Hooray!!!

We have somehow completed the invisible fence for our yard.  Actually, I DO know how we did it... We gave up two of our weekends. Haha :)  We worked on the invisible fence both days last weekend, and we knew we'd have to work on it really hard this weekend too if we wanted to finish. On Saturday morning, we decided that we were just going to push through and work as hard as we possibly could all day, so that hopefully we wouldn't have to work on Sunday and we could just lay on the couch and be unbelievably tired and sore. WELL, we worked from about 9am until about 6pm, but sadly we were not finished... We were so tired by Saturday evening that we could barely move. But somehow on Sunday morning we managed to drag our sore bodies back out to our yard by 8am, and by 12:45 in the afternoon I'm SO happy to say that we were FINISHED. We did it!!!  Oh my gosh that was hard. Now we just have to train Guinness to understand the fence, so hopefully that goes smoothly...

Our cute boy!

This coming weekend we're supposed to go camping for one night at Assateague Island National Park with McGee's parents and some of their family friends. I didn't know anything about Assateague Island, but now that I've read a little about it, it sounds AWESOME! It's located in Maryland and Virginia, and there are wild horses running around! It sounds super cool.

Here's a picture of some of the horses on Assateague beach! 

However, we aren't quite sure if we're going to end up being able to go to Assateague.... One reason is that it's supposed to be raining all weekend, and camping in the rain isn't really a lot of fun (shout-out to Shannon and my family, and our super hilarious camping trip in the pouring rain back in high school!). Another reason is that there's still the potential that the National Parks are going to shut down because of the stupid Federal budget issues...  Which brings me to another topic:

Our honeymoon is in a few weeks! As I've mentioned, we're planning on going to a lot of National Parks, including the Grand Canyon and Utah's National Parks. So... we've got a rough idea for a contingency plan, just in case the parks are shut down (and for that long). There are plenty of other things to do in the area, including Las Vegas (of course), so we'll have fun no matter what.  I hope we get to do everything we'd planned, but it'll be a blast no matter what.

Oh Grand Canyon, I hope to see you soon! 

I hope you all had a great weekend, and I hope you did a LOT less work than we did!!  I swear, I'm so sore that even typing hurts! 

So. Exhausted.

Wow, this weekend really wore me out! I am far more exhausted from this weekend than I was on Friday from my work-week! On Saturday morning, we had an appointment with some window people to get quotes on replacement windows for our house. Our windows are quite terrible, and it'll be really nice to have them replaced before the Winter. Even though it isn't a glamorous purchase, it's very needed and that's what we're going to spend our wedding gift money on. So, we had an 8am appointment on Saturday, so we were up bright and early to make sure we were ready for that!

After the window appointment, we started working on installing our invisible fence outside. So, we were doing a LOT of digging around the perimeter of our yard. We got kind of a late start because the window appointment took a lot longer than we thought, so it was already pretty warm outside and the bugs were out in full-force!  We were both getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and biting gnats (yes, in the middle of the day...). By late afternoon, we were exhausted and gross so we had to hurry up and get ready to head into Philly for dinner!

Kevin's friend Big Mike (the opera singer) had given us a gift certificate for this restaurant that we love in Philly (it's called The Dandelion) and made us reservations for Saturday night, and it's actually really close to where Big Mike's opera was that night. So we had a lovely dinner at the Dandelion (I had steak, and McGee had fish and chips), and then we headed over to Big Mike's opera. It was a GREAT show this year! It's great every year really. This year's was called Jump the Moon, and it was the TRUE story of a group of women at Harvard University in the 1890s that discovered and cataloged more stars than anyone ever had before or SINCE!!  Isn't that crazy??  And most people (myself included) have never heard of these amazing women of scientific history, and that's because their boss (Edward Pickering) got most of the credit. The main storyline was about Annie Jump Cannon, who ended up classifying over 500,000 stars in her lifetime and developed the classification system for stars that is still used today.

Here's the Dandelion! The floor we were on (it's 3 floors) was dog-themed! Those globe lights at the bar say "Man's Best Friend". 

The curtains had dogs on them and there was dog paraphernalia everywhere! We loved it!!  

Here's the program from the opera! It was SO good! Big Mike played Pickering, so he was kind of the villain but he was HILARIOUS too. 

So we were home quite late that night, and then the next morning (Sunday) we were up bright and early to continue digging for the invisible fence. So we dug for many hours, and we still aren't even halfway done.... It is very hard work. We think we should be able to finish next weekend though!!  And then Sunday evening we went to a Philadelphia Union soccer game with our friend Juliff. So, we were home late again last night!!  My goodness it was a busy weekend!! We basically collapsed into bed last night.

Here's the soccer field!

And this view is from our seats too!!  I love the view. 

There's Juliff and McGee! This picture cracks me up because McGee totally wasn't looking... I have another picture where he IS looking, but this one is funny to me. 

I hope you all had a great weekend, and are having a great week so far!!  

Fall?

I think Fall is almost kinda here?  Maybe?  The temperatures and humidity have still felt pretty Summer-y, but we have a LOT of leaves falling in our yard already... and football starts tonight... so that says "Fall" to me! Here's hoping the weather feels Fall-ish soon.

It's been awhile since my last post!!  I was SUPER busy with work (working until around 10pm every night), and then my parents came to visit for a long weekend so I was having too much fun with them to do a blog post! They arrived on Thursday evening, and left on Tuesday morning, and it was SO great to have them here!! We did some super fun stuff together (such as the Yuengling Brewery!), but we also had lots of chill time at the house to just hang out which was GREAT. It was my parents first time meeting Guinness, and Guinness was SO out of control the first night they were here, but by the next day he'd really calmed down and was acting like his normal self! So my parents got to see his calm sweet side (his normal side nowadays), so I was happy about that. My parents also helped me and McGee with a few projects around our house, so that was awesome! It was so great to have them here, and the time went by way too quickly!!  I'm happy that I'll get to see them in just about 3 more months.

Here's my awesome parents!  This was at the Yuengling Brewery, after our tour was over. 

McGee and I went to a concert last night with Mo (aka Maureen, aka McGee's sister), and it was BY FAR the strangest show I've ever gone to. Instead of an opening band, the band had an opening theatrical group since the concert was technically part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (it's like an arts festival that showcases experimental and progressive performances), so it was WEIRD. The band we were there to see (Dr. Dog) joined a theatrical group, and there was a mix of music and really strange performance art. I felt like maybe if I'd been on some sort of crazy hard drug the show would've been more interesting, but instead me and McGee and Mo all kept just looking at each other with huge eyes and a "WTF?" expression. So, that went on for about an hour... and parts of it were entertaining but other parts were just way too weird... And then after that hour was up, the band (Dr. Dog) played a full regular concert which was really great. So, I took some pictures of the REALLY WEIRD stuff from the first hour of the show... Oh and I also took a picture of the girl that was standing next to us, because she brought her 3 month old puppy. That just seemed beyond cruel (and weird) to me... The whole show I was SO worried about that poor puppy's ears!!  My ears were ringing after the show was over, so I can only imagine how that poor dog's ears were feeling.

Here was one of the lab coat people with a lion head on... and an astronaut I think? 

The lion head person, and an alligator... 

The alligator walking around stage... 

Here were some lab coat folks dancing across stage... And some people that were dressed as security or secret service were taking all of the instruments from the Dr. Dog band members while the Dr. Dog band members changed into boy band attire... 

Here's Dr. Dog in boy band attire... They had some sweet boy band dance moves too. 

Here was the swamp creature (those are cassette tape ribbons draped all over him....) and he sang a song called "Swamp Livin'"

I don't know how well you can see this, but this was the girl standing by us holding her little tiny 3 month old puppy. I was so worried about that dog the whole show! 

So, since it's sorta kinda Fall now, I thought I'd make my yearly Fall Bucket List!  A few are repeats, but a few are different (such as our HONEYMOON!!!  Soooooo beyond excited for our honeymoon next month - Here's the link to the description of it: http://peanutshire.blogspot.com/2015/04/honeymoon-plans.html).