From my eyes…

Last week I was chatting it up with a neighbor at a different neighbor’s daughter’s party. Got all that?

Anyway, turns out she cuts hair. I’d put in a call to my normal girl and she didn’t get back to me (she’d been on vacation I learned later) so I planned to get it chopped off across the street the following evening. I took all of your votes from my earlier post about hair suggestions and kind of combined them and just described what I wanted. I liked it when I left. It feels so free to have short hair again after two years. But the next morning when I styled it I decided I wanted it a tad bit shorter and able to do the flippy thing.

I played with a new feature in my Picasa2 photo editing thingy and learned how to make a collage. It needed 9 pictures, so here are some of my new hair cut. You’ll see my before front and back, the first attempt front and back and the final outcome front under, front flip and back. 

I’m digging the features I found on Picasa2. I’m sure youll see more collages in the near future!

My best friend told me last night that I was getting old on her. I had called her on my drive home from a candle party. I talked to her about how in the past year, I’d been to a Tastefully Simple and Pampered Chef party and invited to play Bunco twice. I agree with her that these things are activities for people who are “old”. I think that’s ok. I am getting older and more settled in my life and starting to enjoy the hard work I put in during my early and mid 20s. I know there is lots left to do, but I’m finally, finally, feeling like I can stop and do things like spend a buck or two and a neat iron cross sconce for my master bedroom and things like that.

Another activity to prove my getting older is the fact that I’ve taken to (and actually enjoy) gardening and lanscaping my new house. Mike and I worked our tails off this weekend to make some improvements to the front of the house. It was really a lot of fun even if we did wait until the hottest day of summer so far to do it.

This is the before picture. This is what the builder put as the “landscape package” BOO!

Mike and I built a retaining wall (it needs to be fixed a bit in the back, but that’s a later project) and I changed out the plants to these prettier ones

Another view…..though my house looks crooked in this shot, I assure you it is not. Can you see my gorgeous sunflowers in the back?! The envy of the street

So far growing up, getting old? Not so bad

Almost 5 years ago, I had a baby. She was a dog. Her name was Abby. She was all mine. She made me smile and I used to spend thousands of minutes just watching her. Watching her play, watching her sleep, just watching her.  And she used to love greeting me at the door and cuddling with me and begging me to play with her.

Then a year ago, Mike came into our life. Now, Abby gets more excited to greet him at the door and begs him to play and cuddles with him.

So, like I said I used to have a dog.

*While my post has bitter undertones, I am trully happy that these two get along so well!

Over the weekend Mike and I had two celebrations. We went to a very well put together wedding of two close friends/co-workers. And we also celebrated our first year together as a couple.

I can’t believe Mike and I have been together for a year. Sometimes I feel like “Really? That’s it. Just one year?” because it feels like forever already. I can’t imagine what I’d be doing day to day without Mike in my life and I have to really concentrate to even remember what it was like before he was. And then there are the days when I feel like “Really? We’ve already been together for a year?” because it is still fun and new and I am still learning all kinds of things about Mike, and myself for that matter, all the time.

We spent some time this weekend talking about this first year - what we thought and how it went and what to keep just the same, what to have more of, what to try harder to eliminate. We agreed we are both very happy and like where life is headed with each other. 

Probably partly because of the wedding and partly because of our heart-to-heart chats, but I am feeling crazy in love. It’s so much fun.