I'm still alive :)

I haven't blogged in awhile, I know. Here are a few updates for what has been going on with us lately. I painted the living room and kitchen recently with the help of my mother-in-law, and now it is "Lime Granita" - light green. :) I really like how it turned out. The living room used to be a golden yellow color which I never really loved even though I picked it out! Sometimes paint just doesn't quite turn out how you pictured it in your head. So after two years of living with the yellow, I am much happier with the green. I think it brightens up the room and makes it feel bigger. The kitchen used to be red (it was a bear to paint - it took three to four coats to keep it from looking magenta!) and I loved the red. However, with the oak cabinets and the 80's floors it made it feel kind of old, and again it made it feel darker and smaller. The green makes the kitchen feel really big, which was the first impression we had when we looked at this house to begin with. I think it was one of the major selling points for us! So I am happy how it has turned out. Now I need to look into some curtains for both the living room and kitchen... darn. :)



On a different note, Aaron's sister Rachael and her husband Justin came back to visit this past weekend.


They came back to Iowa City for five days, and then they are off to Davenport to see Justin's sister's new baby boy. While they were here we celebrated Rachael's birthday and I made her birthday cake - red velvet cake with pecan coconut cream cheese frosting. The cake was from my Grandma Trunnell's recipe, and the frosting was a Paula Dean recipe and I think they went well together. I told Aaron I may have missed my calling in life since I really like to bake things! (I could never make it as a baker - they get up way too early!) Here is the birthday cake...


I also made the cake with the traditional frosting too. I have to say, after trying both it is hard to decide which is better. I think it depends on what you are in the mood for.


Anyway, I had to throw in some pictures of Aaron and his dad making the pizza we had for Rachael's birthday dinner. It was really good! Pizza margarita (maybe that's not how you spell it) with homemade tomato sauce, homemade pizza dough, fresh mozzerella, and fresh basil (from the planter on my deck :) - it's ridiculous how much that little basil plant has grown!).



Well, it has been a good summer so far - I'm excited that I still have a few weeks left before I have to go back to school. We'll be heading out to California in August to see Rachael and Justin, and then we'll spend a few days in Vegas after that. We're excited for that! Hope you all are having a good summer!

busy night!

Tonight I worked at Redhead, waiting tables. We were super busy at one point tonight - the restaurant was almost full and I was working on my own tonight! Kim, the owner/chef had to help me run drinks and get orders in, and one of the regulars wrote up her own ticket so I didn't have to take their order! It wasn't too crazy except for that one point in time because about 5 different tables came in within about 10 minutes of each other! When people come in, I have to get their drink orders, get drinks, go through the specials, get their meal orders, and put those in to the kitchen all within about the first 10 minutes they are there. So that's where it tends to get backed up... :) However, with all the chaos, I doubled my normal Tuesday night tips so I can't complain!
I think I'm starting to get better which is good. My voice is coming back and I felt fine at work tonight. So yay. :)
Hope you all are having a great week!

Aaron's Birthday...

So I have never put any video on the blog so this is a test run... Happy Birthday Aaron!

Fourth of July weekend

Aaron and I had a good fourth of July weekend - we went to Guttenberg and saw most of my family (except my sister and her family who were off exploring South Dakota I believe?). It was not exactly how I would have wanted to spend the fourth, though, because I was sick! July 3rd I woke up with a bad headache and just felt miserable. Then, that evening I felt warm so I took my temp and it was 99.8 or something like that. On a whim I decided to check it a again, and it was 100.1. Uh oh! So I kept checking it and it went all the way up to 101 - while I was taking 800 mg of ibuprofen! Not good... The day of the fourth Aaron and I worked - he at the Marriott and I at Redhead, waiting tables. I made some good money, but then I was pooped out! We stopped at Wal-mart before we headed out of town, and I bought a new camera (the dogs basically ruined the old one). I'm a big fan of Kodak - they are so easy to use, they take nice pictures, and when you push the button to take the pictures, there is very little delay. So our new camera is the Kodak Easyshare M763, and I hope I like it as much as our old Kodak camera. Anyways, this is good news for you, my fellow blog readers, because now I have pictures to post to break up the monotony of words. :)

This is sick Megan, but the proud wife who made "dirt dessert" for her husband's birthday (we celebrated it early this past weekend with my fam). In hindsight, 6 packages of instant pudding should have raised red flags as to the amount of "dirt dessert" that it would make, but really, can you ever have too much dessert???

This is happy Aaron, very excited that his sick wife actually made dirt dessert for his birthday. :)

Aaron asked for a Honda VTX 1300 motorcycle many times for his birthday this year - somehow that doesn't quite fit in the birthday budget, but I think Mom and Dad had the right idea here... :) Someday, babe...

I have never seen a kid enjoy sweet things as much as my nephew Conner! As we were getting ready to sing happy birthday and then dish out the dessert, he would pull out a gummy worm and eat it, then another one. His brother Kyle didn't want anything to do with the gummy worms, but Conner said,"I like those worms!"

This is Conner eyeing the rest of the family getting dessert... Are they getting something I don't have??? I thought this was such a cute face.

Grandma says I need to get home more to see her. She's probably right. :) I think she is feeling much better because she was up and around all the time, doing dishes, folding laundry, playing with the kids. This is a good picture of her.
Anyways, it was a good weekend, and I did alot of sleeping and laying low to try to get rid of this bug. It drove me crazy all weekend because I lost my voice on the way to Guttenberg on Friday night, and I still don't have it back yet! (probably because I keep on talking :) ) Today is good for my voice because I'm home alone while Aaron's at work - the only ones I can talk to are Chewie and Reuben, and right now they are both napping. Speaking of Reuben and Chewie...

We've been driving all of our long trips in the car since the gas got to be about $4 a gallon, so Reuben has adapted to life in the back of the car (the seats fold down and open up to the trunk). His new favorite place to nap is in the trunk! He is a good car dog. Chewie, on the other hand...

not such a good car dog. He fights going to sleep - this is proof of that! I think he is worried he will miss out on something if he goes to sleep in the car.
Well, that was our weekend! This weekend is officially Aaron's birthday, so we'll have to see what I can come up with to surprise him a little. He always figures out what he's getting for his birthday, so I'll have to be tricky! :)
Hope you all have a good week!

It's officially summer!

Well, atleast that's how it feels. I'm sweaty right now because I went for a run this morning and then when I got home, Chewie smelled my shoes and he knew I had been outside... So he had to go for a run/walk too. Now I'm pooped! Poor Reuben - I think he could really do without walks altogether, but I would feel bad leaving him behind. Yesterday I took them on a really long walk - so long in fact that I brought them a bowl and a bottle of water so they could get a drink halfway through! Reuben ended up laying down about 5 times on the way back home from that walk. It was pretty funny - he would find a shady spot and just plunk down, like he was saying "I give up! I'm stopping right here and you can't move me!" So it took awhile to get home - I tried to tell him he could lay down in the AC sooner if he would not stop so many times, but you just can't reason with him. :) Today we went on a shorter walk than yesterday, so he only pooped out on me once. About 50 yards from our house. Again, you just can't reason with him.
Anyway, I think tonight we are having some friends over and are grilling out - reason #2 why it is officially summer. Yay for brats! :) Hope you are all having a good summer!