The Rose Bush is Blooming

I like to pick them to bring inside. They are very fragrent and the bushes produce a ton! Unfortunately, they do not last more than a day or two once I pick them, but the bush produces for quite awhile.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day! Here's the garden pictures I've been promising!

We put down this stuff over our garden that we're calling a weed tarp. Over it, we put mulch, but here's a before picture. It looks like garbage bags, but is tougher than that. We hope it works- fighting the weeds last was the opposite of fun. This year we've planted tons of tomatoes, broccoli, eggplant, zucchini, rhubarb, and yellow squash. We also have several herbs in pots around the yard, including basil, thyme, mint, parsley, and chives.

We spent a good part of today putting down mulch. We were happy to have the Scion- with the seats folded down we were able to get all 18 bags of mulch in with no problem.

We repainted the bird houses that the previous owner left awhile ago, with leftover paint we had hanging around. A family of sparrows has already moved in. Revitalize the neighborhood, and they will come.

Our two big pots by the shed. One has cherry tomatoes in it, the other has my mint plant.

Flowers under our bedroom window. We put new mulch in this bed as well.

Our irises are doing well.

In our spare time, we finished repainting the office. The color on the left is the new color, "Seaside Blue" and the right side is the pinkish brown color we painted over. It looks really good.

Welcome to the World, Caiden Noah Zoerb

Here's an itty bitty picture of him!

What Cathy's Reading

If anybody needs some book club ideas, here's some things that we've (well, actually Cathy) enjoyed lately:

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.) This was a novel about a school shooter, written as a series of letters by the mother of the kid to her husband. Very interesting take! I liked this so much I picked up The Post-Birthday World: A Novel (P.S.) by the same author. It was about once decision about the main character made- to cheat on her husband and kiss his friend, or not. Each chapter outlines what happens for each choice- if she did or didn't. I loved how it was written!

RIP Pinky Pig

The Hawaii Blog

As you know, we're leaving for Hawaii on Wednesday! We'll be keeping a travel blog about our trip. Click here to see it! We hope you enjoy our Notes fromWaikiki!

Birthday Day Trip: Lawrence, KS

Sunday was Jeremy's birthday, and we celebrated with an impromptu trip to Lawrence, KS. We had been told that Lawrence was very similar to Fort Collins, so we took the 3 hour drive to find out. It was the first long trip in Cathy's new car, so we were excited about that as well.

Kirk and Jeremy, just before we backed out of the garage. WOO!

It was supposed to be sunny and nice. Instead we had wind and fog. Go figure.

The drive went pretty fast. We took the toll road, and there was not much traffic. We passed through Emporia, Topeka, and a whole lot of nothing. It was kind of like driving through Wyoming, except with more wind.

By the time we made it to Lawrence, we were *starving,* so we stopped at the first restaurant that looked good- The Longhorn Steakhouse.

Life totally called for steak at that moment.

Everything looked so good, it took awhile to decide. We were forced to order a delicious appetizer so we did not starve to death before we ordered our real meals.

The decor was...interesting...but we liked that the heads of all the animals had hats!
When you're that hungry, everything seems to take forever. To kill time, we took pictures.
Even one of Cathy. Notice the classy antler motif of the restaurant.
But the food was really, really good. Really good. We'll have to go back!

After lunch we headed downtown, which really did remind us of Fort Collin's old town. Lawrence is also a smoke free town, which is something we all miss about Fort Collins. There were lots of neat little shops to explore. We did not even hit up half of them and we were there for a couple of hours. Cathy even bought something at a cute European food shop: this little bag that rolls up!

It is tiny.
But it unfolds into a good sized tote bag!

It starts out really small, and fits into Cathy's purse with no problems. It will be really nice for sporadic library trips and for the weekly Aldi's shopping trip. Aldi's is a ultra low budget grocery store that is very low frills- so low frills that they don't even provide bags. Of course, Cathy always forgets to take a bag, so it will be nice to always have a reusable on hand.

The European food store also had the neatest chocolates. Each piece was like a little work of art. It was so neat that we took pictures! Observe:


We did not buy anything, but we looked at them for quite awhile. Maybe next time.

We also stopped by the local university to have a look.

It was a neat looking campus.
And bigger than we expected.

We drove the three hours back to enjoy Jeremy's birthday cookie.

Happy Birthday Jeremy!