Home Improvements

When we bought our house last year, we felt like we won the landscaping lottery! Everything was beautifully landscaped and we've been doing our best to keep it up, but it's been tough. This year we've been working really, really hard to do some additional things to our garden and patio.

Check out these before and after pictures!

Garden early this spring-right after we cleaned out all the dead stuff from the winter:

Patio-the previous owners willed us a giant wood pile and lots of swamp grass:

Goodbye woodpile and swamp grass!

Hello flowers and sunshine!

Kickball!!!!

As if my dodgeball career wasn't successful enough, I've started playing on a summer kickball league! Last night I got on base 2 out of 3 times I went up to kick! It's only a matter of time before Wheaties calls me to be on the cover of their cereal...

Pictures to come!

Fruits of my Labor!

The PHR Test!!

I spent all winter studying! I haven't picked up a text book or studied a darn thing since college (yikes-SIX whole years ago!!), but I wanted to become a certified Professional in Human Resources. It's a great thing to get for an HR career and basically helps you be an expert in the field and get jobs a little easier. Studying was killer and I recently crunched the numbers. Check out how I spent my winter:

• 500 pages read
• 600 flashcards learned
• 8 review quizzes
• 2 assessment tests
• 2 practice tests
• studying an average of 4 nights/week for about 2.5 hours each night for 3.5 months

For the test they gave you 4 hours to complete a 225 question test, and it took me 3 hours and 55 minutes to complete! I am SO thrilled to say that my hard work paid off and I PASSED!! I was so excited and relieved to have passed that I was literally shaking when I found out!! I just got my certificate in the mail today, and now I can officially put letters behind my name! WOOHOOOO!

You may be wondering how I celebrated...well I ran the half marathon the next day! Isn't that a normal celebratory activity?! Don't worry though, champagne followed the next day :)

Just in case....

Just in case our awesome new flower boxes don't make it through the next monsoon, here are some pics! Thanks Linn!!

Race Victory!!!!

Cleveland Half Marathon!

The running champions before the race, about 6am...

Mid race!

*Note all the dudes eating my dust behind me...!*

After!

Visitors!!

We had a fabulous weekend with my in-laws! Here are some pics from their recent visit:

The sun actually shined for a few hours!

We finally bought a grill! Steve and his dad put it together, just in time to cook out!

Our first official cookout!

Dental Doom

Just got back from getting a cavity filled...here's a phrase you don't want to hear when the hygienists are trying to insert the filling:

"I think you're supposed to grab 'em with the pliers and twist"

For real!!! This actually just happened!