Cardboard Logs and Turkey Dogs

Well this past weekend was a first for us: our first camping trip together!  Also the first time we’ve been climbing in over two years!  Hard to believe.

One of the more interesting aspects for me was the making of cardboard logs.  Have you heard of this?  I’d never heard of it.  But we started with these boxes from furniture and some wedding gifts:

And watched The Two Towers and cut them into long strips and then rolled and tied with string until we had this:

Actually, these are the results of rolling about half the boxes, but you get the point.  Basically it was a good way to compact and discard of our excess cardboard while simultaneously providing fuel for our campfire.  Naturally they do not burn as well as regular logs and we had to supplement our supply with sticks and small logs from the forest, but they do pretty well, all things considered.

Here is our home away from home:

This was a free campsite called Luther Campground near Luther Spires, the rock formations we were climbing, just ten miles south of Lake Tahoe.

I decided to buy and try turkey dogs because they were actually cheaper than regular hot dogs, so we cooked those over our campfire and I was just mindlessly eating mine and I asked Caleb what he thought of the turkey dogs and he said he thought they tasted a little weird and then I kind of noticed that they do taste a little weird.  Know what tastes better than regular or turkey dogs?  Toasted marshmallows.  Yum.

Here is Caleb rinsing off dishes in the creek:

Here are a couple shots of us climbing:

First one is me, second one is Caleb. 

We decided to cap off our little trip by driving the highway up the west shore of Lake Tahoe, new territory for both of us, and it was really beautiful.  

I set up a beautiful shot on a beach on the south side of the lake and asked a man to take our picture and then his kid ran into the frame:

So here’s the best I could do with iphoto’s primitive “blemish” tool:

Heh heh.  

And, a parting shot: overlooking Emerald Bay on the south end of the lake.  

SO Many Pictures!

Alright, we got the rest of our pictures from our photographers today!  Yay!  Overall I am so happy with how they turned out.  I was way off on my estimate of how many I thought we were going to get; there are over a thousand.  So, many hours of trying to decide which ones to post, print, put into photobooks, Christmas card picture, etc. are ahead.  It took me several hours just to watch the slide show and look at every single image in the gallery.  And apparently a disc is on its way that has a few more shots not in the gallery.  Gah!

Here is a link to the slideshow of the photographers’ favorites.

Here is a link to our viewing gallery, through which you can order prints if you want to order prints from our photographers ($$$).   Bear in mind that this gallery contains pretty much every picture that they took that day, so not all are flattering or suitable for framing.  :-)

And here’s a shot that made me stop and laugh as I was wading through the masses:

Caleb started it.  I have pictures to prove it.

“First” Dance

Some of you asked about listening to the song we had for our first dance again since it was tough to watch the dancing and listen to the lyrics and voiceovers and everything.  If you weren’t there, our DJ recorded us saying stuff about each other a couple days before and put it in the intro and outro(is that the proper term?) of the song we chose for our dance.  

I was going to just upload the mp3 file of the song with our voices, but couldn’t figure out a way to do that, so instead I made this very simple  four minute video with the song and five lo-res pictures from our photographer’s blog.  I think it took me about an hour.  I now have a deeper appreciation for those people that make cool videos.  Not to mention movies.  

The song is “God Gave Me You”, recorded by Blake Shelton.  

YAY!!

I’m so excited to announce that the sneak peek of pictures from the wedding is up on our photographers' blog!  Click here for their post and tell us what you think!

Sometime in the next four weeks, we’ll get the best 300 photos or something like that on a disk and a link to a viewing gallery that we can share with you and you can look at them all and order prints if you desire.

California Observations and More “Afters"

Hello.  For a while now I’ve been thinking about sharing some of the little oddities we’ve noticed about our new location, and we have some exciting developments on the exterior of our property!  Also, Caleb is coming home this week so we’re looking forward to that.  Also, we are now officially less than four weeks away from the wedding.  Ack! And ahh!

Some fun little trivia about California*, most of which we find irritating: California traffic lights do not have the “left-turn yield to oncoming traffic” option.  You may only turn left when an arrow invites you to do so.  At all intersections with traffic lights, even minor ones.  Also, each and every intersection has a sign that indicates whether or not you can make a u-turn.  Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and we can’t seem to find any pattern to it.  Also, in my experience, you turn to the north (left or right depending on if you’re coming from the east or west) to go north on a highway, and south to go south.  At some junctions in this area, the situation is reversed.  That was confusing at first.  The other big thing is California’s big push for every home to have a certain percentage of light sockets exclusively wired to accommodate CFL bulbs.  That one actually makes me more legitimately angry than irritated if I think about all the implications, so we’ll just move on to more pleasant topics for now.

I’m very excited that our back yard looks almost normal now!  We still want to plant some vegetables and flowers and stuff around the border but here’s another set of before and after shots:

Unexpectedly, our neighbor alerted us to this issue with the roots of this sycamore tree in our front yard encroaching upon our mutual water line.  It was shocking to walk around the yard and see these roots all over the yard, about to pop above the ground.  So, I had it removed.  And now you can see the blooming rose bush better and there’s no shadow on the house. :-)

Before:

Now we just have to fix the mini-crater in the front!

*I should add that I do not know for sure if these statements apply to the whole state of California, as so far we have only traveled in a forty mile radius around our house. 

Our House aka May I live a Thousand Years and Never Paint Again

I hate to disappoint but I spent so much energy painting and shopping and arranging that I can not muster up much clever copy so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking, with just a few comments.  :-) 

Front of the house before:

Front of the house after I clipped the hedges: 

We’re thinking of painting sometime this year, something less drab.  We’ll probably do some more landscaping, too. 

Living/dining room before:

Living room after:

Living/dining room before: 

Living/dining room after:

Kitchen before:

After:

Family room before (poor photography, sorry!):

Family room after:

We didn’t quite get the color right here so we may repaint later.  Also, we’re hoping to replace  the futon sometime this year. 

Guest bathroom before:

And after:

At one point the bathroom was actually the same orange as the kitchen but it turned out to be a bit much for this little room.

Office before:

Office after:

Guest room--looked the same as the office before:

We’re planning on putting some nightstands and a little dresser in here sometime this year, if we get a bedroom set for the master.

Master bedroom before:

And after:

Master bathroom before--carpeted, boo:

After:

Caleb seeding the crater in the back yard:

You can sort of see the grass starting to come up!  Also, there were several completely out of control trees and hedges that I took down a notch.

So there you have it. 

Easter

Well it’s been a little while since you’ve heard from us on the blog front!  Caleb has been in Atlanta learning how to fly the C-12 and I’ve been keeping busy with projects around the house and yard and hanging out with our new group of friends, etc.  We have reached a good initial stopping point with the decoration of the house, so I do have pictures to share but to maintain chronological order, here are pictures of one of the Easter breads I made this year, before and after baking.

I think I might have actually overdone it a bit on the yeast this year, or  I need to remember to put the eggs more on top of the twists so they don’t get so swallowed up.  Also the bread sucks the dye off the eggs when they’re engulfed like that.  Still attractive and tasty, though.