Wednesday:

• Awake at 3:30 to drive to the airport in Charleston.  Drink 30 oz of coffee and get VERY WIRED.
• Fly from Charleston to Chicago.
• Fly from Chicago to Milwaukee.
• Sit in Milwaukee for a long time because our flight was delayed.
• Find a used bookstore in the airport.

Bookstore where?

Renaissance Books

• Fly to Minneapolis.
• Collect our rental car and call Nathan and Co.
• Meet Nathan & Co. and Erica & Ltd. at Erica’s house and have a fun-filled picnic dinner.
• Play with nieces and nephews and lots and lots of balls.  Play in the park.

Fun with plastic balls

• Eat s’mores with Erica.
• Go to bed after being awake for about 20 hours.

Thursday:

• Get up to go running with Erica and plod my way through 2.5 miles for the first time in many, many months.
• Ache for the next 2 days.
• Shower, dress, and drive away.
• Chat with Erica and pass things to Chloe until we get to Eau Claire.

Chloe, show me your teeth!

• Have a delightful lunch with Mom and Dad.
• Go to Goodwill to find shoes for Chloe and buy a hat and purse.
• Drive to Grandma’s house.

Grandma's house

• Have a delightful dinner with Grandma and Dee and stay up late chatting.

Friday:

• Get up and have a big breakfast with Grandma and Dee.
• Sit around chatting and working out genealogy and enjoying company.
• Shower.
• Take Chloe to the park and have fun running around.

Chloe on the playground

• Eat lunch.
• Go through my wedding book with Grandma, pointing out people she didn’t know.
• Say good-byes and drive away.

Group shot with Grandma and Dee

• Drive to Knoxville, IA.
• Get lost.
• Get un-lost.
• Hug Grandpa Doug and other people in the dark and not know who they are.
• Get settled into the camper trailer and meet Justin’s aunt, uncle, and cousin.
• Sleep on a mattress covered in plastic, with heads lower than our feet and get a sore throat.

Saturday:

• Get up and chat with people in the trailer while breakfasting and getting ready.
• Wander down to the pond and meet a couple more people.
• Wander down to the barn and say good morning to Grandpa Doug and Great-uncle Bob and a few other people.

Barnett's barn

• Wander down to the tent and meet Great-uncle Jerry and help him wipe down chairs for lunch.

Reunion tent

• Meet a couple more people.
• Run into town to grab some things from Walmart (a pillow, throat drops, hot dogs, a fan)
• Make it back to the farm in time to meet a whole bunch more people, grab a few sodas, and stand around chatting for a little bit before lunch.
• Have an unfortunate run-in with a gust of wind in a billowy top and face questions about whether I’m pregnant.  Quelch that rumor as quickly as possible.
• Eat lunch.
• Sit around chatting with people.
• Sneak off to take a nap.
• Wander around the property of a distant cousin who raises lilies and hostas.

Randy's hostas

Randy's flowers

Purple flowers

Stone stairs

Grass driveway

Lily

• Jump in the pond for a swim before dinner.
• Meet a couple more people while swimming.
• Go to dinner in a different outfit than at lunch.  No billowing.
• Meet even more people.
• Cheer for the talent show.

Grandpa Doug on harmonica

• Cook s’mores.
• Chat with people until dark.
• Watch the men clear up chairs and tables in preparation for inclement weather.
• Move trash bags to the side so they wouldn’t wash away.
• Walk back to the trailer in awe of all the lightning bugs.
• Die of heat while trying to sleep, even with the fan blowing, with a sore throat and feet higher than our heads and a loud plastic wrapper on the mattress.

Sunday:

• Wake up, breakfast, shower, dress.  Feel very groggy, head-stuffy, throat-achy.
• Go to the high school for lunch because of the expectation of rain.
• Cram 130+ people into the high school cafeteria.

Barnetts in the high school cafeteria

• Meet a few more people.
• Eat delicious lunch.
• Release a microphone to the masses.
• Hide in the bathroom for a little bit.
• Walk around the school with Justin a little bit.
• Leave messages on Gillian’s phone.
• Drive back to the farm.

Barnett rock

• Go sit at the barn out of the rain and talk with people.
• Walk back to the pond and watch Justin go swimming while I sit on the dock under an umbrella.
• Change into dry clothes.  Call Gillian.
• Chat with people for a little longer.
• Go see Gillian.
• Chat with Gillian and play with her children for a while.  Forget to take a picture.
• Leave so the kids can get to sleep.  Go out for dinner.
• Watch fireworks as we drive home.
• Go to sleep with sound of rain and cool air blowing.

Monday:

• Wake up, breakfast, shower, dress, pack.
• Throw everything into car.
• Wander up to the barn to chat with people.
• Wander around old homestead house and take pictures.

Git offa my lawn

Outside his childhood bedroom window

Outhouse

Wooden steps

Water wheel

The reason we made the trip

• Sit back down and chat some more.
• Finally say good-byes and drive off.
• Stop for lunch and move our luggage into the back seat.
• Repack everything so it fits into one suitcase while Justin drives.
• Meet Sara at Cheesecake Factory, but walk across the street to Barnes and Noble to work up an appetite.
• Catch up with Sara and wander around the store.
• Go back and have a delicious dinner.
• Wander around the mall a little bit before saying good-byes.

Tickle shot

• Drive to Erica’s house and keep her up late while we finish packing and getting ready.  She braids my hair.

Tuesday:

• Get up a little before 5:00 to pack up, put up the beds, and head to the airport.
• Arrive on time, return the car, check in, make it through security, and only sit a little while before boarding.
• Fly to Chicago.
• Get adopted by an 80-year old woman looking for help getting to her gate.
• Stay more calm about the shuttle bus to another concourse and the time crunch of our layover because of that angelic woman.
• Get to the gate just as they finish boarding and get right on the airplane.
• Fly to Charleston.
• Collect our luggage, find the car, and drive home.
• Pile everything inside the house.
• Shower and curl up to relax.
• Fall asleep and sleep for about 15 hours.

And as a bonus! Wednesday:

• Relax all morning.
• Go to our financial advisor appointment and start making good plans.
• Go to the grocery store.
• Get a flat tire leaving the grocery store.
• Watch Justin put on spare tire.
• Go home and unload the groceries and tidy the kitchen while Justin sorts the luggage into dirty laundry hampers.
• Eat a late lunch.
• Take the car to Tire Kingdom.
• Buy a new tire.
• Go home.
• Find out that Justin’s old boss and coworker had shown up AT THE HOUSE to ask why he hadn’t been answering his cell phone.
• Laugh delightedly that he no longer works there.
• Relax for the rest of the evening.

Look:

This is a cookie sheet!  It fits perfectly over the sink of our place.  I had it out because I made bread out of the over-ripe pears yesterday and when I washed the romaine it was so easy to just set it on there and let it dry for a bit while I went to cut cucumber.

It worked so well!  The water dripped right through and didn’t spill over the counter like it would normally with our cutting board.  And once I came back to cut the romaine, I just cut it on the cookie sheet, too.  The water kept running on through the mesh instead of all over my counter!

Plus, when I wanted to drop things into the sink, it was just a little ways to reach, and I could see everything that was underneath.  So when I dropped my knife that I’d used for the cucumber, I didn’t have to go groping around blindly–I could see exactly where it had gone.

Anyway, I thought it was a fantastic idea and I just had to share it.  I’ll have more to say soon.

Cheers!

You might need to click on it to make it big enough to read

What do you think?  Did I miss something that you noticed?

I've been baking!

My church is doing a ministry this month with Kairos Prison Ministry. We’re making cookies to give to the inmates.

Kairos Cookies

See?  They do cookies.  And hey!  I love to make cookies!  So I’m making a double batch of the easiest recipe for peanut butter cookies I could find.  There isn’t even any flour.  It’s just peanut butter, sugar, and eggs, really.  But OH.  GOOD.

Delicious cookie

I think I’m going to have about 5 dozen of these to send to the prison.

Wrapped up and ready to go

And I’ve only eaten . . . 3 of them.  But I’m on the 4th one of these:

20 oz each time

Edited to add:  Erica asked a question about the water bottle.

Close of the front

Pop the top

From the inside

No filter.  I got it at Target for $10, I think.  The metal ring around the top of the gray button on the front locks it shut so I can toss it into my purse and it won’t pop open.  There’s a seal along the top of the spout that holds the water in, too.  And there’s a ring that counts up to 6 so I can keep track of how many times I’ve filled it today.  I *love* it.  It’s the perfect size to get in and wash it with my sponge, too.  Dishwasher safe.  I’ve smacked it around a few times, too, and it’s got a few dents on the clear plastic top, but it hasn’t broken yet.  I.  Love.  It. 

Before -- Christmas 2009

Current -- April 2010

Okay, so anyone who doesn’t want to hear about diet stuff can skip this post and go back to admiring our work on the lawn. 

As you can hopefully tell from the pictures, I’ve lost about 20 pounds.  This is crazy amazing to me because I’ve only been seriously working at this since the beginning of March.  To lose 20 pounds in a month is insane!  I’ve slowed down to about 2 or 3 pounds a week now, but those first couple weeks were crazy!

What I’ve been doing is logging every single thing that I eat through MyFoodDiary.com, which I resisted for a long time because of the time commitment involved.  It’s frustrating, sometimes, having to keep track of every little thing and write it down and figure out how big of a serving it was and how many calories were involved and blah, blah, blah.  But ho-ly cow.  There’s no denying the cold, hard truth of nutritional information when it’s all written down and telling you that you just put more than 2000 calories in your body today.  And half of that was sugar.  And you didn’t exercise.

I’ve had to make some adjustments to what I eat and how often and all of that, and it’s been interesting to notice how my appetite has started to change.  If I eat healthy foods, which look more and more appetizing, then I don’t get hungry as often, and I can eat less.  I have more energy to get up and exercise when I’m not so weighed down by a full stomach and it’s easier to sleep when my stomach isn’t bloated with food.

I set a goal for myself to log my food for 30 days straight.  The reward for achieving that was to get an hour-long massage.  I met that goal last week and my massage is scheduled for Sunday afternoon!  I’m on my way to 60 days, now.

Exercise-wise, I’ve been hitting Zumba classes on Monday and Wednesday evening and yoga class on Saturday morning.  Besides that, I try to exercise for about an hour on my own enough times so I maintain a consistent 5 out of 7 days where I’ve exercised.  Not that any day in particular is a “non-exercising” day.  Every day is a day when I should exercise, but some days are too busy and I don’t beat myself up if I can’t get in a workout between work and band practice.

Other than that, I haven’t done anything in particular to work on this.  I try to drink my 64 oz of water or more each day.  If I REALLY need a cookie, and if I can afford the calories, I’ll have a cookie.  But not a handful of cookies followed by a handful of chocolate and ice cream with syrup on top.  If we’re going to a restaurant for dinner, I try to get a hold of the menu online before hand so I can look at the options and find something healthy – like grilled fish instead of breaded and fried fish.  And that’s pretty much the whole story – eating foods that are healthy, in appropriate amounts, and logging it all, while exercising for an hour, 5 days a week, doing something that I really enjoy.

I’m very pleased with my progress so far.  I have a long way to go – I figure I’m just under a quarter of the way to where I’d like to be.  I figure, at my current rate of weight-loss, I should be in the 100s by late May.  And I should be down about 40 pounds by the 4th of July.  My goal when I started was to be down by 50 pounds by the time I went back to my doctor appointment in early September.  I’m hoping to blow her socks off when I get there.

Even better, by Christmas of this year I hope to be almost to my goal weight.  And that makes me a very happy girl!

Anyway, I’ve mentioned to several people that we’ve been doing yardwork.  So!  Since I’m still really tired, but I wanted to put up something here for Mom to see when she checks (I love you, Mom!), I figured I’d do a picture-heavy recap of what we’ve been doing to the yard.

The back of our yard butts up to a protected marchland, so we’re not supposed to do anything to it.  But the marshland was encroaching onto our yard.  This massive thicket of vines was slowly taking over the bushes and trees at the back of the property.  Last year, we cleared a section so we could actually see through to the marsh.  This year, we figured we’d try to get even further.

This is what it looked like before we started.

A broad view of the vines in the backyard, before trimming

A closer view of the vines problem

We spent a couple hours one afternoon pulling and piling and wrenching those things out of the ground.  Some of them are really nasty things with stickers a good 1/2 inch long.  I completely failed on planning and wore cropped pants, so I came away from the process with scratches all over my legs.  Justin walked away with a concussion, which was when we stopped for the day.  But that’s a story for another time….  Our friendly neighbor helped us the next day to pile them all into his pick-up truck and drop them off at the dump, even though it was raining.

This is what it looked like a few days ago:

A stunning lack of vines

Clear to the marsh

There’s still more to be done, obviously, but we’ve made some excellent progress!  We can see all the way through to the marsh!  To the coffee bin that someone dumped….

We noticed that a few of the vines climbing up the trees have died because we apparently cut them at the bottom.  So we have to go see if we can pull them down.  And there’s more to clear and rake up and clean up.  And then things like ferns will start to grow up and the trees will fill out more and it’s going to look amazing.  Much better than that awful thicket.

The other big project we did was to transform the landscaping along the side of the house.  This is what it used to look like:

Beside the house

And that’s the only picture I have of it.  It was pine straw mulch up to a trim of pine bark mulch that has a couple crepe myrtle trees and a couple evergreen trees that I don’t know how to explain.  It was awful.  Cats were using it as a sandbox.  Weeds were coming through.  The trees needed help.  The whole thing was a mess.

This is what it looked like a few days ago:

New and improved sideyard

Justin raked out all that awful mulch.  We brought the whole thing in about 6 inches closer to the house, the empty space will fill with grass before the end of the summer, and Justin dug a trench about 6-inches deep all the way along the side of the house to define that area and filled it in with stones.  One end is right at the end of a rain gutter, so it’s going to keep the rain from washing the mulch away as badly as it used to.   It took a lot more rocks that we expected and those rocks are REALLY heavy.  Justin was very tired from moving all those rocks.  Under the rocks is a weed-blocking material that should keep weeds from growing up in that area.  Justin put in edging while I planted some flowers and bushes.  And the whole thing is filled with cypress mulch.  Oh, and the myrtles got their spring trimming, so they’re much happier.

Bushes on the side yard

I think these are a phlox or something

I have no idea what these are called but I love the color

These are beautiful - I think they're columbines

A jasmine of some sort, I think

This tree was so crooked, but hopefully it'll do better now

View from the front

And there’s more that we did, but I’m really tired, so I’m going to wrap it up there and come back another time.  But what do you think so far?  Amazed at our landscaping prowess?  I know I am!  This place looks awesome! 

Can you see it?

Here, I'll point at it.

It curls!  In tight little ringlets!  And you only see two here, but trust me, on a “good” day, my whole head is full of those things.

It makes me laugh. 

Charleston Bridge means we've gone too far

We didn’t really know where we were going, but we realized as we were crossing this bridge that we’d gone too far.  So we got to the other side and turned around, which gave me a second chance to try to take this photo.

Waterfront Park benches

We parked the car and found this great park with all these wonderful benches and alcoves.  I bet this place is wonderful in a couple more weeks once the grass is growing and things are alive again.

No lifeguard on duty

In the park we found this fountain.  There’s a whole list of rules about wading in the fountains – yes, there is more than one, I’ll get to that in a second – including “no swimming.”  Really?  In a pool only a foot deep?  Go figure.

No swimming allowed

This is the other fountain.  I bet this one is the favorite in the summer.  Just look at all that refreshing water!  On Saturday, it was in the 60s, probably, and the wind was blowing so strongly that water was flowing off the fountain and down the stairs.

Lunch!

This was my lunch — seared salmon with green beans and Charleston red rice (from which I picked out all the pork).  I forgot my journal in the car to write down what I’d eaten so I took a picture of it instead.  I’m rather proud of my good food choices on Saturday.

Charleston alley

This was on the way back to where we’d parked.  It’s just an alleyway and I have no idea what the building is, but I thought it looked really interesting.

Blue boy

This is “Blue boy.”  He’s the real reason why we went up to Charleston.  Since the puppies were all the same color, they have ribbons around their neck to keep them straight.

Puppies!

See?  Otherwise they all look the same.  There were four of them total when we were there, but the other one hadn’t made it over yet.  They were adorable!

Painted sky

And on the way out of town we got this great sunset.  This picture doesn’t really capture it very well, but it was amazing.

And there you go!  Pictures from our day in Charleston.

While I’m waiting for the next load to get out of the dryer, I thought I’d share a few photos with you.  The light is terrible today and both of the batteries for my camera appear to be nearly out of juice – so much so that they can’t power up the flash.  So they’re not the greatest quality of photographs, but I’m having fun.  And on a dark, windy, gloomy day, that’s the sort of thing I work toward.

Anyway!  We went to Savannah Mall yesterday because we refuse to find another hair dresser.  So instead of finding one closer to home, we travel the hour or so every few months to go to the lady we love, get gyros for dinner, poke around the mall a little bit, and then head home.  We picked up Justin’s sister, Jessi, and her roommate on our way past their dorm so they could hit the mall, too.  We got haircuts, picked up a few things in Target, got gyros and ice cream, and on our way out, I stopped into a cute little shop and picked up two short sticks of bamboo.

Bamboo

I have wanted something green and alive on my desk at work for a while.  I work in a sterile-looking building with no windows and it smells of chemicals and it’s just really a cold place to be sometimes.  I got a bag of shells to put into the vase to help stabilize them, but the vase was one I had at home in a cupboard holding a funky-looking champagne cork.

Shells keeping them in place

I am so excited to take this into the office with me tomorrow.  It’s going to make my cubical a much more welcoming place, I think.

It’s sort of the same way that this board makes my home office a wonderful place.

Family and friends board

Working clockwise, we’ve got an invitation to my niece’s first birthday party, a birth announcement for my friend’s baby above a pictures of my brother’s children, a picture of my youngest nephew, flowers from my wedding bouquet, a picture of my brother’s family, a picture of my sister’s family, my parent’s wedding photo, and a photo collage on the back of a letter from a friend.

I love this board.

And, one last photo that I took while playing around taking pictures of the bamboo:

Books on my file cabinet

Handsome!

(He’s come down with a cold today, so we’re going to pretend it’s his birthday later this week when he’s feeling better. But he did get several cards today and he treated himself and a coworker out to lunch.)

For his birthday (but not really) he got this:

It's a car!

It’s AWESOME.  He’s been without a car since July so having his own set of wheels is an amazing freedom for both of us.

And look!

It's another car!

It’s the same color and almost the same shape as my car!  So we have a FLEET of schnazzy blue cars that we’re both thrilled about!

And, while we’re on the whole picture posting thing and talking about purchases, we got these for me a few weeks ago and I am still really tickled about it.

New black pumps

I wear black pumps to work several days of the week lately and my last pair were completely falling apart.  So we went out and bought me an actual grown-up, well-made pair of black pumps and they are so comfortable you wouldn’t believe.

And there you have it!

Happy birthday, Justin!

(Oh, and I’m still playing with the style sheet, so if you see something funky (like that the captions are in totally the wrong font) or if you think the text is too tiny (I can’t decide if it is or isn’t), please let me know.  Thanks!)