Drying on the Clothesline

• In our quest to eat healthier, I've discovered how great the Recipezaar website is. For every recipe, it gives you the Nutrition Facts, which was my initial draw to it. However, upon further inspection, I discovered that it has a great search engine. You can search by ingredient, and then filter by how many calories it has, other ingredients in it, or several other factors. It's pretty great!!
• Speaking of eating healthier, have I mentioned how much I dislike the word "diet"? I'm not on a diet. I'm trying to make some lifelong changes to my eating habits. In my head, diets are crazy and impossible to follow long term.
• You may remember a while back when Nick hurt his paw. He has now split a toenail on his back paw, so he's running around on 3 paws again. (You can sort of see it in the picture below...) The picture just doesn't do it justice though, because it's HILARIOUS when he runs around like that. It wouldn't be so funny if it seemed to stop him at all, but he still chases squirrels and runs laps around the yard like this.

• I'm feeling much better now about my job situation than I was a few weeks ago. I've had several interviews in the last week or so and I'm feeling hopeful that one of them will work out. So I'm happy to report that the job search seems to be moving along at least.
• Tuesday night, we were going to turn on our air conditioning. Our hope was that we'd be able to sleep in on Wednesday morning (I had the morning off and Aaron had the day off). With the air on, we wouldn't be hot and miserable in the morning AND we could have our windows closed, meaning we wouldn't have to listen to all of the neighborhood dogs bark all morning long. (We love dogs, but one thing we will not put up with is our boys barking for extended periods of time outside!!) Sooo.... we turned the air conditioning on. After a few minutes, I heard a sort of whining sound. I asked Aaron about it, and he said it was probably just the compressor since there was so much moisture in the air. But then the noise started getting louder and I asked Aaron to go check it out, because "it sounded like it was about to explode." Sure enough, the fan wasn't working, so the air conditioner was overheating. It looks like we'll be without air conditioning for a while. It's been in the upper 70's to mid 80's in our house for the last few days. Luckily, there's a slight cool down in the forecast for early next week.

Knotty Pine

I got my first flat tire on Friday. The road we take to Ames is closed for construction, so we take gravel that takes us almost directly to work instead of detouring out of the way. On Thursday, they put new rock down. On Friday, I got a flat tire. Do you think there might be a connection?? Since I was driving on gravel when it happened, I was getting thrown around a lot anyways and had no idea that I was driving on a flat tire. I noticed something odd when I got back on a paved road, but I was a couple blocks from work, so I just drove the rest of the way, even though I was pretty sure it was flat. Turns out, I'd already been driving on a flat for so long, it didn't really matter.

This picture illustrates how long I'd been driving on a flat tire. Half of the word on the side is worn off (actually over a 1/4 inch of rubber had worn off) from driving on the side wall. Oops!! Thankfully, there was minimal damage otherwise, so it was fixed pretty easily!!

Lazy Dogs

I don't understand this!!

If anyone could shed some light on why such an employment policy might exist, please tell me!!

Lamp Shades

Thanks to my wonderful husband, we went from this:

to this:

What started out as a pile of dirt in the street in front of our house, became this great raised garden in the backyard. We have broccoli, tomatoes, chocolate peppers, grean beans, carrots and even watermelon growing!! I don't think that our garden has brought quite as much excitement as my friend Dana's, but we're definitely looking forward to enjoying the fruits (and veggies!!) of our labor in a few weeks.

It won't be soon before long.

Aaron and I had the pleasure of visiting Adam, Dena and Emma over the last couple days. Although we got very little sleep, we had tons of fun with everyone, especially our crazy niece. We hadn't seen them since Easter, and it's amazing how much Emma has changed since then. (Adam and Dena are pretty much the same!!)

No one prompted her to do this and we're not really sure why she did this. I just happened to catch it on camera...
Aaron's drawing of Emma on the MagnaDoodle. You can't really tell from the picture, but she thought it was pretty great.