First, we went to a pepper and tomato show. It has tons of different varieties of peppers and tomatoes! Too bad we had already bought and planted almost all of the tomatoes and peppers that we needed. I did pick up one more tomato than we needed, mostly because I liked the name: Elfin. It is also a small tomato on a small plant, like an elf! I know, strange, but I liked it.
My dad, who loves to buy plants, and is actually the reason why we have a pepper farm on our lattice, bought 50 different varieties of tomato plants! And no... his backyard isn't that big, he just fills it with plants! Although, two of those were ones I asked him to grow for me. One was called Lisa King... and who can resist buying a plant with their name in the title. The other one was White Beauty (I think) and it was a white variety of tomatoes, and it sounded interesting.
After we bought our 6 plants, we went home, and ran various errands for the rest of the day, including a trip to Lowe's to buy some rose plants for our front planter.
When we got home, I put some of those 6 plants in pots, while Blake dug out the sago palm that was in the front planter, and then we planted three rose plants in its place.
The rest of the pictures above are of the garden currently. Blake took more earlier, but he took them all from farther away, and I prefer chronicling our plants growing with a much closer view. The best things happening lately are our first green bell pepper growing, our first tomato growing, and probably the best looking strawberry that we have ever had (already eaten, and it tasted as good as it looks!).
I love seeing all of our plants grow from day to day, and I cannot wait until summer so that I can pick all of our fresh produce!!! We are planning on being more ambitious this year than previous years with making our our pasta sauces, pickling peppers, making cucumbers, and drying both pepper and tomatoes, and overall trying to make sure that we use all of our crop (some got wasted last year), and extend how long we can enjoy the produce.
I intend (though we will see how well this goes) to keep up with posts about the garden, because I truly take a lot of pleasure in seeing the growth and looking back on where it was before.
So... I created this blog to keep tabs more or less on myself so that someday I can look back and see what life was like at this time in my life.
It isn't a very productive tool if you only use it every blue moon. Sigh.
I have meant to post for forever, but I just feel like I have nothing of importance to write, to share, because I feel like life is the same as it has been for the last few years, and it is just the daily grind, and the exciting future that I thought I would be having by now, is not here yet.
But there was a song on my ipod that I FORCED myself to listen to today, and it helped me decide that I should post something about my life here and now. It was the country song "You're gonna miss this." Basically, it follows a girl's life, as she complains about being 18 in high school, her mom reminds her she'll miss it later. Then she is just married, and looking forward and talking about her future with a house and kids, and again, gets reminded that she's going to miss the time she is in. Then it fast forwards to when she has a couple crazy young kids running around, and she has everything going wrong at the house at once, and then someone whose kids are already grown reminds her that she is going to miss this too. The chorus is "you're gonna miss this, you're gonna want this back, you're wish these days hadn't gone by so fast, these are the good times, so take a good look around, you may not know it now, but you're gonna miss this."
I guess what I am trying to get out is that although I definitely look forward to kid time, and I sometimes focus too much on it, I need to enjoy the time I am in now... because once we have kids, I will miss this time of just us.
Highlights of the year so far:
- In September, I started attending Joyful life for the first time. I have talked about going for years, and I always have attended church, but this is a Bible study with homework, but then after the study the group meets and talks about our homework for the week, and prays with each other and generally hangs out.
I am really glad that I made the decision to finally join. The regular group at our church is on Friday mornings, and I had always talked about how once I had kids, and wasn't working, I was going to start going. But at some point this summer, I realized that I shouldn't delay doing this group till then when they have a Thursday night study specifically for women like me who work.
I have gotten to meet a great group of women who all love the Lord, and who I get along with really well, and I have made a point of going to all of the extra dinners and events that the group has outside of Bible study too. Definitely a great new thing that I am currently doing.
- Other news this year: Blake has gotten in shape. I have to get a new picture on here, but he really looks incredible. He is down to 163 and only 10% body fat!!!!! For reference, he started at 240 with 26% body fat.
A part of this is that we have become faithful gym goers. I go every Saturday and Sunday morning, and most Tuesdays. He goes Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sundays and some Saturdays. He has a personal trainer, but more of it is that he has been eating much better. I really am enjoying my Saturday morning class, even though it is torture too! It is called Body works plus abs (at LA fitness) and oh my goodness do I feel the workout! But I also feel like I am really getting stronger too, and so I keep dragging myself there on Saturdays, which is a big deal because I used to only go when Blake went. I still weigh about the same... but its definitely still the healthy range, so that's fine with me.
- My class this year is the hardest year EVER! In my past three years, I tended to take care of all discipline problems within the classroom, only involving the principal in extreme cases. This year, I feel like I have a child in there every day. (More than literal the last two days, between today and yesterday, I have had three kids in to talk to him).
I have been finishing my BTSA program and will finally be able to say its done in May, and I am soooo thankful for that. I have made my focus this year on behavior for obvious reasons, and overall, I think I have made huge improvements in my class. All the same, I am looking forward to summer.
-Blake has embraced working outdoors (a nice side effect of his weight loss is that he has a lot more energy and drive to do things around the house and in the backyard), and our garden this year is looking like it will be even better than last year's, and I am sure I will have a lot to post about it later too.
We have a lot more different plants, and a lot more varieties of plants that we had last year like tomatoes and peppers. We also are adding to what trees we have. We have already added a blood orange, and we are soon planning on adding an avocado tree and a citrus salad tree too (its a really cool tree that has a bunch of different citrus fruit trees grafted onto the same tree, so that it produces some of all sorts of different fruits! See the video below if you're interested)
We have a couple blueberry plants too this year which is new as well. Blake even extended our "garden" space to on top of the lattice on our patio as too. (Picture to follow in a future blog).
Heh... I guess I had a good amount to write about. And plenty more updates to come on how our garden is doing, and on my two trips in April, my birthday coming up... there is a lot going on right now... and life really is good.
Sometimes it takes writing out what you have going for you to realize it for yourself. Now I just have to get it from my head (my logical side), into my heart (those pesky emotions).
The topic of this week is rain, and lots of it. There has been storms passing though California since Monday, and that means that the kids have been inside all week, and I am having to find new ways of keeping them quiet.
With that though, God is so good in how the rain comes. Early in the week, when I was driving myself, there would be tons of rain throughout the day, but not in the morning or afternoon when I was driving.
Wednesday, Blake decided to drive me to work because he knows I hate driving in the rain, and it was not really rainy on the way there, but he figured it might be after school, and MAN am I glad he did. When it was time to pick me up it was pouring! Totally, completely, scary to drive in pouring down.
Today he drove me too, but it wasn't really needed because the rain wasn't falling hard on any of our drives (to work, from work, to Bible study, from Bible study).
When we got home from my Bible study, we decided to take Roxie on a short walk, and we had decided on the route. It was windy, cold and we knew the storm was coming (I brought an umbrella and rain boots in case it came back during the walk) but we decided she deserved the chance to get out. So we go, no problem, no rain, and then we reach our door, he is getting out the key, when we both turn because it sounds like rain. We look back, can't tell for sure if it is rain or wind, he walks out a bit... sure enough it started raining LITERALLY right when we got home. I was shocked! But I really shouldn't be because God is so good. (not that it would be a big deal to walk in the rain... but for it to stay dry for the exact length of our walk, considering all of Roxie's sniffing and everything... crazy!)
We're told that there are only a few more days of this before it lets up, and it is none too soon. But it is good for the plants, so I am thankful for it.
Over Christmas break we completed the Laundry room, another long standing project. I had no cupboard doors in there for over a year because it kept on getting past over for more urgent projects like the garden or the bathroom.
But now it is done, and I LOVE it! It is really cute, actually probably my cutest room in the house, which is sad because only Blake and I go in there, but it makes doing laundry better, and that's worth the effort in there all by itself.
The only thing we might add later is a window covering... but again, its just us who go in there, so why bother?
So... after months... and months... of not posting, here is a new year, and I want to get better at chronicling my life... because I should. I don't want to look back on my twenties and have NO idea what went on during this time.
First things first, we did get the bathroom done. It was done by Thanksgiving 09, which was our goal. I really like how it turned out, and it feels like there is tons more space in it, which was our goal.
I LOVE the furniture we found for the corner. Its big enough to fit what I wanted on/in it, but still small enough that it feels big.
The toilet is a special water saving toilet, which scared me at first, but it works great! We are actually planning on putting another one of the same toilets in our master bathroom upstairs.
The mirror was a great find. I was looking at "shopping" websites all over the internet, but was not finding the large oval wood mirror that I was looking for. I ended up going to ebay and buying this antique one, and I couldn't be happier.
Although I don't love WHY we had to remodel this bathroom, I am really excited that it finally got done, and better than we imagined. Yay!
For the last few weeks we have been working on our bathroom remodel. This was not a project started by choice. This came about because our toilet leaked... a really bad leak... that spread into our living room and into our garage.
We had to pull up the flooring and get the vanity/sink out to dry out the area so that there was no chance of mold. Now, we had intended since moving in that we wanted to remodel this bathroom.
This was for many reasons. First, their molding and paint job was only okay, and that is being generous. Also, the toilet was a long toilet, and it was a small bathroom. You barely could clear your legs when you tried to close the door. Also, it had a full counter and sink on one side of the room. Being a half bathroom, that design made it seem extremely small.
We wanted to redo the paint, and the molding. We wanted to replace the toilet with a circular one, instead of the oval. We wanted to put a pedestal sink instead of the big counter and sink that were in there already.
With the need to rip out the flooring and the vanity anyways... we decided now was the time.
Above is where it is currently at. The room has been painted, and the flooring put in. I also included a picture of the sink (still in the box, that picture is from the side of the box) and the main artwork that I want to go in.
This corner table is what I picture in the corner for our little storage place in the room, since we are losing the cabinets with the pedestal sink. We will also be finding a toilet paper roll holder.
We had quite the treat in our garden today... lots and lots of these little tomato caterpillars, and one of them was not so small.
So what did the scientist and the teacher decide to do with these bugs? Kill them... no. Spray them? ... no. We put them in a glass container, put foil on top, and poked holes in it so that we can observe them over the next few days/weeks depending on how long they live.
Why?
Because we really don't like killing bugs, but we obviously can't leave them to eat our tomatoes, and we do like observing nature... so they are, for the time being... our new pets lol.
