Blizzard 2016

Well, we have officially survived our first blizzard in our  new house. I've been through a few blizzards since I moved to the East Coast, and I gotta say it feels a LOT different when you own a house!! When I lived in the apartment, my only real concern was about my car in the parking lot. But for this blizzard we had our cars in our garage (so that is AWESOME), but instead I was worried about things like our roof, gutters, windows, trees (they all stayed strong!), bushes, etc...  I think we definitely ended up getting over 24 inches of snow, but I don't know the exact amount. I found a total for the town of Malvern which is right next to us, and they got just over 28 inches. It was impossible to just measure the amount in our yard because of the insane winds... It was blowing the snow all over the place and creating these massive snow drifts that were WAY over 2 feet. The snow drift on our front porch (blocking our front door) was almost 5 feet tall. We could only leave our house by the back door or the garage door.

On Friday night it was already snowing pretty good by the evening, and when we woke up on Saturday morning we had probably about 12 inches of snow already. It continued to snow quite hard throughout the whole day, so we didn't do much! We made some homemade waffles and some coffee and had a nice breakfast, and then we bundled up to take Guinness outside to play. He LOVES the snow! We had three or four trips out to play with him throughout the day yesterday, and it was exhausting for us too because trying to walk in the crazy amounts of snow was difficult! Guinness loved hopping around like a bunny though. We watched a LOT of movies yesterday, and we had a fire going all day in our fireplace. It was quite a lovely day!!

All of these pictures are from Saturday, when there was still lots more snow falling: 

He was digging.. He thinks it's super fun to bury his frisbee in the snow! We lost one yesterday...

Our house yesterday afternoon. You can see the snow drift on the lower roof over the front door. 

Here's a photo series I call "Bounce through the snow and attack the frisbee":

 And today we spent about 4 hours shoveling our driveway (just half of it) and walkway and front porch. It is a LOT of snow. Oh and McGee climbed up on our roof and was shoveling some of the snow off, because it was SO much snow! The wind had caused quite a snow drift on our roof, so it was quite heavy and that can be dangerous. After about 4 hours, we could no longer shovel (our muscles were giving up), so we came inside to eat a very late lunch and now we're watching football! So far this Broncos-Patriots game is good!  I'm rooting for the Broncos (most people are very aware of my hatred for the Patriots...), and then I'm rooting for the Panthers in the next game. I think Broncos-Panthers would be a great Super Bowl!  Here are some pictures from today, so you can maybe tell that we got a lot more snow since the pictures I took yesterday:

This is after we'd started shoveling.. You can see how deep the snow was we were having to shovel! 

Here's some of the snow hanging off our roof... McGee ended up slicing it off the roof with our pole saw.

This is when I'd been shoveling our walkway for quite a long time, and I'd almost reached our front porch. 

Here's a photo series of McGee sledding down our street. When we first moved-in he'd joked that he wanted to sled down our street (it's insanely steep), and this was his chance! There was a HUGE mound of snow at the bottom of our street, so that made it safe-ish because it'd stop him (plus no one was out driving because the roads weren't very drive-able yet): 

And here's a few more pictures of our house area: 

There's our beers to help us with shoveling. We had music going too. 

 Here's some pictures of Guinness playing in the yard today:

Burying his frisbee... I was keeping an eye on this one since we already lost one yesterday!

 That's the Blizzard of 2016! Sorry for the abundance of pictures (but not really! :) ).

Oh Jonas...

So, it's looking like Winter Storm Jonas is going to be a doozy. I've seen predictions for everything from 12 inches of snow to 24 inches of snow... but no matter what it's going to be a LOT of snow. The snow can be fun as long as you don't have to try to drive in it, but the bummer part is now it's going to be a blizzard too, which means insane winds. So, that part is NOT fun at all, because with a blizzard you get a lot of tree limbs falling and damage. So, my fingers are crossed that all of our trees behave themselves and stay strong during this storm!

Philly is towards the right-top area of the pink. So this particular forecast is predicting 18-24 inches of snow. 

We went shopping on Wednesday night to get supplies, because we wanted to beat the rush. Grocery stores get totally ransacked before big storms, so I've definitely gone too late before and found the shelves completely empty. It's a pretty crazy experience. Years ago when I lived in DC I was out of bread and milk before a big snowstorm, and I went shopping way too late! When I got to the store there was no bread but there were a few packages of hamburger buns left (so that's pretty much bread... it worked just fine for sandwiches), and there was no milk except buttermilk (YUCK) so instead of milk I ended up buying orange juice with added calcium... haha :)  It was the best I could do for that storm. But, I learned my lesson, and now I prepare at least a few days in advance for big storms!  We have lots of supplies (lots of food, milk, beer, wine, water, etc!), so we're as prepared as we can be for big ol' Jonas.

I did not take this picture, but this is what grocery stores look like right about now! 

So, I'll probably post again sometime this weekend (with pictures!) because I'm sure I'll have lots of time... We definitely can't go anywhere this weekend!  It'll be a fun weekend though, full of lots of cooking, relaxing, and watching movies. I hope you all have a great weekend!! 

Winter is definitely here!

It has been SO cold!!  Which also means we've now had the first fire in our fireplace at our house! We moved-in in March last year, so we didn't have any fires then, and the beginning of this winter has been too weird to have fires yet. With the windchill factored in, the "feels like" temperature the past few days has been around zero and even dipped into negative temperatures at night!  It's crazy.  And we've had a few days with a little snow, but nothing much... But the end of this week is supposed to be snowy. The last forecast I saw was predicting about 1.5 feet of snow between Friday and Saturday, so we're making sure we're prepared for that. We'll do some big shopping tomorrow to make sure our house is well-stocked with supplies, just in case it ends up being really bad... It could also end up being nothing at all, so who knows. It's better to be prepared though!

Guinness enjoying the light snow we had the other day! 

Our first fire in our house! That tree rug is fireproof so it protects our wood floors and area rug in case an ember flies out through the screen. 

I'm sure we'll be watching lots of movies this weekend if it does snow, which will include some of the 8 movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. In case you don't know but are curious, the 8 movies are: The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Brooklyn, Bridge of Spies, The Revenant, Spotlight, The Big Short, and Room. The past few years we've tried to see all of the Best Picture nominees (I don't think we've ever seen them all, but we've been close!), but usually we've seen at least a few before the nominations... But this year we haven't seen any of the 8 yet!  So, we'll see how many we end up seeing... I know we definitely want to see The Martian, and we'd wanted to see that while it was at the movie theater but we didn't get a chance. So, I think that'll happen this weekend!  Lately we've been watching the 2nd season of Fargo, and it is SO good!!  We loved the 1st season, but we didn't get a chance to watch the 2nd season while it was being televised, so we made sure to DVR it and now we only have 4 episodes left!  It's amazing, and we're completely hooked.

As usual, we've been keeping busy around the house too!!  Last weekend we ended up putting in a new dishwasher. We were going to wait at least a few months before getting a new dishwasher, but the one we wanted ended up going on a CRAZY sale, and then with our gift cards it barely cost anything! So, we bought it and went and picked it up, and Kevin installed it (with Guinness's help, of course). The only bummer is that the valve to turn the water on/off to the dishwasher ended up springing a leak (the plumbing in this old house really likes keeping us on our toes... ), so Kevin is going to fix that this week.

Guinness stood right by Kevin, whining and making noises. 

Here's Kevin cracking up. Guinness was "talking" the whole time. 

Then Guinness decided he needed to get a toy, but he was still watching Kevin. 

He's so cute. And he was soooo confused by what Kevin was doing. 

Here's our beautiful new dishwasher!!  We just can't use it until we fix that darn valve... 

I'll keep you updated on the snow situation, and I'll take pictures if we do get a lot of snow!  I know Guinness would love it if we do... He looooves the snow. I hope you're all doing well and are warmer than we are here! :)  

Go Flyers!

We had a fun weekend! Friday night we just relaxed, and then Saturday morning we went out to breakfast at our favorite diner (they have THE BEST eggs benedict... and Kevin loves their pancakes). After breakfast, it was time to get ready to drive into town to go to the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game!!  I got Kevin tickets as one of his Christmas gifts. We got there a little early, and we stopped by the XFinity Live bar area and had a few beers, and then went over to the stadium! We had a blast walking around the stadium (and we got a bunch of free swag from vendors that had tables set up), and then we got to our seats right before the game started. The people sitting around us were awesome and so fun, and it was a GREAT game! The Flyers ended up winning 4-0.

This statue is outside of the stadium

We had really nice seats! They were high up, but the view was great. 

And since we weren't productive at all on Saturday, we were REALLY productive on Sunday!  We did a lot around the house. Kevin grouted the tile in our downstairs bathroom, so that bathroom is REALLY coming along now!  

Not much else is going on really... It was warm this weekend (in the 60s), but now today it's in the 20s... so Mother Nature is freaking out or something. Today really feels like Winter again though. And they're saying a bit of snow tomorrow maybe??  We'll see, and I'll definitely take pictures if we do get some snow.

I hope everyone is doing well!!   

Hellooooooo 2016!!!!

It's hard to believe that 2016 is here already! 2015 was quite amazing, and flew by!!  We bought our house, got married, and had our honeymoon all in 2015!!  We're planning on having a pretty chill 2016, which will be quite nice :)  We do have a few trips already planned, but nothing too crazy yet! We also have lots of house projects planned, of course.

OH MY GOODNESS is Winter here with a vengeance now! Winter wanted to wait awhile to make her appearance this year (it was 70 degrees here on Christmas), but now we are having some single digit weather. The "feels like" temperature this morning was 3 degrees! That is painfully cold. We still haven't had any snow or ice yet though, so that's good!

Our New Year's Eve was quite relaxing, as it usually is. We made some steaks at home, and drank some champagne, and watched some movies!  The next morning we got up pretty early to head to the train station to take the train into the city for the big Mummer's Parade. Our train ended up being an HOUR late (they were having electrical problems), so that wasn't very fun... But once we got into the city it was fun to see all of the parade madness. We walked over to our friend Timmy's apartment and  met up with some other friends there, and we all hung out there drinking champagne and watching the parade on TV for a bit before heading outside to join in the madness. After we'd watched the parade for quite awhile, a few of us walked over to Big Mike's apartment and had some pizza and beers there. By the time we got back home, we were soooo exhausted! It was a long day of being totally unproductive and irresponsible, and it was awesome.

Some of the floats/props getting ready for the parade!  

Some of the parade! 

More parade! And that's our friend Leslie in the blue scarf (and Big Mike is on the right)

Here's McGee and Jen (Mike's girlfriend) and Mike! 

Here we are hanging out in Mike's kitchen! He's holding one of his cats, and Timmy is clearly telling a super awesome story! 

On Saturday we FINALLY got our new fridge! I don't know if I've told most of you the fridge saga, but we've had TWO failed attempts at fridge deliveries... The two fridges were horribly damaged, but it turns out the 3rd time was the charm! We finally got our new fridge. Here's our old fridge:

The old fridge was dying, and it was also actually too big for the space. You're supposed to have at least a tiny bit of space on the sides for some air flow, and this one was literally wedged in the space. We had to take the molding off of the wall to be able to pull the fridge out! And it had scratch marks on the sides from where it scraped the cabinets and wall. So... here's our new (slightly smaller but appropriately sized for the space) refrigerator: 

It's slightly smaller, but it's also WAY nicer!!  And we moved the old fridge down to the basement and we'll use it for drinks, etc. which will clear out some space in our main fridge! 

Our kitchen is slowly but surely coming along. We still need to remove all of the wallpaper (and they wallpapered that whole wall behind the fridge too... how lovely of them...) and then we need to paint, and then eventually we'll need a new dishwasher (WAY cheaper than a fridge!), and we still need new hinges on our cupboards (they're still the brass ones that are in rough shape...). And then that room is officially done! 

We've also been working on the downstairs bathroom, and I'll post updates on that soon. It's slowly but surely coming along. We're also making good progress on our basement! I'll take pics of all of that soon. 

I hope everyone is having a great New Year so far!!