New patio!

We've been in our house a little over a year now and we've painted, put in new flooring, bought some new furniture, etc. Well what we both really wanted to take care of this summer was adding a patio in the backyard. I find it a little strange that nobody ever put anything in the backyard; no deck, patio or anything and this house has been here since the 70's. Here's what the backyard looked like before:

Over the past two days, our new patio was installed. We did not do it ourselves since we're both in school and didn't want to spend our entire summer working on it. These guys knocked it out in two days and I love the way it turned out! We used a newer product, Rosetta Grand Flagstone. It's concrete pieces made to look like natural stone. And here's the finished product:

Now I have to figure out what kind of plants/flowers to plants in the little dirt space in between the boulder wall and the patio. Oh, and buy some patio furniture. Why does it have to be so expensive?!

Trash the Dress Pics

So I decided it was time to trash my dress since I've been married, oh, going on 4 years now. And it still fits (actually it's a little big) so now was as good a time as any. Plus my friend Rachel didn't have any of these types of photos for her portfolio yet, so it worked for both of us :o)

Here's one pic...


And here's a link to the first blog post and the second blog post. There's quite a few pics on these links but if you want to see the whole gallery, email me at lostarz at gmail dot com and I'll send you the password for the full gallery.

I love they way they turned out!

All the pretty flowers

As I was playing around with my camera yesterday, I realized I haven't taken any pics of the flowers we planted this year. I decided to go with Pansies...I just love the color.

A wedding & A weekend

So I decided to take last Friday off of work. I had a wedding to go to later in the day, so it seemed like a good enough reason to take the entire day off :o) I'm glad I did because I found out that my good friend Michelle was going to be in town for a wedding she was in so I was able to have lunch with her. She lives in Delaware...I wish she could move back to Michigan!

So like I said, that night we went to a wedding. A friend of mine from high school was finally marrying her sweetheart. Congrats to Lisa and Nick!

...and a few of me and Jim

...the first dance...her dress was gorgeous!

...me, Lisa and Elena posing for a pic

The newlyweds are currently enjoying their honeymoon in Mexico and the pictures she's adding to Facebook look fabulous!

Saturday around 1-ish Jim and I went to pick up my brother to head to our cottage up north. My parents were already there so we were meeting them up there. We got up there around 6-ish and cracked open some beers. My parents made dinner, we made a bonfire and just hung out for the night.

Now, when we were little, we went up north as a family for every Memorial Day weekend. One thing I remember the most is the fly-in pancake breakfasts we used to go to on Sunday morning of that weekend. The pancake breakfast was held at this little airport up there and it was always cool to watch the planes fly in and out. Well we didn't hit up the pancake breakfast, but Jim, my brother and I went over there so I could take a few pictures of the planes.

We spent the rest of the weekend just hanging around the cabin, eating (lol), watched the Red Wings game and had another bonfire. Sunday night we had fun with shutter speed on my camera. I don't have a picture uploaded right now but let's just say that my brother had fun with a flashlight, a long shutter speed and dirty drawings lol.

And you know I took more pics. Check out my cool sun flare picture I posted on my photo blog.

The treadmill is better for me

So after last Monday's C25K run on the treadmill, I was proud of myself for finishing it relatively easy, and was excited to move on. Well the rest of the week sucked. Wednesday was when I ran into the dreaded side stitch, and then Saturday it was just so hot outside that I think I only made it 20 minutes.

Well today I ran again on the treadmill and had no problems. So I think that's the solution...run on the treadmill for now. I don't know what it is, but it feels like when I run outside, I'm not going anywhere. I know that sounds stupid since on a treadmill I'm running in place, but at least I can see the number of laps and the distance increase. Outside, I have no idea how far or how fast I'm going.

So I think for now I'm going to stick with the treadmill and then maybe once I'm able to run longer distances, I'll head back outside. But I really hate the heat. I mean really. I'm in Michigan so you'd think I would love the summers, but I don't really like being outside in the sun if it's over 80 degrees. Ridiculous right? lol, oh well.

Squirrels are pretty smart

So last weekend we decided to hang a bird feeder from our little tree outside our condo. We figured it would give the cats something else to look at to pass the time. So everything's all hunky dory and then Friday I notice that all of a sudden there's an extreme amount of bird seed missing...I just figured the birds got really hungry. So Jim goes out there to fill the feeder, but no such luck...

...the squirrels chewed on all the little plastic attachments until one broke loose and let out all the bird seed. That explained why the squirrel was hanging around a lot munching on bird seed. I just figured the birds were messy and dropping everything...lol...

So today at Lowe's I bought another one. It has copper attachments, but the tube is still plastic...lets hope the squirrels don't chew through this one.