be off to Maine!

And it may be a tad bit too early to bring this up.........but after summer is over, you do know what comes next, right? Yup...FOOTBALL. :)

Shopping in the Rain

I had to run some errands last night and I didn't realize it was going to rain until I saw the huge cloud in my rear view mirror. I was already out so I figured I would hurry and try to make it back home. My last stop was Kohl's. I had been in there no more than 5 minutes when it started pouring REALLY hard. So I decided to just keep shopping. Dan called me from work to ask me how the rain sounded on our tin roof. When I told him where I was, he told me to stay put until it stopped raining. I wanted to make sure I heard him right because what I got from that was, "keep shopping until it stops raining". Well you don't have to tell me twice!! I kept right on shopping after promising him I would call him when I made it home safely. Hmmmm, maybe I should shop more during big storms...

It was storming pretty hard and the power went out in Kohl's for about 8 minutes. They made us all go to the front of the store. I guess so we wouldn't steal anything in the dark! As soon as the power came back on, I finished up my shopping and safely headed home to show off my new things to Dan. And thank goodness, he liked each thing I bought!

Our backyard oasis

Well, maybe it's not exactly an oasis. There is no waterfall in the background which you probably need to have a soothing oasis. But we do have pretty flowers, a decent garden, a porch swing, and a little bird feeder.

We started the garden last year, but we planted the seeds way too late. We learned our lesson and started earlier this year. We have okra, jalapenos, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and strawberries. We have a slight problem that we are currently trying to solve. Something is eating the tomatoes and the strawberries. We thought it was a stray cat, but now after some research on the Internet Dan informed me it could be a rat. GROSS! Or maybe a squirrel which I can handle, but rats are just gross. That is a bit of a bummer, but like I said, we are currently trying to solve this problem. Right now we have cayenne pepper sprinkled all over to hopefully get rid of the pest. Everything is growing fantastically, and we've already picked our first jalapenos!We also added some more flowers to the backyard this year. I don't have much of a green thumb so I typically can only keep a couple of hanging baskets alive. This year I'm going to attempt to take care of several more plants. We are also trying to grow two flowering plants that will turn vine-y and hopefully grow around some latticework that we are planning to hang. We'll see how that turns out. It's the two plants sitting on the deck. Our last project is attempting to nurse our grass in the backyard back to health. We live on a corner lot on a cul-de-sac so we have a LOT of grass in the backyard to water and no automatic sprinkler system to water it with. Add that to the fact that we were out of town a lot last summer, and we had a very cold winter. So much to our disappointment, we discovered that not all of our grass decided to come back this summer. We are trying to water it as much as possible, and I've actually noticed it seems to be working. Thank goodness the front yard decided to cooperate!

I love sitting on the swing after it cools off at night and enjoying our backyard. But, I must say, I wish I was rich enough to hire my own personal gardener. All this weeding and watering is going to wear me out after awhile!

Dan's Birthday Weekend

Since my husband's birthday always falls near Memorial Day weekend, we usually end up going out of town since we have the 3-day weekend. This year we had a very low-key celebration at home on Sunday. I bought some of his favorite snacks and we started off the afternoon just relaxing at the house. Then after giving him a choice of going to a movie of HIS choice or going to Primetime, my sweet husband chose running errands and doing some shopping with me. This is how we typically spend our Sunday afternoons and he decided to keep up that tradition in the hopes that maybe since it was his birthday celebration he could get to pick out something for himself! We started at Best Buy to research getting a satellite radio car kit for his truck. Part of his birthday gift is to add his truck onto our satellite radio package. We didn't have much luck so we went to Academy next to try and use up some gift cards he had accumulated. We went in looking for a small charcoal grill to use when we don't want to use the big smoker we already have. We ended up scoping out the pools, baseball equipment for my new obsession with going to the batting cages, and we left with nothing. I'm sure we will be back soon to use up those gift cards or he'll use them on golf stuff. We finished our shopping trip at Lowe's. We needed a new weed-eater since ours bit the dust. Somehow we managed to buy a shopping cart full of other things including new flowers for the back patio. I was hoping they took Academy gift cards, but no such luck! We drove through Sonic on the way home where I think I discovered my new favorite drink this summer. A strawberry limeade chiller. It's a strawberry limeade made with my favorite thing: ice cream! We worked out in the backyard for a little bit and then relaxed before going to dinner. Since it was his birthday, I gave him some restaurant choices that I typically don't like going to. He picked CiCi's. (If you think I'm a bad wife because I took my husband to CiCi's Pizza for his birthday, don't worry, I took him out to Abuelo's on his actual birthday). We had a good time and then finished off the evening at home using our new weed-eater, watering our lawn, and watching the Rangers lose. Again.

Happy 30th birthday to my husband!!