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!!!

bookworm!

i can't stop reading the janet evanovich series about stephanie plum (if you haven't heard of them, you've probably seen them -- one for the money, two for the dough, three to get deadly... etc.)

i'm on book 11 - she'll be releasing book 14 in june! i think nate's going to kill me for not paying any attention to him whatsoever when i'm reading ;) although, he's quite persistent. he's found if he repeats something enough times, eventually i hear him. the other day he repeated that fact 7 or 8 times until i eventually looked up:

"if i say something often enough," he said "eventually, you hear me!"

"is that all you had to tell me?"

"yes."

maybe i'll kill him first ;)

earth hour

today, from 8-9 pm local time turn off all your lights in honor of earth hour. read more here.

easter dinner for fourteen

we had lots of members of nate's family over for dinner on easter- it was fun :) i wouldn't have thought we could seat 14 in the house, but between the house and the patio, it worked out perfectly! we had all kinds of traditional easter favorites and granny even brought some of her homemade candy! i had lots of help with cooking which was needed and appreciated! but i did dress up for the occasion:


nina said my oufit reminded her of this picture!

my new buddy will be in the mail soon!

you can schedule him. to vacuum. how cool is that? i think he'll need a name... sweepy mcsweeperson? hmmm....

Flash Cards by Rita Dove

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper
of oranges and apples. What you don’t understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher’s geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip tree always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I’m only ten.

wow... these pics take FOREVER to edit

but i promise i'm working through 'em! this one is from our first day 'touristing' around paris. our plane landed around 8 a.m. and we dropped our luggage, showered, and took the train into the city to explore! somewhere during all that, we forgot to eat! we were starving by the time we took the metro and stumbled up to champs elysées and this picture was taken in the first place we saw. i told her we wanted the café, but i think she thought i meant we wanted coffee- we ended up in more of a hotel lobbyish type place instead of the cafe in the next room, but it worked out just fine :)

junk mail! and our lack thereof

so maybe a year ago, we joined green dimes, an organization that contacts marketing companies on your behalf in an effort to reduce junkmail that you receive (think credit card applications, insurance offers, etc.) in fact, i think i even blogged about it. we have definitely seen a difference. they even plant a tree on your behalf ;) i highly recommend it (ps: it's $20 but is a GREAT cause!).

along the same lines, i've recently discovered catalog choice, an organization that (for free!) let's you enter your info, and choose the catalogs you'd no longer like to receive by mail - handity dandity! i've been adding them to my account as they arrive since i mainly utilize online when i'm looking to shop without actually having my hands on it ;)

my husband is my hero

he can change a flat tire in a bad neighborhood in chicago on a rental car he's not familiar with less than 2 hours before we need to catch a flight while a second tire is going flat.... in 10 minutes! i kid you not.

just once, i'd like an uneventful travel story. just once!

congratulations cyndi and matt!

oakland nature preserve

this past weekend, nate and i explored a nature preserve - did i blog about that already? i think i did... either way, here's a few pictures from our adventures:

sinkhole??? seriously???

look! i exist!

so i played with this a bit in photoshop, but check this tree out! it struck my fancy. if a tree can do that...

congrats nately!

nate's starting a new job in a couple of weeks! still at disney, but a different department. for those of you who don't know, nate and i currently work in the same department - in fact, if he laughs or talks loud from his office, i can hear him in mine. we carpool and usually eat lunch together when we can. but soon, he'll be in a different department and building! it's an exciting opportunity for him but i'll miss having him around :) we still hope to be able to carpool although it'll be a bit more cumbersome than before. especially with the price of gas these days! i'm not sure how we compare to the rest of the country but it's been around $3.15 here lately.

we've got a string of exciting weekends coming up, we're either visiting or receiving visitors pretty much through mid-april! spring break is always a busy time in florida :) the weather has been absolutely beautiful lately, we've been spending a lot of time out reading on the porch. i've been really into historical fiction lately (philippa gregory writing about henry viii and the elizabethan time period) which has also spurred some actualy historical reading (biographies on elizabeth) but i've also been mixing some janet evanovich in there (four to score!).

we watched several movies from the library this week too - nate chose "310 to yuma" (shoot-em-up western) and "ghost-rider" while i went with "hairspray" and "3 men & a baby" -- we weren't exactly on the same movie wave length but we both enjoyed each other's choices :) never did get a chance to watch ghost rider though...

lunar eclipse!

lastnight nate and i headed into the backyard to check out the lunar eclipse -- he set my tripod up for me so we could take some pictures of it -- i don't have much of a zoom lens, but i cropped this one and you can kinda tell what's going on! the white specks are stars --

in other news, we celebrated our 2nd anniversary on monday :) since i was still kinda zombie-ish we had a low-key evening, i made tostadas (mmmmm, mexican food!) and then fell asleep almost immediately around 8:30 pm! but we do plan to celebrate more formally this weekend :) maybe dinner out? or a nice indulgent dinner in - we'll see!

i haven't forgotten about my favorite photo subject

miss cleo :)

happy valentine's day!

hmm.. does valentine(')s have an apostrephe? is that how you spell apostrophe? obviously i am tired. regardless, cleo wishes you a happy one, however you spell it!

it's hard to not cheese like a tourist..

... when you're standing in front of the eiffel tower :)