Picnic

A lovely day for a picnic! Last weekend (before it got crazy hot) we went up to one of our favorite places to hang out with the doggles. We ate, Zoe swam, and then our little mile walk turned into 7 miles thanks to a couple wrong turns! We were just trying to try out some new trails, and ended up backtracking. A lot. Oh well, it tired out the 4 legged ones, which is always a plus!

COOKIES

Sometimes I sound like Cookie Monster. Not when I want cookies, just when I'm being silly. On the other hand,  sometimes I want cookies so I made these and they were delicious. My mom's recipe with walnuts and honey. Good story.

Tshirt Art

So lovely pinterest taught me how to make this nifty bag out of an old T-shirt that I had 3 of anyway. You can see the tutorial here It worked! I was half afraid I would have to show my results to pinstrosity instead but it turned out to be pretty simple. Yay! Happy Sunday.

Roses from My Hubby

After seven years he still surprises me! He left roses on the bathroom sink and the dashboard of the car-both very sweet gestures for a third anniversary-and then had a dozen roses sent to my work anyway. Overachiever. Happy Anniversary RAZ!

now and then Mick

Way Back When Graduation Announcement

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What a Darling Lake!

 One of our favorite things to do is to take the dogs to some water and let them play! I'm not sure why, because they are a big mess and then we have to struggle through bathing them right after spending hours outside and it's quite exhausting. But, we do it anyway.  First we stopped at Bonnefield Lake, but it had pretty clear posted rules about dogs staying on their leashes, and they can't really swim if they're on their leashes...unless we swim too...a little cold for that...

They're just happy being outside though, just look at that cute puppy.

We decided to move on to Lake Darling. We had never been there before, but we googled lakes near Fairfield and thought it looked like a nice one.  We thought. Google neglected to mention that it was drained 2 years ago for sludging, drudging, and general perking up.  Above you see Zach pointing to what we thought was going to be the lake.  We kept driving through this beautiful park and telling each other, "we'll see the water just around the next bend!" 

 We did find a nice little pond for Zoe to swim in though, and found out her fetching is much better in water than it is on land! On land she is very good and finding what you threw but doesn't have much interest in actually picking it up and bringing to the thrower.  She swam and swam and swam after that stick and brought it back almost every time!

Buster swam some too but it was a little deep for his taste.  He was more interested in following me around while I took pictures and surveying yet another beautiful view of the empty lake.

We had to try a few self portraits to get both of us with our eyes open

And the dogs were more than happy to jump back in the car after swimming and fetching and traipsing and hiking for a couple of hours! After baths at home, they were peacfully content the rest of the day! What a relaxing Sunday afternoon.

A Day of Craftiness

I had a couple of projects on my mind for our office. My theme has been travel, so far I have bamboo shades and a clock with the map of the world on it-a Christmas present from my Grandma.  I have two large maps, one of the United States and one of the world, and I wanted a neat way to hang them.  Zach had already glued the U.S. map to a cardboard display board. It was somewhat successful, but I didn't like that it wasn't completely flat.  I got a large piece of styrofoam insulation and had the lovely gentleman at Lowe's cut it in half for me so it would fit in the car! Below is half of the styrofoam (the whole thing cost $10), which I trimmed with a utility knife to match the 3' by 4' map of the world.

Below is the cardboard version on the left and the styrofoam version on the right. I used push pins to hold the edges of the map to the styrofoam so I didn't have to use any glue or tape.  I was going to line the edges with fabric or ribbon, but there was a perfectly sized white border on the map that I could just fold over and pin to cover the styrofoam edges.  Voila!

Okay, for the next project, unfortuneately, I don't have a picture of the original computer desk. It was large, and had a set of 2 file drawers on each end.  I loved the file drawers but the whole desk was just so BIG, and Zach wanted something more proportional to our office. So he found this great deal at Menards. :) But I didn't want to give up the file drawers. He took the big heavy desktop off the file drawers and took the legs off the bottom. Now the problem was that the top of the drawers was unfinished/uncovered particle board. I decided to find some Mod-Podge and get to hiding that ugliness!

Here I'm flattening out a map I want to use for the top.

 

Trying out some ideas...

I decided to go with travel pictures on one and a map on the other. I used school glue to put them on the top of the drawers because I didn't realize I could use Mod Podge for the gluing down. It may have reduced the wrinkling and bumps I had if I had used Mod Podge, but I can't go back now.

Finished product on set of drawers #1:

This one is a map of Paris that has some circles and highlighting I did from when we were in Paris. It will make me remember that trip more now than it did folded away in a picture album.

 Crafty tools:

And the second finished product!  I'm happy with it. Wrinkles and all.