Just Another Saturday

James and I have a habit of starting one outdoor project on Saturdays and having it turn into five.  On Saturday we spent about 12 hours in the backyard.  It was a long, hot, sweaty day.  Between the two of us we drank more than 6 quarts of gatorade and lots more water.

Here’s a run down of our day….

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I cleaned the laundry room, which I have pretty much neglected and baked some bread.

We are having some drainage issues since we don’t have gutters on the backside of our house.  On both sides of our patio we dug out and smoothed out the dirt.

Bought a load full of rocks.

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And, filled in the holes.  Eventually there will be flower beds under these windows and we will incorporate the rock to be a little more pretty, but for now it fills the bill.

James built me a garden box for my birthday.  We weedwacked under where it was going to go so it would be a little more level.

Then we lined the box and filled it up with another truckload of dirt.

James went to get something out of the shed stepped on the edge and heard a crack.  The dogs had dug underneath the edge so it was already weak.  When we started taking it apart we discovered that the people that built it just stuck a bunch of bricks together and covered it in concrete.  The cheap way out.  James took it apart and we poured concrete in the section that broke off.  We are also filling in what the dogs dug out with dirt and left over rock.

Here it is after it was poured and drying.

I also did a little weeding in the front yard flower beds.  I am loving the hibiscus and the plumbego.  The hibiscus flowers only last about a day but the next day there is always another one in its place.  My plants are small this year but they have done a really good job of adding some life to our front yard.

We worked really hard and at the end of the day I had a very tired husband.

Before & After

I have recently become a little obsessed with Design Sponge’s Before and After section.  I think it is making James a little nervous after watching flip through all of the projects for several night in a row.  I even stopped at an antique/ junk shop yesterday to see what they had.

Now I need to find an upholstery class to take so that I actually know what I am doing.  I am also going to need to scour garage sales for cheap old furniture with good bones!

Sick to My Stomach

When I look at this picture I feel a wave of food poisoning induced nausea come over me.  We took these pictures on the Thursday before our wedding.  I had the grand idea to eat at a local breakfast joint that morning.  Bad, bad idea!  Every time the photographer would tell James to pick me up and spin me around I would have to brace myself and will myself to not dirty the dress.  I made it through the photoshoot.

We met up with a couple of James mission companions for dinner after.  They wanted steak.  I couldn’t even look at the menu.  Andrea hung out in the bathroom with me for a while during dinner.  James pulled over on the side of the freeway.  I felt much better the next day!

I finally have access to be able to download the pictures from our photographer.  I will pull some of my favorites, especially from the beach shoot, to share.  Looking at the pictures reminded me of how beautiful everything turned out.  I loved it all and I wouldn’t do it again for anything!

27

I had a birthday on Monday!  I was celebrated with breakfast in bed, lots of phone calls and emails from family and friends, lunch out with James, lettuce wraps and a homemade birthday cake.

The girls that I work with at church sang to me on Sunday and all swore that I couldn’t be turning more than 24 or 25.  I wanted to kiss them and yes I know I still look pretty young which I am thankful for now!

James told me he would make me any cake that I wanted as long as I gave him the recipe.  I decided to have him recreate the chocolate chip layer from our wedding cake.  So yummy!  I gave him the recipes for the cake, the filling, and the frosting.  I later realized that I was asking for a lot- it was his first cake.  He did an awesome job!

26 was a pretty good year!  I hope to make 27 even better!

Where The Wild Things Are- Part 2

My sister chastized me for not providing pictures of our rotating backyard exhibit when I posted the list of our finds from a couple weeks ago.  Her boys wanted to see pictures.  Never fear we found new friends when we were doing some gardening on Monday.  So these pictures are for Jake and Josh.

A new snake in the shed

It was just a little one and not posionous

This one is part of our permanent collection.  His name is Max.

A frog that I caught mid jump

A spider, not a black widow this time

A toad.  These guys really like hanging out in the garage.  I don’t mind sharing our space with them since they eat the spiders.

Making Friend With the Neighbors

Those carrots that I showed the other day?  I turned a few of them into carrot cake and sent it right back to where it came from.  James went and delivered it the neighbors and he said that we may have made friends for life.  Pretty simple, tasty way to do that don’t you think?
This is the recipe I used.  I am not super big on carrot cake, but this recipe had great reviews and tasted awesome!

Appliances

We were incredibly blessed to receive some amazing kitchen appliances for our wedding.  I have really been loving cooking in a well stocked and easy to use kitchen.  I loved making bread for the first time in our Kitchen Aid mixer.  That whole kneading by hand thing kind of freaked me out so it was nice to watch the mixer doing all of the kneading for me.

The other day for breakfast I told James I wanted waffles.  He took over in the production of the waffles while I put away dishes.  I turned around to see the Kitchen Aid being filled with the waffle ingredients.  Apparently, he was going to dirty just as many dishes if he stirred the batter by hand or if he let the mixer do the work.  Okay.  I rolled my eyes but didn’t argue.  At least I got some waffles out of the adventure with kitchen toys.

Growing Season

Doesn’t this just make you want to go plant a garden?

I went down the street to ask my neighbor what kind of pretty plant she had growing in her front yard and she asked if we could give a home to some of her beautiful carrots.

While I am pulling weeds instead of pretty orange carrots from my dirt this year I am working on a little herb garden.

My mom gave me a little Chia herb garden for Christmas.  I waited to plant it until I got here so that I wouldn’t have to leave it behind.  The basil is doing the best but the other plants are just starting to show a little green too.  They have taken quite a bit of coaxing but we are hoping to have good results.  Buy herbs at the store is pretty expensive so it would be nice to just be able to pick them from our garden.

By the way, the plant that my neighbor had was a plumbago and it looks like this.

She says that it grows great with no help.  Sounds like the perfect plant for my front yard.

Where the Wild Things Are

A list of things that we found our shed today:

• A black widow
• A lizard
• A frog
• Lots of other random non-scary spiders
• Termites all over the boards we need to board up our windows when there are hurricanes
• AND a snake

Normally I don’t freak out too much about snakes but since we have been told that there are several different kinds of poisonous snakes in the area I told James that this one was his and he called a friend for help with identification.  It was a safe one.  He was allowed to return to the wilds of our yard.

Since hurricane season starts on my birthday we are going to need to replace all of the boards that got trashed today.  Today we went to the hardware store and I got to learn how to pop the boards on and off the windows with some special clips.  Humm, maybe my California earthquakes look more exciting afterall.

The Need to Create

I am the type of person that always needs to have a project on the table.  An idea for the next thing that I want to make is usually rattling around in my head.  While doing general ed classes and taking time off of school to figure out what I really wanted to be when I grew up, I almost always had my sewing machine out, or my crochet needles stuck in something, or paint spewed across some surface.  While I was in school and then while I was working in the design field I noticed that I rarely felt the need to pull out those projects.  My mind was being challenged all day to come up with creative solutions to problems.  I was thrived on that and was usually too exhausted to come up with any new projects at home.  When a friend visited my apartment in San Francisco she said that she was surprised at how undesigned it was.  The truth was I just didn’t have the time or energy to care about it and with very limited space I didn’t really want to spend the money trying to make it look good.

Now that I am not working in design I am finding that itch to create creeping back into my life.  I am finding myself with many outlets to use the itch since that I have a whole house and a husband that is pretty open to anything.  I have been doing a lot of cooking and baking and making large plans for our garden.  I have also been caught sketching out ideas for my next sewing projects and planning out rooms of our house as you witnessed in my previous post.

My original intent with naming my blog “stacydesigns” was to actually post things that I designed, things that inspired me, things that I made, and projects that I got to have a hand in at work.  I want to get back to using this space little more to record some of those ideas.  Just so you know, you will probably be seeing a little more of that here.