Love Letter to Our Home

Dear House,

A year ago today we pulled up in our U-Haul, two first-time homebuyers excited to make you our own. You’ve been good to us over the past 365 days, so I wanted to take a moment to say thanks.

One of the biggest selling points for me a year ago was your kitchen. It had all the things I wanted: granite countertops, a big island, hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances. I still love all of those things about your kitchen, but it’s the little things I’ve come to cherish even more: the many wonderful meals we’ve cooked there, the way you function beautifully to entertain a party of 2 or 20, and the fact that your cutout window allows me to watch TV while standing at the sink doing dishes.

We also love you for your two-story living room, your upstairs loft, your yard and the plethora of wildlife living in it (well, sometimes).

Now, I should mention that it hasn’t always been a cakewalk. You were far from perfect, but we’ve been doing our best to make you all that you can be. Like when you had water in your crawlspace and Lee had to dig up the entire backyard to get you drained. Or the fact that some crazy electrician put the light switch to your master closet BEHIND the door in the most awkward position. After a day of cursing and thinking he had screwed up the wiring for the whole house, Lee finally got the switch moved to the more logical side of the door.

We still have a ways to go. I know you want a proper dining room table and china cabinet and your massive two-story living room wall with nothing on it makes you feel naked. Trust me, I want those things for you too. Hopefully Year Two will bring them and more.

You’ve seen us through a lot of milestones this past year. Our first time truly living together. The insanity that became my life while in the final stages of wedding planning. Three words: Joint.Checking.Account. Spending way too much money on Christmas decorations because we wanted you to look spectacular and wouldn’t settle for any less than two fully decorated trees. And our first addition to our family (by the way, I’d like to formally apologize for letting her live in the laundry room at first, we know you’re much happier now that she’s outside).

I should also take a moment to give a shout out to Holly Springs – thank you for welcoming us to town. You’re a long way from my work, but it’s worth it, to come home and feel “at home.” You’re a perfect medium: small enough to remind me of La Grange, but big enough to have a Sonic and a Lowe’s Foods.

So, House, thank you for a great first year. I can’t promise that we’ll never want to trade you out for a different model, but for now, to us, you are perfect (mostly).

Love,
Megan

4th of July in Pictures

Heading out on our crabbing excursion.

Patriotism.

This is my husband. I think he is handsome.

Until he does this.

Little creek where we went crabbing. Such a pretty day.

I decided to try my hand at floundering in the hip boots.

Three labs that love to retrieve.

Big snake that Katie almost stepped on. Lee chopped him up.

Fireworks lined up on our neighbor's pier. So pretty to see the fireworks shows going off all across the river.

Fun with sparklers.

Lake Gaston Girls' Weekend

Before I can post about our 4th of July weekend, I need to go back and catch up on a post I missed -- our fabulous girls' weekend at Lake Gaston.

Leigh invited us to spend the weekend at her parents' lake house. I think it was just what the doctor ordered for all of us: fun in the sun, relaxation, girl talk, and a night of shenanigans to cap it all off.

Here are the pics suitable for sharing with the world:

Mmmm. Corona.

A nice man offered to take us out on his boat. Leigh couldn't remember his name. It was not sketchy at all.

He took us to this place. It is a real life redneck yacht club. Can you believe it has its own website?!

Yep, that's a full-size gas grill on a pontoon boat and a pretty sweet mullet as well.

Well, that's it for the suitable pictures. 4 out of about 100. (Let's just say there were syringe jello shots involved.)

Thanks Leigh and Mrs. Paula for hosting us...we had a great time!

Hello July!

July is going to be both busy and fun. Busy, because work is rather crazy right now, and fun because I'm starting it off with a long four day weekend of 4th of July festivities at the river (thanks McKinney for giving us Thursday AND Friday off!).

In the midst of all the madness, here are my goals for July:

1. Create and order a photobook of our honeymoon pics (similar to this one I created for our parents of our wedding photos)
2. Finish unpacking desk/office boxes and get desk set up (yes, we’ve been in our house almost a year and we still have unpacked boxes) AND back up my computer
3. Move 3 of the books on my “To Read” shelf to the “Read” shelf in Good Reads
4. Finish organizing our closet
5. Replant my porch planters and patio planter to replace the dead pansies

I'm hoping that by sharing my To Do's for the month, I'll actually be motivated to DO them, instead of them just lingering on my list like the usually do. At the end of the month, I'll let you know how I did and share my goals for August.

Happy 4th everyone!

Garden Update

So I realized I haven't posted an update on the garden since we planted it back in April. Remember that it looked like this?

Well, what a difference a few weeks can make. Now it looks something like this:

(I'm not sure which is growing faster, the plants or the dog.) Anyway, as you can see, the tomato plants are totally taking over. What you can't see though, in the back, is the squash, cucumbers, bell peppers, and jalapeno peppers that are all thriving. We also had a ton of cilantro. It was great while it lasted but doesn't really like the warm weather. We made some amazing cilantro dip and black bean salad while it was around though. We've also got a TON of basil. I just made a big batch of pesto tonight that we ate with pasta. YUM.

Anddd, we had salad with cucumbers and grape tomatoes fresh out of our garden. We're about to have more grape tomatoes than we could ever know what to do with. And that's not even taking the regular sized tomatoes into account, which will start getting red and ripe any day now.

Yummy grape tomatoes, in various stages of ripeness:

Bell pepper just about ready to be picked (don't you like how I took these pics right after we watered the garden, so everything looks all fresh and dewey?):

And jalapenos:

Squash (some of our squash unfortunately had root rot, but there's still plenty):

Still-green regular tomatoes:

Something that shouldn't be in our garden though? This thing:

We found out that it's a tomato hornworm (see its little red horn?). We found three of these on our tomato plants when we got home from the beach last weekend. Evidently, they can pretty much pulverize tomato plants in a short span of time. Luckily though, all you have to do is keep an eye out for them (they're kind of hard to miss with those white dots) and just kill them or remove them from your plants. Crisis averted.

P.S. Those white things on its back? I thought maybe they were babies. Nope. They're parasites. Little parasites that will turn into moths and eventually eat away at the hornworm. Ewwwwww. GROSS.

Tightwad Tuesday

Before you buy anything online, don't forget to check out RetailMeNot.com. It's a site that compiles coupon codes and promo codes for almost every retail site out there. When you get to a checkout page online that says "Have a coupon code? Enter it here" and you think "Man, I wish I had a coupon", Retail Me Not can usually help. It might just be 10% off or free shipping, but it makes you feel good about your purchase because you saved a little bit of money.

Using Retail Me Not, I've saved money on everything from bridal shower invitations to picture prints to custom postage stamps. If you can't find what you're looking for on Retail Me Not, you can sometimes find coupon codes on other sites through a regular Google search.

One bummer about Retail Me Not -- it seems that more and more companies are catching on and requesting that codes for their site be taken down, i.e. Target and J Crew. But even then, Target for example provides their widely advertised "featured discounts" so you might still find something useful.

Happy online shopping!

Summer '09 Mixed CD

1. I Gotta Feeling - Black Eyed Peas
2. Big Green Tractor - Jason Aldean
3. Waking Up in Vegas - Katy Perry
4. Thinking of You - Katy Perry
5. Out Last Night - Kenny Chesney
6. I Run to You - Lady Antebellum
7. Winter Song - Sara Bareilles & Ingrid Michaelson (from So You Think You Can Dance auditions)
8. Crazier - Taylor Swift
9. Best Days of Your Life - Kellie Pickler
10. Don't Think I Can't Love You - Jake Owen
11. Then - Brad Paisley
12. Falling Slowly - The Frames

P.S. - #1 is the best for dancing to, #2 is the best for singing to