26!

Happy Birthday Jason!

Love,

Your Wife

Yay for insulation!

Jason and his dad were hard at work this weekend in the garage. Despite the below average temperatures, they were able to get all the insulation in the garage and attic, as well as install a few more electrical outlets. They'll be back at it in a few weeks putting up the drywall.

My oh my...

Project time! Jason's done with school and his list is a mile long. :) First on the list... insulating the garage. It's an ice bucket in the winter and the walls sweat with condensation which then drips off the ceiling onto everything, including tools. So...Jason started taking down the drywall on one of the coldest weeks we've had this winter. It's around 5 to 10 degrees outside. He claims his new coat kept him warm.

Photo Art

Love it! All the photos were taken by my mom except the dandelion puff (thanks Kim!). It's so cool to have something like this where the pictures actually mean something. The C is a chair in my mom's office. The L is the door handle on my parent's kitchen door. The O was a random puff ball found in Kim's yard in winter. The W is a wrought iron chair on Mary's (my parent's neighbor) back porch. And my dad wrote the Est. 2006 in a sand pile at his shop. Very cool and it was a really great surprise. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Jason graduated!

So most of you know that Jason has been working on his master's degree from U of I since the fall of 2006. It's been a hard journey for him and we were sweating it for awhile, but he finally graduated! Since he didn't go to the real graduation ceremony, I dug out my old graduation regalia and we made do with what we had.

We've had a great 2009, and we're looking forward to what 2010 will bring us. Have a safe and prosperous new year!

New Bedroom

Yikes! It's been awhile...hope you're still with me. Jason and I have been working, working, working. He's finishing up his last class, and I've got one more to go next spring until we both finally have our master's degrees.

We decided...well...I decided that it was time our bedroom got a face-lift. Here's a before...kinda...I forgot to take one before we took all the stuff off the walls.

And here's the after...

Much more sophisticated if you ask me and a lot less...well...yellow. What do you think??

Digital Photo Story

Something I've been working on for my grad class....

Surprise!

So Jason and I found this on our doorstep on Sunday night...

We suspected no one else except for Laurin and Lucas. Ok, so this story requires a little background...

Last month or so, Jason and I were looking through pictures, and found this one of Lucas...

Laurin hates his sunglasses, so we thought it would be really funny to print the picture, put it in a frame, and give it to her. To make things even more fun, we left it on their doorstep with a candle next to it, rang the doorbell, and drove off. Apparently, they had been thinking of someway to get us back for awhile now.

An update

I've been chastised for my lack of updates...here's one:

Same ol' shit, just a different day. :)

Fun day out

So if you didn't know this already, I'm trying to pick up the game of golf. Jason and I went out yesterday for my second try at it. We're just playing at a Par 3 course, and if didn't have to put 3 times on each hole, I might be a decent golfer. Anyways, we had fun and I did ok.

Afterward we went to Kohl's where I found Jason this tie that matched a shirt he was getting perfectly. Only problem was it was pink, and he didn't think he was confident enough to wear a pink tie. It was only $6, so I convinced him to get it. We'll see if it gets worn other than to try it on in the fitting room.

Then we went to a shoe store where Jason found these hideous boots. Always a character...

Crazy Squirrel

So Olney has white squirrels...but Pekin has a yellowish squirrel. Jason has seen this little guy running around the golf course for a few years now, but he was actually in one of our trees this morning. Interesting...

Summer's over

Gotta go back to work tomorrow...boo!

What a weekend!

First off, thanks to my parents for coming up this weekend to help us knock out a bunch of projects on our house. We really appreciated it.

The carpet is finished! Woohoo! It is just so much better. Words can't really describe how soft and clean it feels (and cat hair free!). It was definitely worth the money and the wait that we had to endure.

After we got the carpet in family room, my parents mentioned something about moving the furniture around. This is what we ended up with...the chair used to be against the wall, the couch was where the loveseat is, and the loveseat was where the chair is...it's growing on us.

I got a new piece of artwork for the wall in our office area to replace the shadowbox with my Precious Moments in it. It really matches well with the picture that we got a few weeks ago over the fireplace. I also got a big basket to house all of our blankets that were previously stored on the backs of the couches. You can see it in the corner of the picture below.

Last summer we had lights installed above our desks, but the only problem was we had to have them on when the lights in the family room area were on. The guys put a little pull chain on it so that we could turn it off when we weren't using those lights. I think it will save on electricity and keep the area cooler since the lights put off a lot of heat. (And yes, there is a light out...we know...)

Let's see...what else did Dad and Jason do this weekend...we saved a big piece of the old carpet so that we could put it down in the laundry room area. Looks TONS better and doesn't feel quite like a basement anymore. They cut around pretty much everything and made it look very professional.

We had some rugs in the laundry room area that weren't necessarily bad, so we put those outside in the garage. Also, makes it feel tons better barefoot.

If you'll remember, our carpet project was delayed because we found water leaking into the basement. Mom and I picked out the flowers and the guys plated them. Again...looks tons better (are you noticing a trend??)...

Last thing...I think...I picked out some new lights for the garage and front door. They have automatic sensors in them that turn on at dusk and will stay on until dawn or for a specified number of hours. Very cool... The old lights were gold and very tarnished, as were the house numbers and doorbell, so those got replaced too.

Whew...what a weekend! I think we're done with big projects for a bit... We'll take the rest of the year off and do that bathroom next year! ;)

DIRT!

We got about 4 tons of dirt dropped on our driveway on Friday. It was a ton extra than we had ordered, but the guy said it was the same price, so he went ahead and gave us extra...joy...

We wheeled it over to the side of the house on Friday evening, and it actually didn't take too long. Then on Saturday, we borrowed our neighbor's truck to go rent a plate compactor. I think Jason had fun operating it, but at one point I asked him if he wanted a drink. He said, yes, I'd like a beer. I told him he couldn't drink while operating heavy machinery. :) Besides that it was only 10 in the morning, and I didn't want him to look like our alcoholic neighbor.

He had to borrow another neighbor's hand tamper to get real close to the house, and after he used it for a bit, he appreciated the plate compactor.

It seemed like a never-ending process to get the dirt sloping at an appropriate level. One of those things you could probably mess with all day long. We got it to where we though it was good enough and decided to just stop.

So you may be wondering...did you use all the dirt? Not even close. We probably had about 1 1/2 tons left over. It's one of those things that you ask, now what do we do with all this extra dirt? Well, lucky for us and our neighbor (the one we always borrow tools from), she needed dirt in her side yard. It's just been washed away from all the rain we've had since it's on a major slope, and she took the rest of the dirt we had. Yes! We of course helped her wheelbarrow it over there and Jason used the compactor on it. In the end, she gave us $35, which actually paid for the rental of the compactor. I really do love our neighbors...well...except for you know who...

Maiden name might be German...

...but I'm not a fan of German food. Jason and I had our first experience with German food tonight, and there's not much to say other than it was gross. Jason had Jaegerschnitzel, thinly sliced beef, battered, and fried, topped with a mushroom gravy. I had Schnitzel Agstein, thin pork cutlets dredged in seasoned flour, dipped in egg batter and grilled. We both had a side of spatzle too, some sort of homemade noodle. It was NOT as the waitress described. We asked her what spatzle was and she said it's kind of like macaroni and cheese. I got a little excited when I heard that, but when she brought it out, I was nothing more than disappointed. It didn't look like macaroni and cheese (mainly because there was no cheese!) and it certainly didn't taste like it either. We told the waitress that we had never had German food before, and at the "end" of the meal she knew that we didn't like it either. I say "end" because it was hard to make it look like we ate anything and Jason was overly concerned about wasting food. I, of course, wasn't and most of my meal went untouched. Luckily we had decent salads and bread! What a nice waitress though...she only charged us for one meal since we didn't care for it, so we gave her a good tip. Needless to say...we won't be making any more trips to that restaurant to order German food.

(Harry Potter tomorrow night...so excited!!)

Here's the culprit...

Jason and I got busy once again scooping up rock. I'll be elated if we never have to do this again, but at least the rock is smaller and easier to pick up than the rock we shoveled last summer.

You can clearly see why we might have some water issues at this corner of our house in this picture...

And here's the rock...on the deck...

Hopefully in the next update the stumps from the shrubs and bushes will be gone...

More landscaping... :/

Let's play word association...Ashley - paint - carpet - water leak - landscaping...great! More landscaping! Well an excavator dude came today to give us our diagnosis, and he said the same thing as a couple other people...take out the rock in the landscaping and fill it in with dirt to create a slope that goes away from the house. We pulled back some of the rock and discovered our problem. The dirt is definitely slanting toward the house. It's a good 4 inches lower next to the house than at the edge of the landscaping boulders.

So...in another spontaneous move this weekend, we decided it was best to do this...

You might ask...didn't you guys just do some landscaping last summer?? Yep, almost a year ago...would have been the perfect time to take care of our water problem had we known it existed. Oh well, I didn't really like those bushes anyway, but it was going to be too much work and cost more to replace them at the time. Now we're just spending more money a year later, but we thought it would be best just to get rid of them so that we could fix the grade of the dirt as best as we could. Now I can plant pretty flowers instead of ugly shrubs!

Wondering what it looked like before??

I almost forgot!

We went out to dinner on Friday night with Laurin and Lucas and afterward made a spontaneous decision to go to the riverboat casino. I'd never been and quite frankly don't think I'll ever go back. Seemed like a waste of money and all I did was press a button a few times. Not too exciting...dropped $35 between the two of us in 30 minutes...not bad, not bad...yeah right! I'd rather get ice cream like seven times for that!

It just keeps getting better and better...

Well, we don't know anything yet about the water issue. Hopefully we'll find something out tomorrow when the excavator comes to look at it. Since our carpet installation got delayed, he rescheduled for July 21 and 22. Unfortunately, he called back last night saying that his wife had plans for those two days and that's why they were open, so...now it's going in on the 23rd and 24th. Let's hope we don't have any more setbacks...

Another setback...*sigh*...

If it's not one thing, it's another. Why can't home improvement projects just go on as planned?? Last night when we ripped up the carpet in the family room/office space, we found some rotting tack strip and Jason noticed that the pad was wet that sat around it. We didn't think a whole lot about it, but we did put the dehumidifier in that corner to dry up any moisture in preparation for the carpet today. When we woke up this morning it was raining pretty hard and after Jason left for work I went down to check on that corner of the room. Water...not a lot, but enough to halt our carpet installation until we get it fixed. What a bummer...