Happy Stuff

Hey guys!  Now it's time for a catch-up on the happy stuff from the past 2 months.  So, mainly a lot of flowers and birds and Guinness.  Oh, and at the very bottom of this post I will let you in on a little idea that I had for this coming weekend that I thought would be fun for me and Kevin, so you might think it'd be a fun idea for you too!!  Or, you might think we're lame... It could go either way!  You'll just have to wait and see...

Happy Stuff:  Flowers!  It has been hydrangea season in our neighborhood, and I loooove hydrangeas!  My favorite flowers BY FAR are daffodils, but hydrangeas are definitely #2.  Some of our neighbors have some beautiful hydrangeas!  I really love looking at them on my walks with Guinness.  Here are some pictures from our neighborhood over the past few months:

Happy Stuff:  Birds!  We have still been enjoying our bird feeder and checking out all of the cool birds, and we've also seen some birds around our yard and I saw a pretty eggshell while I was on a walk with Guinness! 

That's an eggshell!  It was so bright blue!  And it was in the middle of the street. 

 

Happy Stuff:  Miscellaneous Nature!  We have a lot of deer that hang out in our neighborhood, but something that is way more elusive in our neighborhood are foxes! We've seen them a handful of times, but over the weekend Kevin and I saw one and were able to get a decent picture of it!  

Happy Stuff:  Guinness!  Guinness has continued to be a source of happiness and comfort for us during these crazy times.  We take him for at least one walk per day, and he's become a champion napper.  We have realized that Guinness LOVES a pillow when he naps!  He loves to create a pillow out of a blanket (he'll drag the blanket around), or use the side of his dog bed as a pillow... He'll get creative, but he loves to prop his head up.  He's a fancy pup!  

This one cracks me up!  His mouth was open while he was sleeping

Throw pillows!  He looooves a pillow.

Happy Stuff:  My idea for this coming weekend!!  So, I had this idea that I thought could be fun, because I don't know about you but I have been needing some uplifting entertainment to get my mind off of everything going on and to de-stress on the weekends.  So, because of that... I have been craving CHRISTMAS MOVIES.  Christmas is a loooong ways away, but then I remembered that people totally do Christmas in July!!  That's a thing!!  So, next weekend, Kevin and I are going to do Christmas in July and watch a bunch of Christmas movies all weekend.  We aren't going to do anything else Christmas-y (we aren't decorating or anything... that sounds exhausting), but some Christmas movies sound pretty darn happy and uplifting.  There are a bunch available on Disney+ (they have Miracle on 34th Street, Muppets Christmas Carol, Mickey's Christmas Carol, Nightmare Before Christmas, and others!), and Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu also have some!  So, just an idea I thought I'd pass along in case you think it'd be fun and bring you happiness!  

I hope you all are doing really well!!  These are crazy stressful times, and they've been crazy stressful times for a LONG time now, so make sure to take time to be good to yourself!  Love you all!!

Our 5 Year Anniversary

Hey guys!  Wow, it's been 2 months since my last post!  Sorry about that MASSIVE delay.  There's really no good reason for it... I've just been pretty blah the past few months with everything going on, so I didn't really think to post anything.  But, I'm trying very hard to feel less "blah", so here we go!  I'll give an update of some of the stuff that's happened over the past 2 months, and I'll probably break this into a few posts just so they aren't crazy big!

The biggest thing that happened is probably that Kevin and I had our 5 year wedding anniversary last month, and we'd planned on having a lovely evening of hanging out together and making some homemade pasta and a lovely dinner, and GUESS WHAT.  2020 decided to make our 5 anniversary more "2020-esque", by having a HUGE storm come through our area and knock down a bunch of trees, which then caused our whole neighborhood to lose power for 5 days.  Yeah.  Yep.  That's what happened.  On our 5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY.  We were LITERALLY in the middle of making our homemade pasta when the power went out.  We were hoping it'd come back on soon, but then we looked outside and saw that there were tons of trees down and our neighbor's tree had fallen on the power lines in front of our house, so then we knew we weren't getting power back for a loooong time.  We found out after that this was a crazy storm called a "derecho", which basically means that there were hurricane-force winds that are widespread and long-lived, and the storm moves in a straight line.  During the worst of it we went down to our den for safety, and I was looking out a window and saw total INSANITY and I was completely enthralled, but then Kevin was like, "Umm you might want to move away from the window", and I was like, "Oh good point!".  But what I saw was seriously nuts.  It was like the wind was just coming straight DOWN... There were leaves, sticks, etc just being forced down to the ground all at once.  Here are some pictures from our neighborhood:

That's the corner by our house, with our neighbor's tree down...

This is our cross-street... with another huge tree down... 

Here's another huge tree down... 

And here's a close-up of our neighbor's tree, and you can see some of the power lines down.

Here's a shot from further up our street, looking down towards our house.  

Our cross-street again.

So, we were without power for 5 days.  The first day was kinda ok, and we were thinking/hoping we'd get the power back at some point that day, but so many neighborhoods were hit really hard so we didn't actually see any tree crews our power company workers until the 4th day.  So, we played a LOT of Monopoly and other board games, and we ate stuff from our cupboards and some camping food that we had (we could boil water on our little camping stove), but that was about it.  It was an experience for sure... and the whole time we were worried about our food supply in our refrigerator/freezer, because it's wasn't exactly easy to get groceries during that time thanks to the pandemic.  So, we ended up having to throw allllllllll of our refrigerator/freezer food away, which was super depressing.   Oh, and we didn't have hot water during this time either, so it was cold showers or no showers for us! 

We went for a walk around our neighborhood the next day to survey the damage (and that's where I took some of the above pictures).  Guinness was VERY stressed out for parts of the walk (especially if Kevin would leave to go check out a downed tree).  But, while we were walking around we realized that we were VERY lucky, because quite a few houses in our neighborhood had trees fall on the roof... so... at least we didn't have to deal with that!  Those people had that AND the power outage to worry about. We were definitely lucky.

Oh and we had storms for all of the nights after the derecho that knocked out the power, so Kevin and Guinness and I slept downstairs in the den because we were NOT taking any chances.  Plus, we didn't have air conditioning of course, so it was at least 10 degrees cooler in the den.  

Here's one of the trees after some crews came through to clean some stuff up.  This is one of the trees that was blocking our cross-street.  

So, all in all, that whole experience was just TRULY fitting for 2020.  We tried to make the best of it with just hanging out with each other and playing games (and we definitely drank a LOT of beer that first day!), but we were definitely really stressed almost the whole time.  We're very happy that's over!! :)

Now I'll work on a post with just fun stuff, since this one wasn't very fun!