Birthday Flowers

My super wonderful best friend Stephanie in Florida sent me a beautiful bouquet for my birthday.


Not only did I enjoy the sight and lovely fragrances, but I had a great time with my much neglected macro lens.



I love fresh flowers and would love to have them more often.

Such awesome colors and unique texture and patterns.

I'm very excited to see my friend in just a few short weeks.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I'm only about 2 weeks behind blogging now.

Birthday Crawfish Boil

Last weekend, we threw a huge crawfish boil and birthday bash to celebrate our birthdays.

Crawfish festivals and parties are huge around here, so most people will eat these mud bugs several times in the Spring. John and H's best friend Mark wait anxiously for the first round of crawfish to come out of the boiler.

My Gram was there double- fisting it, even it if it was Coke.

Matt was there with his girlfriend, even if I managed to take an awful photo of them with her half in the shade and half in the sun. I'd promised to take a better picture, but totally forgot.H cooked up some dogs and burgers for those (like me and all the kiddos) not inclined to eat crawfish.

H's mom was nice enough to host it at her house and help out with all the food preparation. She however wouldn't pose for a picture with us!

Our favorite cousins were there too- at least 4 out of 5 (one got in trouble that morning and couldn't come at punishment).

They had so much fun running around in the backyard and playing hide & seek or catch with the tennis ball.

Until too much rough-housing when they broke the glasses of one of the boys. H to the rescue before their grandma found out and we were all in trouble!

And our other-mother Dana made us some fabulous pastries as dessert- including this beautiful red Velvet cake that was devoured in a few minutes.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:

This stuff (and the night time one) is saving my life right now!

Wonderful Relaxing Weekend

Finally! After all the excitement of the past few weeks and studying of the last few months, we had a weekend to relax and unwind. I headed to Sams Club on Friday afternoon, to re-stock our freezer with yummy stuff for our new grill.

We enjoyed a tasty rotisserie chicken for dinner, and then finished up Primary Colors on our DVR. That movie is so true to life that it just made me upset watching it. I also had a chance to watch the Biography channel's show in Pol Pot- which was fascinating and tragic at the same time.


Saturday, we met our newest tenant for the cottage early in the morning. Then we checked out furniture for H's boy room. We returned some things to Bed Bath & Beyond, and used a store credit to buy some candles for my office, a new shower head and a gift for mother's day. We dropped into DSW, where I bought some pink flip-flops and H picked up some sandals too.

On the way home, stopped by Blockbuster and picked up Wii Olympics 2008 and Lions for Lambs for Saturday night. We also checked out Sam's for furniture, and we found a recliner and desk that H really wanted for his room. We feasted on steaks and wine for dinner, before playing our game and watching our movie.

Sunday we enjoyed church, then Meet the Press and Obama, who was on Fox news. H put together his desk and worked on his room. I played with some photos and decided to order some canvases of our trip to Brazil and Argentina to go over the window in our breakfast area, adjacent to our other wall art. Yea, I'm that dorky that I did a trial lay-out with them all in Auto-CAD.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Another relaxing weekend coming up in...oh July!

Our New Grill

Last weekend, we took all of our birthday gifts and gift cards to Home Depot and bought a new grill! It was on our 101 List & we enjoy grilling every week.

We bought our old grill about a week after I moved in because we were having family over to see the house. It's really not big enough to cook a mess of beef and chicken fajitas at the same time. Zoe is checking out the new grill, to see if it will taste as good as the old one.

H is every excited that this one starts up with no problem and I think it's going to cook our food a bit more evenly than the old one.

Let's fire it up and cook our first meal!

That's certainly one way to get it started!

It's getting hot in here!

Yummy chicken breasts came out awesome!

With a glass of wine and a beautiful sunset, we had a great night!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: It works great on some tasty steaks that we cooked this weekend!

Garden Update

The day after his birthday & party, I made H work on our garden. We some 4x12's at Home Depot and they cut them for us, so we'd have an 8' by 4' garden.

Zoe approves of the bed, but wants to know when she can play in there.

Since we'd been in Detroit the previous weekend, we couldn't do it then, and the plants were ready to go into the ground. The squash grew the fastest & their little roots made it difficult to pull them out of the container.

I struggled and struggled to get some of the plants out of thier shell. I felt really guilty when I would accidentally pull them out and break all the roots. Luckily, most rows had 6 plants, but we only had room for 5 plants in the bed.

Last Sunday, I planted 3 rows- which included the squash, onion and then cucumbers.

By last weekend, the 3 varieties of tomato plants were coming right along!

We even had some activity on the basil or cilantro plants too!

Monday night, the 21st, I planted 2 rows- including the watermelon and cantelope.

Zoe is not too fond of all this water interupting her running room in the yard.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: My brother's baseball team is 9-0!

Random Detroit

One last Detroit post, two weeks after the fact! I loved this shot of these two old buildings at sunset from the baseball park. The steam rising and something about the Wurlitzer Building was just neat.

We took this photo to Bella Isle Park, with Detroit on the right and the fabulous city of Windsor on the left, connected by Ambassador Bridge.




Directly across from Comeria Park is the Fox Theatre Detroit. I've toured the one in Atlanta, but didn't get to go inside this one.

A building that looks more like it belongs in Buenos Aires than in Detroit.

Saturday night, we headed to the suburbs for a wine bar. We found out about Vinotecca in Royal Oak on the Internet, and decided to check it out. I thought the wine storage on the wall was clever, and we enjoyed a nice bottle of wine.

It was a dark, cozy little spot with some fun decorations. We then headed down the street to Andiamo, where we enjoyed an awesome Italian dinner.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: We made some big progress yesterday on the boy room.

Comerica Park & Detroit Tigers

One of the reasons we decided to make my work trip to Detroit a long weekend was that H could see Comerica Park & catch a Detroit Tigers game. We had bought tickets for Monday night's game against the Minnesota Twins.

Unfortunately, H had to change his flight and fly back to Houston at 6AM on Monday. So we decided to drive by the stadium on Sunday to see what we could see and tease him about skipping out on the game.

It's a beautiful new stadium, right in downtown Detroit. We were able to walk right up and take lots of good pictures from outside.

Although they have a brand new stadium, the Tigers weren't doing too hot. They started off the season with one of the worst records in the league.

They were very proud of their Tigers. There were huge and sort of scary statues of some very angry looking tigers.

The oversize bats and baseballs were also pretty neat, along with the spunky blue and orange everywhere.

There were also some unique tile mosaics around the stadium.

See? Mean and scary tigers! Everywhere!! Hundreds of them....

Comerica Park sits, literally, right next to Lion's Ford Field.

I was able to recruit a somewhat reluctant co-worker to attend the game with me Monday night.
We had great seats, that I still harass H with, only 8 rows up and just beyond 3rd base. I was much more interested in people watching and checking out the skyline, with all it's interesting buildings.

Maybe this is the reason they aren't winning too many games.

It was funny to see 2 former Astros players on the Tigers lineup, but I was more concerned about that 46 degrees!

I did watch a little bit of the game, but they were losing pretty bad by the 5th inning and I was getting really cold.

Just a few shots of the old Tiger Stadium, which was replaced with the new stadium in 2000.

It was kind of sad and depressing, along with all the other abandoned buildings in Detroit.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: We've finally got a new renter moving into the cottage! WOOHOO!