Landscaping Champions... sort of.

Well, we had a VERY busy weekend!  I think I say that almost every week, but it's true... We got a lot of house projects done on Saturday!  We spent a LOT of time outside doing some landscaping on the front of our house, which of course included a trip to our favorite store ever: Home Depot. We bought mulch and flowers, and spent a good portion of the rest of the day weeding our yard and raking the dead leaves, flower petals, etc from our garden area so we could put down mulch. It was my first time ever mulching!  I never really understood the point of it... But it really does make it look nice, and it should theoretically help a lot with weeds. We also bought a hanging plant for the hook by our garage, and we bought some flowers for the area by our walkway! I'd been planning on buying marigolds because I know the deer will leave those alone, but they didn't have many marigolds at Home Depot!  They only had a few, and most of them looked really bad and unhealthy... so we bought the one that looked good. And then we bought a ton of impatiens because they were on a super crazy sale (they had a LOT of them), and then we just crossed our fingers that the deer will leave them alone! We were joking that by the next day all we'd have left is our one marigold plant and we were just buying an impatiens snack for the deer... but I'm relieved to say that all of the impatiens are still there today and are looking healthy! So far so good!

Can you see my row of impatiens? And all of that mulch is new. Oh and you can kinda see Guinness peeking through the curtains while I was trying to take these pictures! 

Here's the hanging plant! It has red and yellow and purple flowers. 

Here's the view of our house from across the street! We spent a lot of time weeding and mulching that area by the mailbox. 

And that little flower plant on the right (just under the stair railing) is the one marigold plant!  That one should survive, even if that row of impatiens dies or is eaten by deer. 

Saturday night Kevin had a soccer game to go to, so I stayed home and relaxed. I watched a really charming movie I'd been wanting to see: Mr. Holmes. It stars Sir Ian McKellen and he's portraying an older Sherlock Holmes, and I really liked it. I highly enjoyed my night of resting after all of that yardwork! Guinness and I were cuddling on the couch for most of the evening because he was EXHAUSTED from going to the dog park in the morning and playing outside while we did yardwork. This is him trying to convince me to go play for the 5 minutes he was awake that evening though: 

He's tired but he's just fighting it... He's pretty much like a toddler. 

Sunday morning we both woke up pretty early, and we decided to head into Philly to go to Sabrina's Cafe for breakfast! They always have a really fun themed menu with specials. It changes almost every week, so it's really fun to go there and check out what's new for that week! The theme this week was Women in Government, so the names weren't as funny as they often are. When we got home from having brunch, we both got to work on a few house projects. I was cleaning and Kevin was working on the wiring for the kitchen, because we have a light in there that has been giving us problems for probably about 2 months. After a few hours of messing with it, he fixed it!!  It was such a major win, because that thing has been driving Kevin nuts for SO long. So, after that huge win, we decided we had done enough for the day!! We'd planned on doing projects all day, but it seemed like a good time to quit, so we went out to lunch at this Mexican restaurant we love, and we both had a cocktail. I had a mango mojito (yummm) and Kevin had a margarita on the rocks. And that evening was the Game of Thrones finale!!  It was amazing - one of the best episodes yet!!

I hope everything is going great for you guys, and I'll see you California folks soooon!!  I can't believe it's almost here!!

Lots of house projects!

We had a CRAZY busy weekend and week so far!  It has been a little too busy, so we're hoping that this coming weekend will be a little more chill so we can have some downtime together. During the bits of time that we were home, though, we did get a few projects done. On Saturday, McGee's dad came over and helped him with a huge plumbing project in the downstairs bathroom! Installing the new vanity was crazy complicated because of the weird plumbing in that bathroom (in combination with the weird set-up of the vanity we chose... whoops...), so that project has included like 4 trips to various Home Depots. McGee and his dad were able to thoroughly tackle that project on Saturday though, and they finished it!! The plumbing was beyond complicated, but it's finished and it's working so great!!  I took a picture so you can see the vanity, even though that bathroom is still a mess and there are tools everywhere... so just ignore all of that in the picture:

We still have lots to finish in that bathroom, but that plumbing was BY FAR the worst thing in there (well... maybe with the exception of having to re-build the subfloor in there... ). We're hoping to get through a lot more of that bathroom this weekend (such as some of the trim and maybe the new light switch). It's coming along!  We're hoping to have it done by mid-July when we're having some friends over. 

And while McGee and his dad were working on all of that plumbing (I am useless when it comes to plumbing...) I thought I could attempt to clean our screened porch (Florida room? I've heard it called a million things...). We hadn't been using that room much because spiders had totally taken over, and also there was pollen EVERYWHERE. During the Spring we get a lot of pollen coating everything (cars, patio table, wood trim, etc), so it badly needed to be cleaned. I should have taken a "before" picture because I'm sure you could have seen the grossness of everything!  But here's the screened patio after many hours of my cleaning: 

We have a few more big projects for that screened room, such as replacing the screens (they have tons of holes in them because they probably haven't been replaced in like 30 years...), replacing the roofing material (it's also quite old, and a few areas like to leak when it rains...), and replacing the carpet that's in there. 

We also put some of the kitchen back together, which feels really nice!  We still have a few more things to hang up, but here's a picture: 

That's an awesome cutting board with "E+K" on it that was a wedding gift from my friend Adriana (hi Adriana!), and that big picture above the table is a Yuengling (beer) puppy picture that we love. Oh and for all of you Game of Thrones fans, yes that IS a green dragon egg container next to our Keurig... I've had it for a few years, and I keep the K-cups in there! 

Another big (yet easy...) thing is that I finally framed a few wedding pictures!! My favorite picture from the wedding is the one of our whole family, and I finally framed that and it's in our dining room now. I want to surround it with some smaller non-wedding pictures, but I still have to work on that.

And here's the photo, since you can't really see it because of my shadow over the picture: 

I hope everything is going great for all of you! And for all of you CA folks, I'll be there very soon (a few weeks!!) and can't wait to see you! 

Shenandoah National Park!!!

We just got back earlier this evening from Shenandoah National Park, and all I can say is WOW. We had such an amazing time!!  The weather could not have been more perfect for us - It was warm and sunny but not hot, and we had a really good amount of wind in the evenings and at night which was super amazing with all of the tall trees at our campground (the sound of the wind in the trees sounded like the ocean!).

Our campsite was super awesome, and we had it set-up in no time at all!  After we had unloaded the car and we got everything all set-up, we ventured out to go for a hike! We went on one of the more popular hikes there which is to a place called Stony Man, and it had some truly amazing views. It was a nice introduction to Shenandoah!  After our hike, we stopped by the Visitor's Center, and then headed back to camp! We were EXHAUSTED, so we were very happy to just relax by the campfire, cook our dinner, and get to bed pretty early.

Our tent! 

The view from Stony Man!

Another Stony Man view... 

Another view from the hike... 

And another view from the hike... 

Our campfire cooking our dinner! 

The next morning we slept in a little bit (by camping standards), and then got ready to go start our hikes!  Our first hike was to Jones Run Falls, and it was super easy and beautiful on the way to the falls. But, the hike to the falls was all downhill, so I was already thinking about how hard the hike back would be! We made it to the falls, enjoyed spending some time at the falls, and then started our hike back up. Well, this is when things got interesting. You see, Shenandoah National Park is known for having a very large population of black bears... and we hadn't seen any yet. Well, that changed on our hike back from Jones Run Falls. After we started our hike back we saw a bear about 150 feet away, through a bunch of trees. So, we were super excited!  It was a very safe distance away, and it was amazing. We stood there watching it for a little bit, and then we kept walking. After we were walking a bit, I was looking down at the ground when all of a sudden I felt Kevin grab my shoulder really hard, so I knew something was super wrong. I looked up at his face and he had an urgent look on his face and when I looked where he was looking, I saw a black bear WAY too close to us. It was maybe 50 feet away, and we could quite clearly see it and it could quite clearly see us. So then we started walking really fast, while jingling our bear bells (we were prepared - we had bear bells AND bear spray as a very last resort if we were about to get mauled or something) and we started talking quite loudly. Then, within two minutes, ANOTHER bear went running across the trail in front of us, and it was only about 20 feet away from us. WAY TOO CLOSE!!  This one was adorable because it was super young and small, but we didn't have time to enjoy its cuteness because we were like, "Where is its mother?" so we paused to see if its mom was going to come running across the trail too. We couldn't see its mom anywhere, so then we started booking it CRAZY fast up the trail!  I was having a really hard time because of the steep uphill climb and the high elevation (plus I think I might just be REALLY out of shape... possibly... dang it...) so we were having to stop so I could catch my breath whenever we were at an open area that seemed safe. I'm happy to say that we made it back to our car, and only saw those 3 bears.

The falls!

The falls again.

I did not take any pictures of the bears (of course), but I took this picture of a sign at the Visitor's Center! 

After that heart-pumping hike, we found an easier (and we were hoping less bear-filled...) hike that had spectacular views! That was a truly beautiful hike, and a great one to end the day with. 

 After the hike we went back to our campsite, and had a blast hanging out on our last evening! It was perfect weather and there were some great breezes, and I couldn't get over how peaceful it sounded with all of the tall trees around our campsite. We had a really great evening, and we had a great weekend at Shenandoah National Park!

Our First Anniversary

I haven't posted in a little while, because we have been busy!!  I've also been incredibly swamped with work, so I haven't had any time to post anything. So let's see... Kevin's birthday was on Thursday! We had a pretty chill celebration with just the two of us, and I made him one of his favorite meals. And then Friday was our 1st Anniversary!!  I can't believe we have been married a whole year already! It has really flown by. We spent a lot of time this week reminiscing about where we were a year ago (Yosemite!). We have SUCH awesome memories of our wedding day/week. That whole trip to CA was amazing. Here are a few pictures!

My dear friend Lindsey got us an awesome photo book for our 1st Anniversary, and it contains photos and my blog posts from our wedding, our West Coast Party, and our East Coast Party!!  Such a thoughtful gift, and we had such a fun time looking through it and reminiscing. 

Our photo book! We love it. 

My parents also sent us a few National Parks books, since the traditional gift for the 1st Anniversary is paper! So sweet, and we've been having so much fun looking through them and making plans for future trips to some National Parks!  

Kevin and I also got each other "paper" gifts, and it was sooooo funny because we both had almost the exact same idea! We both framed our vows that we'd written together, but I think Kevin's gift to me was way sweeter because he kept our actual pieces of paper that we read from during our ceremony!!  I didn't even realize he'd kept them... but it's so sweet because you can see the creases, etc from where we folded up our vows so it's obvious that they were the actual ones from our ceremony! He also got me a 2nd gift, which was this cool vintage map of Yosemite that he also had framed. It looks SO cool, and I think we're going to put it in our entryway. For our anniversary celebration, we had a lovely night at home and we made homemade pasta and homemade alfredo. We made that dish for our Valentine's Day and it's so beyond delicious, and it's fun to make too so we decided to make it for our anniversary! 

And we decided that since it's our 1st Anniversary, we probably get to celebrate that for at least a week, right? Haha :)  So on Saturday night we went to a Wilco concert. Wilco is the band that puts on the Solid Sound Festival every other year in Massachusetts that we like to go to. We knew they were coming to Philly the day after our anniversary, so that was a definite must! And it turned out that our friend Timmy (who was also our wedding officiant!) was going with a friend too! We all met up before the show for some tailgating in the parking lot. 

And since we decided that we get to celebrate for at least a week, we are also going camping next weekend to Shenandoah National Park!! We're quite excited to see Shenandoah National Park, and do some camping. I'll be sure to take some pictures and do a post about that!