update on... yoga room?

hi all!  i am happy to report i'm feeling soooo much better than last weekend and back up to [most of] my usual tricks!  i'm healing slowly but surely and it will still be a little while til i am feeling totally 100% normal, but i'll take this little victory of not having taken any pain killers all weekend so far!  it's definitely summer here and our AC-free house is turning into a sweat lodge.  ugh.

after lots of work, we are finally done with the living room!  i'm so so so excited with how it's turned out.  just last weekend i posted that we took a little trip up to one of my favorite stores and bought an awesome new piece.  it's finally up and it's the perfect finishing touch of the living room!

so there it is!  the best part - it's just little clips that hold up the pictures/coasters/books/postcards/menu from our wedding, so we can change them as many times as we want!  and knowing how bored i get with my surroundings... it will be often.

the top half of our awesome find, with pictures from a bunch of our trips,
postcards we used as save-the-dates for our wedding, coasters from some
european pubs we love... 

the bottom half, with the cocktail menu from our wedding reception, an
old wine label, snapshots from prague, my parents at a college dance, and
a book called 'secret love letters and the legend of the lovers from prague,'
and a picture philip drew :)

happy father's day!

hi all.  sorry for my absence this last week, but things have been a bit off.  here's the short version: after a long day of yard work last sunday, i woke up monday morning with a bad pain in my right side.  it got steadily worse all week and by thursday i had an appointment to see my doctor.  i'll cut the rest out since this isn't really a medical blog, but basically i have some nerve problems in one of my nerve branches that starts at my spinal cord and stretches along my right side to my belly button. nothing serious, just a few weeks of chronic pain that i can't shake.  so between that, game 7 on wednesday night (SO STOKED about the b's win!) and a fancy work event thursday night, there wasn't much time for anything but laying in bed with bags of frozen sugar snaps on my side.  :(

BUT i was determined to still have something resembling a good weekend.  saturday was spent with our bikes and our neighbors at the highlands street fair in our neighborhood, which was so much fun!  lots of beer, lots of food, lots of music... and one bike wreck for me.  go figure.

so now here we are sunday, where i am recovering and roasting peppers while philip is hard at work on house stuff.  just wanted to say hi to everyone!

i was going to do a bit of blogging about some new pieces i picked up at one of my favorite shops today, but i think i'm going to wait... i have a shipment of photos coming in from apple this week and i'll blog then once i get some up.

happy father's day to all, especially my own dad! :)

me & dad, sept 2008 :)

the backyard: update i

happy sunday night all!  it's not like me to be blogging so late, but what can i say... i'm inspired by these longer days we have been having.  it's been an absolutely lovely weekend here i must say, and i definitely have some fantastic updates for you all!  we have started on our summer project: the back yard.  yikes.  i like to say that when we first moved in i'm pretty sure that is where they filmed hostel.  yeah.

but let's backtrack to the playing part of the weekend before i get to the working part :)  friday night philip and i did one of the things we do best: played our hockey drinking game.  now this is something that i made up way back in the day but is still just as fun today as it was two years ago.  there are only a few rules to the game:

-1 drink for every shot on goal
-3 drinks for every goal

the rest of the goals depend on the game you are watching.  so it can be 1 drink every time you see sidney crosby if its a pens game, 1 drink for every fight if it's an avs - detroit game, etc.  friday night we had some good ones though:

-2 drinks every time the h. and d. sedin are referred to as "the sedins" or "the sedin twins"
-1 drink for every crowd cheer of "louuuuuuuuuuuuuu" no matter the absent-minded stop
-1 drink for every mention of how damn old recchi is

so obviously we were having a good time :) until the game ended.  saturday morning i had to work - but a soon as i got home i found philip working in the back yard, and he asked me, "what do you want to do today?"  my reply: "go to the park and drink."  and that's exactly what we did.  we both got bikes last weekend, so it was a perfect time to take them on a test run.  we packed backpacks with a six-pack of alaskan amber, a picnic blanket, a deck of cards and some triscuits and headed off to sloan's lake.  after a few hours of drinking beneath the shelter of an aged tree (that one's for you philip!) we decided to head home.  it was about 6pm and we had been in the park for three hours.  so on the bike ride home, i was leading the way... and decided to bike over to three dog instead :) we enjoyed a few more drinks and some good conversation with one of our favorite couples the kremhellers who came out and met us.  it was an awesome day - even when we biked back to our house at 10:30pm.

but sunday we were done playing and on to work.  we were up fairly early and went to pick up all the supplies we would need for a successful yard work day and then started at it.  last year we laid the sod, so a lot of the hard work has already been done.  this summer it's more about fine-tuning the yard, making the sides look presentable and having a place where we can sit outside and enjoy our hard work. just a reminder of what the backyard looked like last summer when we moved in: