Happy Thanksgiving! Day 1 of our roadtrip took us down the coast through Monterey and Big Sur. We saw lots of pretty coastline...



and stopped at a beach with elephant seals!















...and a drunk curlew!Hope you're all having a great holiday...we'll post more pictures soon!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I can't wait until we're all together for Christmas!! I thought I'd post a few more photos of our floor project. Jason and Ariel finished everything this week except for the trim work, but that should be done by the time I get back from Europe next weekend...

We still have a lot of cleaning up to do...all of Ariel's tools are still here and there is saw dust everywhere, but here's how the floors look now:

The floor project continued last night. Jason and Ariel prepped the living room with paper and chalk lines to mark where the staples will need to go in when they start laying the wood on Sunday...

This morning we woke up and noticed that some of the red chalk lines appeared a bit smudged...

Yep, you already know what I'm going to say...it's hard to see in these photos, but we definitely caught the culprits...

I know I haven't been good about posting more photos since we moved in. But in my defense, we didn't have internet for a whole week! So now I'm catching up. These first four photos are me standing in the middle of the kitchen and turning around to take photos so that you can see the whole layout all the way around. I still need to hang things on the walls, it's a work in progress. :-)

In this photo, the closed door goes down to the basement, the open doorway to the right is our foyer/front door/steps upstairs, and the open doorway to the far left leads to the garage. If you would stand in that doorway the laundry room would be the the left, powder room to the right, and garage straight ahead.

And here's the new dining room light fixture...our housewarming gift from Mom and Dad...I love it!

And I know everyone is wondering about Piper and Pippin. They've settled right in and are loving all of the extra room!

Time for bed...we'll post more photos soon!! :-)

Happy November everyone!

Here are a couple pictures from a crazy thunderstorm we had tonight...one of the first I've seen in Seattle (thunder is a very rare occurrence here, unfortunately). For about 10 minutes, the entire sky lit up this eerie red color, with several nice flashes of lightning and some thunder to go with it. I love thunderstorms, so I turned off all the lights and sat by the window to watch.

Then it started hailing.





The ground was almost coated for awhile with this little pea-sized hail, but it melted quickly in the rain. Too bad there wasn't any thundersnow!

Jerylin, Gloria and I threw a Halloween brunch for our friends this past Saturday, and made some ghoulish food to go with it.


A lox monster, with "devilish deviled eggs" in the background.


Tomato juice with lots of radish/black olive "eyeballs", some severed hands (ice), and witches' finger breadsticks in the background.

There was also a mummy quiche, but the pictures didn't turn out for that one.

Happy Halloween!

Another bad spare bedroom. The border came down in this room, but it still needs a fresh coat of paint and definitely some new carpet. If we take Ariel up on his offer to help us put in hardwood floors in the living room and dining room, then maybe we'll take some of the pink carpet from those rooms and put it in here instead of this...