what we've been up to

i'm behind on pictures. i know. still need to post pics from my mom's visit and i STILL need to finish my paris pics. but in the meantime, the chewies will be visiting this week (yay!), mario kart was just released for wii, and the weather is beautiful! we've been riding bikes and enjoying eating dinner out on the patio :) soon though, the weather will get HOT HOT HOT and all activity will occur in the air conditioned house, car, movie theater, work, gym, or anywhere out of the sun!

in the meantime, i took a self portrait for one of the message boards i post on, posted here for you :) my mom helped me shop for clothes while she was here - who knew i could wear capri pants?? not me!

linkage :)

so a few cool things.

1. nate and i have started taking our own grocery bags to the store. they're hard to remember, but it does make me feel better about all that plastic! but a really cool company has popped up that sells super stylish bags :) they're really cute! take a look - www.gracen.com.

2. if you're into photoshop... and you know what actions are, phaunt is giving away 30 of her fantastic actions this week! for those of you who aren't familiar with actions, they're like macros in excel, but for photoshop! or if that doesn't make any sense, it's a preset bunch of steps you can use to 'post-process' a photo. for example, make it black & white, brighten it up, put a frame on it, etc. they're super handy!

my mom's back home! :(

my mom headed home yesterday morning -- we had a great visit :) we spent time at the beach, rode bikes, at copious amounts of italian food, and relaxed! i should have take more pictures, but here's one of the three of us (i cut off nate's head!) i'll post the rest on smugmug soon!

canada and sushi (among other things)

we had a great time with laura and drew :) we tried to eat lunch at canada in epcot in honor of drew, but it was all booked up. no worries though, we had a great time eating (and drinking!) our way around the world showcase :)

we also fed them plenty of mexican food, and one night we even made our own sushi at home! i think we did a pretty good job for our first attempt! we were sad to see them go, but we'll be up to visit with them in june :)

a little story involving 4 a.m. and 911

so nate is out of town for like... 24 hours. it always freaks me out when he's gone because i'm just nervous about sleeping in the house alone since i never have to do it anymore. i make cleo sleep ON TOP of the covers (or at least with those big ears sticking out!) so she can hear for me.

so lastnight/this morning i woke up, still dark.. didn't realize why i'd woken up at first but then realized i had heard knocking. or at least i thought i did, so as i'm in the process of deciding if i really heard knocking or not and realizing it's 4 a.m., i see a white light kind of flash across the dining room (at the back of the house), then more knocking on the front door (which by now the dog FINALLY HEARS and starts barking), more white light flashing around the house in various places. then the doorbell, and i'm running around like "holy $&@#&%*!!!" dialing 911 on my cell phone so i can press send if immediately necessary because our land line is having some kind of issue and doesn't work right now. there are little windows on either side of our front door so i kind of peeked out to see who the hell was at the door and i see a cop. whew. so i say "oh thank god" and open the door.

turns out our crazy broken phone dialed 911 (apparently portable phones can do this when there are issues?) and they were responding to the call. so the first thing she asked me was if i dialed 911 and i was thinking... not yet, but i was about to!

the white light was her partner checking the house with a flashlight.

so they came in the house and they were really nice and petted cleo for a few minutes (who is WORTHLESS by the way!) i'm just so glad it was the police at the door...

paris, day one

so i finished editing pics from my first day in paris! (can you imagine how long this would take me if i had been on vacation instead of working and took even MORE pictures???) here are a few of them, but you can check out all of day 1 here. we visited les tuileries garden, the banks of the seine, and notre dame.



my favorite part of the day? i think probably this cool little cafe called la palette. it was full of local parisians having cool coffee shop discussions (or at least... they seemed so in french!), reading literary looking books, all those things you'd expect of a cafe :) i had fun just wandering and looking at storefronts (pastries, cheese, and flowers, oh my!) i also loved all the bookstores- they were everywhere AND there were people in them! we even happened upon the bookstore from "before sunset" which is one of my favorite movies :)


oh and the doors! do you all know about my love of doors? :) well, i have one and the doors in paris are so colorful! i loved it.

what's going on here? apparently mickey gets really dressed up in france!

the ivey B&B

guess who's coming to visit this weekend? laura & drew! we're so excited :) we wrote out a list of things we'd like to show them -- they're always such wonderful nashville hosts and we're really looking forward to having them here :)
after that, my mom will be here!! she hasn't been here since we made all the changes to the house so i'm really excited to show her all that and hopefully we'll get to the beach.
then we have a while without visitors, but in the end of may, my dad, anita, ryan and austin will all be here for a week :) they've never been here so i'm really excited about that too! cassie is hoping to make it down for some part of that week too.

we've been enjoying the FL weather and having a good time :) not looking forward to that summer heat though!!!