I know I've been promising to post these all week and I'm finally just getting around to it...here's how our living room looks now with the curtains and endtables. Now I just need to find two lamps and a few decorative items to put on the shelves under the endtables and this room will be finished (for now)!

Dad had a good 60th birthday, Amanda made a delicious Lemon Blueberry Cake, and he was very surprised when he opened his card...

and saw that he was getting a new gas grill...

We picked the grill up last night, and put it together this afternoon. It came unassembled, and the nice people at Wal-Mart did offer to put it together for us. But we figured it couldn't be that hard...until we opened the box, and saw all of the parts that it came with (there are even more pieces in the shadows that you can't see), and we started thinking - maybe we should have let them put it together....


Dad worked hard putting it together. Of course I worked just as hard telling him what screw and part went where ~ someone had to supervise and figure out the pictures on the instructions! :)

But truthfully, the grill went together without any problems. All of the pieces were there, and everything fit together beautifully. And when dad was finished, he had a shiny new grill to cookout on (dad even polished it up to get the fingerprints off before I took the photo!)...

We have to get either a new tank or converter for our old tank before we can use it. Which won't be a problem. I'll post a photo of dad the first time he cooks on it!

Or so we thought. It took the squirrels less than 24 hours to figure out how to pop open the lid...


Oh well...I guess the squirrels have to eat too... :-)

Our first harvest of the season ~ fresh oregano!! I'm going to try hanging them to dry, rather than put them in the oven on a low heat. I attached the bunches to a hanger, which makes it easier to hang them in a doorway or downstairs by the coal stove. This is the first time I'm doing it this way, so I hope it works!



The oregano tends to want to take over the flower bed, so we're probably going to have to rip some out...Amanda do you want any??