Last weekend, we had a great time in Trussville with my parents and sister. We celebrated Jenn’s birthday (a little bit late), went to my friend Kayla from high school’s wedding, and watched The Help (which is an awesome movie that you should see if you haven’t yet!) and the Lion King (my favorite Disney movie ever). Overall, we had a lot of fun, and it was a nice, short getaway from house projects and other stuff for a few days. Poor Jenn spent a lot of the weekend studying. She’s taking the MCATÂ (the test to get into med school) in less than a month. I know she’ll do great on it!!
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| Before the wedding on Saturday |
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| Me with the bride! :) |
We left Felix and Gabby at home by themselves again like we did a few weeks ago. Other than an overturned trash can and some bite marks in a Kleenex box, we think they behaved pretty well. Of course, all of their food was gone, so they were happy to see us again (so they could get more food!). Gabby got in trouble Sunday night for jumping on the loveseat (they’re not supposed to get on the living room furniture), and so Travis got after her with the spray bottle. She went running, and he went running after her, and when he sprayed her, she HISSED at him….3 times! That was the first time we’ve heard her hiss since the first couple of days we got her. She then ran away into the dining room chair, but she immediately let him pick her up and started purring and cuddling. She’s a mess! At least she doesn’t hold a grudge for very long :)
Yesterday marked 2 months to go until the half-marathon we’re running! I bought some new running shoes last week and some synthetic socks (1 pair for each of us) at First Place Athletics. My shoes were getting kind of worn out, so I’m going to alternate the new and old pair for a couple of weeks before just using the new pair all the time. The synthetic socks are supposed to prevent blisters, which we’ve been getting…especially on the longer runs. All I have to say is for $10-15 per pair…they better work good! This weekend, we’re supposed to run 9.5 miles, so that will give the socks a good test I guess…
Mom is over halfway through her radiation treatments! Only a couple more weeks to go. Her biggest issue right now is just BAD itching. The area definitely looks like it would itch…it looks like a really, really bad sunburn. Hopefully, that will go away and get better really fast after she’s finished with all 36 treatments. We need to be planning a big party to celebrate her finishing chemo and radiation!! Yay Mom!!
This weekend, if the weather cooperates, we are planning to start working on our flower beds. We are going to line the flower beds with some kind of landscaping stone/rock and mix some soil conditioner into the dirt. That might take most of the day on Saturday. It’s hard to know since we’ve never done anything like this before. We’re going to use the same stones around the trees in our yard and the mailbox, just to make everything uniform. Hopefully it will look nice! Once we get all of that done, we can start figuring out what kind of shrubs and flowers to plant. Our goal is to get everything planted by the end of March before it starts getting too hot outside.
Our big purchase for the week (seems like there’s one at least every week!) was a network attached storage system. Yes, this was Travis’s idea. It’s something that has 2 hard drives that can store all of the files from both of our computers on it. It’s like a backup system in case one of our computers crashes, and it also allows you to access your files away from home (I think). You’ll have to ask Travis about the details…he’s the tech guru in the family. We’re not sure how much longer his laptop will live, so we wanted to get this thing up and running before it dies. It would really be a headache to lose all of our stuff in Quicken, budgets, retirement spreadsheets, etc., so we’re trying to plan ahead and keep that from happening!
We’ve also ordered a weather radio online, although that was significantly cheaper than the network attached storage! With tornado season coming up really soon, we want to be better prepared than we were last year.
I did pretty good at CVS on Monday. I bought 2 tubes of toothpaste, a 4-pack of razor blades, and a pack of gum for $2.14. I started out with and ended up with $12 in ECBs. Not bad! :)
Well, I think that’s about everything new that’s going on with us. We’ll keep you posted on our house and yard projects coming up! :)
Happy Wednesday/Leap Day!
Erin
