Obsessions

Every now and then, I like to post about things that we’re into…to paint a picture of this particular time in our lives and the things that occupy our hours. :-)

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1. MUSIC -- We love the Denver-based band The Lumineers right now… I dare you to watch these videos and keep your foot from tapping to the beat. It’s happy music!  I could listen to their album all day.

Beware the hipsters: "Ho Hey"  and   "Flowers in Your Hair"

We also really like the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men ("Dirty Paws").

And Gungor’s beautiful song "This Is Not the End" is so ethereal and full of hope about eternity.

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2. FOOD/DRINK – We made portabella pizzas tonight for dinner. They were delicious! The only problem was that our grocery store only had three portabella mushrooms in stock, and I bought them all. Really, we could have each eaten two or three! I didn’t take any pictures of ours, but this will give you an idea:

Grease a cookie sheet lightly with olive oil. Layer portabellas with pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and pizza toppings of your choice. I also added minced garlic, garlic powder, and crushed red peppers. Bake at 400 degrees for 12 minutes. Voila! :-)

I recently did a mini-cleanse juicing “thing” for spring. I wasn’t super militant about it, but I did drink lots and lots of fresh beet juice for about 10 days. I don’t know about you, but this was my first up-close experience with beets. They’re hairy and knobby and gross on the outside, yet such a pretty color on the inside! But when you drink the juice, no matter how many apples and carrots and grapes you shove down the juicer, the “farmy” beet flavor remains so, so strong.  I joked with my co-worker Leahh that I was “drinking the farm.”  I want a t-shirt that says “Schrute Farm Beets.” :-)  It was a tough pill to swallow, and I think my beet-drinking days are behind me, at least for this year.

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3. HOME IMPROVEMENT – Three weeks ago, Ryley was walking past our big juniper bush on her way to the van, when she came face-to-face with this:

It was just a garter snake, and it was sluggish, so I was able to snag it with a nearby stick:

It was pretty big for a garter! But what to do with it?? Ryley begged me not to kill it.

Her words: “You know, the life cycle and all that.”

I actually thought it might be near death, so I left it at the end of our driveway. When I told Ryan, he said, “No, it wasn’t dying. Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel? It just needed to warm itself in the sun.”

Sure enough, when we returned home, it was gone. I suppose I should watch more Discovery Channel.

So, the following weekend, Ryan took a chainsaw and took the bushes to the ground. It’s something we’ve thought about doing for years; the spiders are horrible in the fall, the bushes were so monstrous that they took over half of our sidewalk, and we couldn’t reach the water faucet or wasp nests behind them. But the snake was the final straw.

I took several pictures, too, of our property, hoping to enter “The Worst Landscape in America” contest on the DIY network. For a week, I planned to post the pictures with a long, detailed story of how we have two dead trees, a snake infestation, a rocky lawn where grass refuses to grow, etc. We’re a shoe-in to win!  But when I finally sat down to upload the pictures on the day of the deadline, I learned I had actually missed the deadline by six hours!

A free landscape make-over was just not meant to be. I guess we’ll have to do the work ourselves, darn it.

In the meantime, we have come across two more garter snakes (different sizes) within feet of where the first one was nestled in the bushes. Ryan was able to kill one of them.

I know they’re harmless, but it’s also unnerving to realize they’ve apparently been nesting in the bushes outside your front door!

We definitely have our work cut out for us in that area of our yard, but we are excited about the possibilities!

At the same time all this was going on, our friends Christie and Jonathan were getting rid of some old but nice furniture, which we became the grateful recipients of! That allowed us to move out a couch we’re not crazy about, and we took advantage of the opportunity to rearrange a lot of our furniture. I even moved the piano, which I hadn’t thought possible. My college German professor once told me that she theorized a lot of marriages would be saved if people rearranged their furniture more often and changed things up a bit. She would be proud!

We’re also in the midst of a project in Ryley’s room, and we hope to make some more progress this weekend. Pictures to come….

Our home improvement minds have finally come alive!

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I love Juliet when she’s clean and groomed! Unfortunately, that’s not too often, but we’re enjoying it currently!

She’s even allowed on the couch! Look how far I’ve come! ;-)

Stay tuned for pictures of our weekend trip to Nebraska. Good night for now!