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!

Happy Guinness Update! And... another bird.

Hey guys!  Happy Monday!  I know Mondays aren't happy, but the good news is that THIS Monday is the first day of the week before Memorial Day Weekend!  So, I think most of us have NEXT Monday off!!  So, that's some happy news, and I hope all of you are getting that day off.

I wanted to update you all because our dear Guinness is feeling great!  He's pretty much back to his old self now, and he's been keeping all of his food down :).   He's still on his meds for 4 more days or so, but he's doing great :).  Here are some cute pictures of Guinness over the last week:

 So, you guys.... I am not even kidding here when I say that I thought the blue jay would be my final favorite bird, but we had a surprise visitor in our yard that BLEW MY MIND.  This just happened yesterday, and today I saw this SAME visitor again when we were on our walk with Guinness, and I've never seen this bird before IN MY LIFE!!!  It is a woodpecker, but I've seen woodpeckers before... and they are normal and bird-sized.  This woodpecker was ENORMOUS!!!!  It was like the size of a duck or a cat, so it must be a different species of woodpecker than I'm used to.  Kevin and I were on a Zoom call with his family, and we were facing one of the windows in our downstairs den room, and all of a sudden we were both SO distracted and we were like, "OH MY GOSH!!!!" because we saw this HUGE woodpecker moving around on the tree outside the window!!!  Kevin's family was like, "What is going on???? What are you guys looking at????".  I was able to get a lot of pictures, and my phone compiled them into a gif so it's like you can see it walking around on the tree!  I'm not sure if gif files post ok here, so I'm sorry if it doesn't work!  I'll post the gif, and below it I'll post a picture too so you can see it just in case the gif doesn't work.  Now, keep in mind this thing is the size of a duck (the tree it's on is enormous):

Isn't it amazing looking??  And today when we were walking Guinness we saw it flying in our neighborhood.  It's huuuuge and so amazing. 

So, nothing is going to beat the excitement of that bird, but I thought I'd go ahead and post the pictures I took of our azalea bushes that are in our backyard!  Two of them aren't looking amazing, but one of them is looking awesome.  These were all here before we moved in, and we haven't really done anything to them:

Here's the 2 that aren't looking great... but I like their red flowers!  And you can see Kevin in our screened room!  We like to hang in there when the weather's nice.

Our weekend was pretty good!  We watched some more James Bond movies, and I really enjoyed a few of them and a few I didn't like as much, and one was literally the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.  The ones I enjoyed were On Her Majesty's Secret Service (the only one with George Lazenby) and Live and Let Die (with Roger Moore, who I thought I hated as Bond but I hadn't seen this one!).  The one that was literally the worst movie I've EVER seen in my life was the old Casino Royale (from 1967).  This one isn't really considered one of the real James Bond movies, and it was intended to be a comedy/spoof and it's loosely based on the Ian Fleming book, but it's by a different production company.  So, that one barely counts, but we wanted to see it anyways, and it was PAINFULLY BAD.  We also watched Diamonds Are Forever, The Man With the Golden Gun, and The Spy Who Loved Me.  I thought those 3 were ok but definitely not what I'd call good, but nowhere near as bad as the 1967 Casino Royale!  But, I highly enjoyed the George Lazenby movie even though I'd only ever heard bad things about it... and I also thought Live and Let Die was great even though I've never liked Roger Moore before!  So, next weekend we will continue our James Bond marathon starting with Moonraker. 

I hope everything is going great for you guys, and I hope you get a 3-day weekend this next weekend!  I'm thinking of all of you, and sending my love!  

Well, it's May now...

Hey guys!  How have you been?  Most things have been pretty good here!  Work is going ok for both Kevin and I right now... It's still stressful, but it's becoming more "normal" I guess... I don't know.  I think we're just starting to adjust to the new type of stress.  This week has added a lot of NEW non-work stress though, so I'll touch on that briefly before getting to good/random stuff going on.  So, the stressful thing:  Our dear Guinness has been sick :(  We had to take him to the emergency vet last night.  He vomited a few times on Sunday, and then on Monday we were just giving him rice and a tiny bit of boiled chicken, and he kept that down ok but still didn't seem well (very lethargic and all he did was sleep), and then yesterday (Tuesday) he didn't even want to eat the rice and chicken and he was very ill.  He threw up a few times during the day, and right after Kevin got home he threw up again and it had a little bit of blood in it.  So, we called our vet and jumped in the car to take him to the emergency room.  The vet checked him out and gave him some fluids to rehydrate him, and said most likely Guinness just ate something that isn't agreeing with him.  She said it could be some other things (some of them are serious), but first we're going to treat the symptoms and see if he gets better. So, he's on like 3 different medications right now, and some prescription canned food that's super easy to digest.  We're only able to give him 1/4 cup of food at a time today, but so far he's kept everything down today!  So.... this has all been QUITE stressful to say the least, but today was a lot better than yesterday.

So, now onto happy stuff or at least random stuff!  I'm sure you have all been wondering since my last blog post "Is the cardinal still Erin's favorite type of bird during this pandemic??", so I'm here to tell you that it is NO LONGER my favorite type of bird!!  It's definitely my 2nd favorite though, and it's the type of bird that is at our bird feeder the most!  We see cardinals alllll the time in our yard, and my heart melts whenever I see a male and female cardinal hanging out together. 

A cute little cardinal on our bird feeder! 

But, enough with the suspense because I know you're all like, "Enough chit-chat about cardinals, Erin!!  WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BIRD????", so you don't have to wait any longer: 

That's right, folks... My favorite bird in our yard is now the majestic blue jay.  I have not really been able to take a picture of one, except for this very terrible picture from far away:  

There it is in the middle of the picture!!  NOT a good picture... but it's my best one so far!  They're quite elusive and soooo beautiful. 

So, now that the exciting mystery of my favorite bird is over, let me think about what else has been going on.... We've definitely been doing some yard work!  Spring is pretty much here, even though the weather is confusing... On Sunday the low was 29 degrees, but then this Friday we're getting over 80 degrees... so... ????  Crazy.  But, our trees are all looking nice and green now, and Kevin just had to mow the lawn for the first time since Fall, and our grass is looking pretty darn good this year!  I also planted some marigold seeds by our walkway, so we'll see if anything happens with those!  Usually we go to Home Depot and wander around and buy lots of beautiful flowers to plant, but that just didn't seem like a good idea this year.  So, we'll see what happens with those marigold seeds!  Our azalea bushes are doing GREAT right now, but I've only taken a picture of one of them.  So, more pictures of our azalea bushes will be in my next blog post!!  Something exciting to look forward to, eh? 

Here are the azaleas right by our front door!  This bush was planted by the previous owners, and it is going CRAZY!  We haven't done anything to it ever, but it seems happy. 

Here's my favorite part of the walk I take around our neighborhood with Guinness (just not lately, because he's been sick).  This is at the very top of our street, when we turn onto the next street.  I love this view during all seasons!  Right now it's looking quite green and beautiful. 

Let's see... What else is going on.... Ummm we've still been doing our weekend movie marathons and hanging in our downstairs den room from Friday evening through Sunday evening!  This last weekend we started doing a James Bond marathon, starting with the 1st one (Dr No) and got through the 5th one (You Only Live Twice).  This next weekend we'll start with the 6th one (Her Majesty's Secret Service) and see how far we get!  It's a super fun movie marathon!  There are so many James Bonds I haven't seen!!  And since I know you're wondering:  My favorite Bond BY FAR is Daniel Craig... I mean, his movies are just next-level and action-packed.  But my 2nd favorite is Sean Connery.  And my 3rd is T-Dalt. 

So, to end this post, I'm just going to post a bunch of cute pictures of Guinness, because I just love him so much.  I hope you're all doing really well and staying safe and healthy!  Love you!