Lisa and Michael

The time, that is. It’s already March, and the year is cruising by. We’ve been so busy since the wedding, quickly striking off items on the to-do list and adding new ones. So far, we’ve remodelled the laundry room, added cable to the kitchen, and trimmed the roses and vines in the back, no easy task let me tell you. It’ll take the entire Spring and Summer to get everything done, if we’re lucky.

On top of that, I’m studying for the GMAT and looking toward B-school in the Spring, and Lisa just started her SHRM certification course this week. If all goes as planned, we’ll both be writing exams at the same time, or near enough.

Still, we’re enjoying ourselves. But, I just wish time would slow down a bit, it’s going way too fast.

Only a few more weeks to harvest, but we’re already pulling tomatoes, broccoli, and yummy New Mexico chile peppers. Just check out those pumpkin leaves on the far right! Next year, they’ll be going on the tier above the garden where they can really have room to spread and grow.

Lisa is trying hard to figure out where we are going in September, we’ll see how close she gets.

Edited to add: New toy for Puppy and Oscar.

Now this is a large radish!

Puppy hates baths, but man, he’ll whine like mad if you don’t point the hose at him.

Having a good time at Lowe’s.

We’re back from Orlando and we had a blast! The conference was good and Lisa really enjoyed her time at the resort, even if she did get a good burn on Tuesday. We enjoyed some great seafood and had an incredible time at Islands of Adventure and tons of success at the outlet malls. We did so much in just 5 days.

Plus, Saturday we planted the garden. Man, was that a lot of work, but so far, everything is looking good. Now, if we can just keep the dogs out of there! We’ve planted a variety of tomatoes, onions, peppers, and herbs.  We should be enjoying our harvest end of July, first of August.

Finally, Darrell, a Cardinals fan, made the mistake of leaving his Jeep at the house today:

I know Michael has been working/learning, but I have sure enjoyed relaxing, shopping, sleeping late, making friends with the other spouses while laying by the pool and of course sipping cocktails the whole time. You can’t get much better than this! I do worry that Oscar may be in charge at home, but we will have to deal with that later I suppose. I will continue to rest it up on this trip because it seems that we are always working on a house project back home. The day after we get home from Orlando, we will be going to a plant show to pick our plants for our very first garden. Then once the roots are good, we hope to paint the house to go with the garage door. All this and work full time too! Already a busy summer ahead.

The new garage door is installed, it looks nice. New pic below.

We switched our auto insurance to GEICO this week. Even with adding an additional vehicle, our new premium is a whopping 31% lower with GEICO than it was at Farmer’s. What a rip-off they turned out to be! Lisa and I try not to think about it, it makes us sick we did not switch earlier.

We’re off to Orlando this Monday for a business trip, I have a conference to attend and Lisa is going to hang out by the pool, read, maybe do some work. We’re going to bypass Disney for a change and check out Islands of Adventure this time.

I decided not to bring a bulky camera around and am instead going to rely on the Blackberry as camera, and what’s cool is Google allows you to email directly to your Picasa account, so I setup a new Orlando album that we’ll be able to post to instantaneously. Check it out!

It was bound to happen sooner rather than later.

It’s the house’s original door ca. 1979. It’s 100% wood and very, very heavy. It took everything I had to get back it into place, or close enough. Murphy’s Law: The new Jeep is trapped inside, but escaped unscathed. Lisa and I knew this was going to happen, we were just hoping not for another few years! Not much you can do about that. Since it’s so old and falling apart, there was no sense in getting someone out to fix it, we decided to replace the whole thing. And that happens tomorrow.

4/18 Update – The new door:

So, I woke up Tuesday to the sound of Shelby shouting, “Fire! The bush is on fire!” (or something to that effect). She seemed serious about it all, so I jumped out of bed wearing just sweats and ran outside in the snow. Sure enough, the damn shrub was burning! It took a minute or so, but I was able to put the fire out. My aim is good.

Shelby and Lisa were having their morning coffee, I guess around 5am or so, when Shelby noticed the Christmas lights were blinking. She asked Lisa about it, but Lisa thought they were just turning off. But they kept blinking, and at some point noticed the flames. Hell, I’m not sure how they could have missed the smell!

(click on pic for full size)

Anyhoo, when I inspected the scene in full daylight, the bush really wasn’t that badly burned, most of the flames were coming from the extension cord, outlet, and LED lights themselves. It would seem the snow we had the night before had shorted the cheap Lowes outlet, causing a fire. It’s a good thing someone noticed the flames, since the bush is right next to the house and who knows what could’ve happened if left to burn unchecked.

Lisa and her crazy idea of redecorating the whole house!  It started out with wanting to have a garage sale so we could park more than one car inside the garage and after posting a few things to Craigs List and making a few dollars to spend on some new furniture–it turned into redecorating the whole entire house in like two weeks!  Now Michael putting up with the constant moving and taking apart stuff and traveling to pick up stuff while he should be resting up for the upcoming cruise—now that is true love!  The house looks great and best yet–the garage is CLEAN!!