Hobby? check!

Roy has been in search of a hobby ever since he's graduated from school. (all of a sudden there's so much free time!) We were so lucky when we moved into the house that he found a hobby less than 50 feet from our front door.



Yup, right bedside our street is a lake.. which Roy has recently discovered is full of fish! (and the occasional alligator - as shown in the picture)

Fishing has been a great hobby for Roy, and both of our brothers have gotten into it too! Many a weekend are spent with our brothers over at our house, fishing at the lake, and discovering many more lakes sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.



Every once in awhile, I get in on the fun too!

Late night visitor.

We've had an issue the past few nights. Actually 2 nights in a row.

This "issue" caused our garage to go from this:



to this:



What possibly could have caused this mess?

....a tiny little mouse.

who I have affectionately now named "Stuart".

It all started one night when we were pulling into the garage, and as we were walking in I noticed something FLY inside. My first thought was that we immediately needed to move because the suburbs have monster sized cockroaches... but then I realized that it was probably a mouse. The only problem with leaving the mouse in the garage to fend for itself is that our garage is attached to the house. The idea of opening the garage door to have a mouse FLY into our house.... no, not going to happen.

So instead Roy and I spent 30 minutes (each night) trying to coax this little mouse out of the garage. We devised elaborate plans, blocked tunnels, built weapons (ok, a broom)... and finally worked together to scoot the little guy out.

(much harder for Roy to do with his wife occasionally jumping over things to get her feet off the floor and screaming at him not to hurt the mouse.)

Sweet surprise.

The other day we took a walk through a nearby park and took a short break....


and made a fun discovery in the bushes!


blackberries!


Now I just need to learn how to make jam...

Landscaping.

This post is insanely late... we did this project months ago, but I'm just now getting around to showing everyone. (bad blogger!) Hopefully this super long post will make up for it.

One of the first things we wanted to tackle before we got into the serious heat of summer was to do some landscaping. So we rallied up our gardeners (ie. my dad and brother) and got down and dirty one weekend.

The weekend started with a very big shipment... a housewarming gift from my parents!







Needless to say, we were jumping with excitement on Friday night and woke up very early Saturday morning to start the day.

Before any of the fun started: a before picture of the backyard. (by the way, how lucky are we to not have any back neighbors and just gorgeous trees?)



As soon as the digging started, we realized that to complete our plan - we would need to do some rearranging with our underground sprinklers. So, I was sent to Lowe's with a very detailed list for sprinkler extension parts.



I wandered the aisles for far too long (stopping only briefly to grab a bottle of water to hydrate me on my journey through the intimidating and never ending buckets of what seemed to look like the exact. same. thing.)

I was so surprised when I came home to find that so much work had been done! Roy and my dad had laid out all the weed barrier and planted most of the plants!



After the planting and mulching, we started the daunting and exhausting task of laying out the rocks.



The end result is great and we even had enough to use rocks in our front yard as well!



The back porch got spiffed up with some patio furniture!



Like any middle easterner's backyard, now ours is filled with tons of fruits! so far we have kumquats, tomatoes, meyer lemon, figs, and a unknown citrus tree!

Kumquats



Fresh mint.



We even found some awesome solar powered lights to go in our front flower beds.



Which look great at night!



For comparison, here's a before of our front yard.



And an after:



*Update: the best part of my tardy blogging is that I can now give an instant update to all the hard work we did back in April.

Tomatoes are getting big!



Some are giant!



Our crepe myrtles are growing.



And my knock-out roses are definitely knockouts!



I'm so happy to say that thanks to our dedicated weekends and constant watering - our yard continues to look even more amazing! It was hard in the beginning (living in apartments for so long, we never had to worry about mowing the lawn or weeding!) but its definitely been something fun to do on the weekends that brings us so much satisfaction when we sit on our back porch at night and enjoy the view.

Spring has Sprung!

We just got home this weekend from a wonderful trip and stood in front of Bromley looking at our yard. Spring is officially here and our yard was in need of a haircut.

So, off we went to Home Depot in search of a lawnmower!


There's nothing like wandering the aisles of Home Depot with a yummy sonic drink in hand. My pick: Lemonberry slush, extra berry.


So many options, so much money!


I thought something like this would be better, because we could mow the lawn and then also drive to the pool and pretend like its a 4 wheeler.

After Roy found his pick, we stopped off at the nursery.


And found some very pretty little flowers to add some pizazz to Bromley's lawn.


The pretty flowers were purchased to replace some very sad looking plants in our front yard. I think the plants are called "monkey grass".


I think they should be called "spider grass" or "creepy grass".




So our Sunday afternoon was spent with Roy mowing and myself digging and planting.


ta-da! Now the house looks just as pretty on the outside as on the inside!


And while we were cleaning up and I was watering my new flowers, we even got our first compliment from a friendly jogger!


Here's hopin' that the flowers continue to bloom!

Snowmageddon!!!

Actually... More like Icemageddon...but I'm not one to be angry with the weatherman.

I had a great day today. Great in the sense that I didn't have to go to work (it was my day off, lucky for me because otherwise I would have been braving the mean streets with all the other poor souls that work in the medical field)... not so great that I feel like I have come down with the flu. On a positive note I've been able to spend the past 24 hours with my loves: Roy, dayquil, nightquil, and my death bed (ie. The couch).

Spending so much time on the couch today has made me think of several things..
1. I need to start hanging more stuff on the walls.
2. This couch is uncomfortable.

I'm planning on conquering #1 tomorrow if I'm feeling better and I'm still pondering #2... but then again, if you lay on anything all day- its not very comfortable.

In the meantime.... I've been eyeing some couches from Ikea. Surprisingly, the reviews are pretty good.

Famous last words, right?

Nailed in.

I'm a super indecisive person. Especially when it comes to decorating. Couple that with a husband that HATES putting more than one nail in the wall for that indecisive person and you get a house full of empty walls.

I have plans for pretty much every wall in the house downstairs. There was one wall that kept me puzzled from the very beginning. Adding to the mix was that I feel that this wall is one of the most important.

You see, its the first wall that you see when you walk in the house and look straight to the back.



It's also the wall that we pass by the most, as its right next to our bedroom.

I had big plans for this wall. From the very beginning, I had a vision of EXACTLY what I wanted to hang there. But I always pushed my plans to the side because my big plan was pricey.

Until this weekend...

Roy and I were casually window shopping when we came across my vision. And the stars were aligned, because not only did I hold in my hand a gift card for the store but the store was also having a sale on its art!

30 minutes later Roy was lugging a huge package out of the door and I was skipping to the car.

I discovered I'm not always so indecisive when its something I truly love.

We rushed home and quickly settled the package into its new cubby. It fit perfectly.



1 hour later, it was hung. It looks amazing and now I can't wait to fill up the rest of the walls!



Its definitely an homage to my absolute favorite city in the entire world: NYC. It looks even better in person because lightly in the background is the NYC subway map and legend.

UPDATE:

I was so thrilled with the purchase of that NYC subway sign but still moaning inside about it's price tag. Randomly the other day Roy and I were wandering through TJMaxx when Roy started jumping around and pointing furiously to the back of the store......

fast forward 1 hour later....



Almost the exact same thing, but a quarter of the cost of the first one!!!

I love it so much more.