Magnum P.I.

What a great weekend!! Aaron and I went on a date on Friday night. We didn't do anything too horribly exciting, (dinner and a movie), but it was definitely a much needed date!! The only thing that would have made it better is if I hadn't worked 11 hours and Aaron 13 hours before the start of our date...

But, we got to sleep in on Saturday morning, which was nice. We woke up around 9:30, threw on some "going out in public"clothes, brushed our teeth, and headed up to Cold Stone to wait in line**. After an hour, we got our free ice cream for a year and were on our way back home. After we got home, we ate lunch and then took a nap. Yup. A nap. It was great. Aaron had to close that night, but it gave me an opportunity to get some cleaning done. When he got home, we watched a movie, ate popcorn (with parmesan cheese...yum!!), and snuggled.

Sunday morning we started prepping our house to be painted. The back of our house has the most windows, pipes, meters, etc... that needed to be covered and taped before we could start, so we did that together. Then Aaron started painting. We were able to borrow an airless sprayer from his dad, but unfortunately the last person to borrow it had left the tip on, which had caused it to rust, so we had to go up to Ames to buy a new tip at Lowe's. We made the best out of our trip though and stopped at Panchero's to grab some lunch. Once we got home with the new tip, it only took us 3 hours to paint the entire house!! We had a great little system down - while Aaron painted the west side, I covered the windows and scraped on the north side; as he painted the north side, I prepped the east side... We were soooo happy to be done with our project for the day by 3:30. It left us with our entire evening to just relax and spend some time together.

We harvested a bunch of broccoli and beans from our garden. We've already frozen a couple gallon sized Ziploc bags worth of beans and had 5 or 6 meals, but our plants just keep producing, so we gave about half of what we picked last night to a neighbor, whose bean plants aren't doing so well this year. While we were over there, my job search came up and our neighbor said she would give my name to a friend of hers who has tons of contacts in the area and has gotten several people their jobs, including both of our neighbor's daughters. Hopefully that will open up some new doors for me!! In other garden news, we have over 2 dozen tomatoes on our one tomato plant right now. Only 1 is turning red so far, but we should have plenty of tomatoes in the near future!! We also have a few peppers growing, lots of carrots-although none are anywhere near ready to pick- and our watermelon vine is getting huge!! We bought some insect spray yesterday, so hopefully the bugs won't get to the tomatoes and other plants before we do!!

** As a side story- Aaron and I learned quite a lesson while waiting in line at Cold Stone. There was a girl directly in front of us in line who was waiting all by herself. To pass the time, she decided to make a bunch of phone calls to catch up with some people. After listening to her talk for 1/2 hour, I know more about this girl than I do some of my friends. For instance, she was telling someone in her family all about how her little sister had lost her virginity. I'm guessing that is something that was not meant to be shared with the family. Aaron and I were very uncomfortable, to say the least, to overhear her conversations. The lesson learned: Do not have private conversations in public!!

Shrek the Third

How did you spend your Saturday morning?? Aaron and I spent our morning sitting in a line in front of Cold Stone Creamery in Ames. The result: We got free ice cream for a year!! In celebration of the 1 year anniversary in Ames, the first 50 people there this morning drew for free Love It sized ice creams, Smoothies or Shakes or Grab 'N Go Quarts for a year. We got there an hour before they opened and we were about # 30 and # 31 in line. Aaron got the Love It sized ice cream and I chose the Smoothies and Shakes. We're very excited that we can make a monthly trip to Cold Stone at no expense to us!!

Chewy Sweet Tarts

We are horrible dog parents. We have neglected to brush Steve so much lately that tonight it was just sad when we did brush him.* Aaron and I "dual brushed" for 20 minutes and got a serious amount of hair off of Steve. However, there's probably at least that much left on him in random tufts of hair. He started to get antsy towards the end, so we'll just have to brush again tomorrow night. Here are a couple (one slightly disgusting) pictures of the ordeal.

Steve seems to enjoy getting brushed, until we hit the 15 minute mark that is...

This is the slightly disgusting picture. This is a big pile of hair that we brushed off of Steve. Notice the tennis ball as a reference. And the pile was probably twice as tall as the ball.

It'll be interesting to see what tomorrow night brings. Hopefully Nick will play outside, alone, peacefully again. If he's inside, he thinks he should be brushed too, because it "seems a lot like petting!!" At least, that's what we imagine him saying if he could talk...

*Brushing did occur after the cookie baking.

Dehumidifier

I stumbled on this recipe today and it sounded intriguing, so we gave it a try tonight. These cookies are amazing!! They are soft and delicious. You should give it a try...

4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups butter, softened
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 (3.4 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups semisweet chocolate chips
2 cups chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour and baking soda, set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Beat in the instant pudding mix until blended. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Blend in the flour mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips and nuts. Drop cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Edges should be golden brown.

Yield: 72 servings (we actually got more than that and we made pretty decent size cookies!!)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix + Babies = Happy Blakely

We finally have one room in our house completely done!! Most everything else is in a mid-way stage, but it's nice to see a room finished. So, here are the pictures of our bathroom before and after...

It may not look like there've been a lot of changes, but we did do some major work!! We repainted the cabinets with a special bathroom paint. We also tore out the medicine cabinet, put in a new electrical outlet, a new light fixture over the miror, drywalled, painted the walls and put up the new mirror. In addition, there's a new faucet on our sink and a new light fixture on the freshly painted ceiling.

Hopefully we'll have many more before and after pictures to post in the near future!!

Peanut Butter Cookies

Do you need new printer cartridges?? Why not just buy a whole new printer then?? That's what we did!!

We were at Target last night, purchasing an obscene amount of stuff, because we had a coupon to get 10% off our entire purchase, so we'd been making out list for quite some time. When we went to buy new cartridges for our printer, we realized that it would actually cost significantly less to buy a whole new printer than to buy cartridges for our two printers.

We have a photo printer and a printer/copier/scanner at home. The software that goes with our photo printer hasn't been working, so we haven't been able to print very many pictures with it lately. I've actually ended up taking pictures to Target to be printed there instead of trying to deal with the photo printer at home. In addition, the scanner/copier function on our other printer only works when it feels like it, which is less than 50% of the time.

The new printer we bought combines the features of the two printers we had, which saves us desk space. The color cartridges on the new printer are three individual cartridges, so that if you run out of blue, you just buy a replacement for the blue and can still use the rest of the red and yellow. In theory, it seems like that should save us some money.

Although we probably won't buy a whole new printer every time we run out of ink, it seemed like a good investment this time around!!

Yummy Scotcharoos!!

I love these girls!! This first picture was taken at my bachelorette party last September. It was the first time my cousin Bethany had met Missy and Amanda...
But they were definitely excited to see eachother a few weeks later at the wedding!!
I was so happy when we were all able to get together again last week for the Slater Fourth of July celebration. Maybe next time we'll all have to roadtrip to see Bethany in Chicago...

Get It Together

We did a lot of work outside today, so the boys also spent a lot of time outside. It was pretty hot for a dog today though, so we were trying to make sure that we were keeping them plenty cool. The technique that made our dogs look dorkiest was taking bandanas, soaking them in water and then freezing them before we tied them on. (I think I heard this idea on Regis and Kelly a few weeks ago...) They weren't so keen to the idea of the bandanas at first, but once they realized that they were cool and refreshing, they LOVED their bandanas. See below:

It was definitely an exciting day for the boys though, because Nick decided that it was bedtime at about 9:30 and just let himself into his kennel. As you can see, the door to his kennel is wide open, but he's been laying in there sleeping for almost an hour now. He did manage to lift his head up and look around when we took this picture though, but not for long, because he's fast asleep and snoring again already.

Don't Sweat It

I've noticed that many people who used to blog on a daily, or at least weekly basis, have now decreased the frequency of their blogging. However, I am guilty of the same, so I can't say much.

Here's one of the many things we've been doing to keep busy though:

This is what our kitchen used to look like.

This is what all of our cabinet doors and drawers look like stacked up. They have since been sanded and primed and are awaiting a fresh coat of paint. Stay tuned for an updated picture of our kitchen...