Anniversary

On  August 18th I had my 10 year anniversary at my job. 

On Saturday I got this package in the mail.

Inside was a nice letter from Mary Sue Coleman, the President of U of M.

And a catalog of gifts to choose from:

I don't know what I want yet. Maybe these earrings.

Or I kind of like this pretty ring.

Or maybe I'll get a piece of art. I rather like the black and white tree on the top in the middle. Plus when you get the art they will make a donation to the Make A Wish Foundation or ASPCA.

No matter what I choose I'm sure it will be nice.

Plus I get 4.5 more hours of paid time off a month now.

I may complain about my job and going there every day, but it is a good one, with good pay and benefits. And it's nice that they let you know that they appreciate you sometimes!

Until the next time...

Yes, It's still Working!

No new wedding plans for Brad and Shauna. They're still gathering information on venues. There is a chance they may postpone the wedding until May of 2015. In the meantime, we're having fun looking at Pinterest and thinking of different things we can do!

Last Sunday we had the kids over for a barbecue. I decided to make this ice cream sandwich cake that I saw on Pinterest. You start with ice cream sandwiches of course

Stack them up on a plate just so

Can I just stop here to say that ice cream sandwiches sure have gotten smaller over the years! 

Anyway, you end up with this.

Then I just covered it with cool whip, drizzled chocolate and caramel and sprinkled a crushed up Mr. Goodbar on it. 

It looks like a mess but it was deadly delicious! 

Before the kids came when I was cleaning the half-bath,  I dropped a glass cat statue into the sink and broke it! 

Yep the sink! Not the cat statue...the cat statue is fine..not a scratch on it! 

We temporarily fixed it with glue and caulk and then Rich spent five hours yesterday replacing the sink and pedestal! Poor guy!

 I felt so guilty! 

Oh and the cat statue is banned from the bathroom! 

Until the next time!

The Wedding Planning Begins

I am going to start posting detailed wedding plans....basically for my own records  so if you get bored and don't want to read I won't be insulted. I'll try to put some non wedding stuff in too!

Shauna and Brad do not want to get married in a church. They want the ceremony to be at the same place that the reception is. I personally love that idea. It's so convenient and they don't have to worry about transportation to the hall from the church.

So we need to find somewhere that has a nice place to have a ceremony outdoors or indoors if the weather is not so nice. This is Michigan and the weather can be unpredictable. Brad prefers a golf course country club because they are much more picturesque!

The first place we checked is called Fox Hills. It's in Plymouth, fairly close to where we live. The hall was beautiful with windows all the way around overlooking the golf course and a wrap around balcony. This is the only picture I got of the outside.

Shauna and Rich would walk out the door and down those stairs and along the brick walkway to this gazebo

which is really beautiful with hanging baskets of  flowers so we wouldn't have to decorate it.

It's also very expensive. I'm not going to go into detail about costs in these wedding planning posts because it's not necessary but I'll give you one example. They charge $700 to rent the gazebo for a outdoors ceremony.  Fair enough because it is beautiful but the kicker is they also charge $3 a chair for the guests, so if you need 150 chairs, it's an additional $450! Seriously!  So that, along with a few other little things was a deal breaker for us. Too bad, because it truly was a beautiful place!

The next place was called Beacon Hill in Commerce . They were setting up for a wedding that evening when we got there.

Their prices for food and drink were a little more reasonable but what we really liked about this place was the outdoor ceremony area.

Beautiful and on a lake, too! And I can't remember the actual cost of the rental but the chairs are included. And we love the way they curve around the center. We would have to decorate it ourselves but I don't see that being a problem.

We are checking out a few more places but this place is a strong contender.

That's all the planning news for now. They haven't set an actual date yet but it will probably be sometime next August or September.

I did want to show you the patio of one of the apartments I walk by a lot on my daily walks.

It's a little hard to see but they have a bar with plants and solar lights in little colored buckets. A small potted tree and some chairs. And plants, wind chimes and balloons hanging from the balcony above it. So cute!  I want so bad to walk up there and tell whoever lives there that I love their little oasis and how much enjoy looking at it every time I walk by!

Until the next time....

Vacation Recap

Rich and I have been on vacation this past week.

We planned a little trip into the upper peninsula to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. That's the area circled on this map.

There is a ton of waterfalls in the UP and we wanted to see some of them. The most breathtaking are in this area. 

We definitely were not disappointed! 

This is Miners Falls. I really wish the pictures showed how truly beautiful this falls was. It is a 20 foot fall into a gorge. 

The round holes in the rock at the bottom were interesting. I can only assume that they formed from thousands of years of dripping water! 

This is Sable Falls. 

This is also a 20 foot drop but it's three-tier and equally as impressive. I could look at these falls all day! 

The least impressive one we saw was Mosquito Falls and before we could get to it we had to hike 1.1 miles of trail that looked like this:

and climb areas that looked like this: 

To finally get to see this:

Nice but definitely not as impressive as the other ones; and it was a rough 45 minute hike! But we chalked it up to experience and good exercise!!

We only spent two nights up there but it was nice to get away even for just a little while. 

Now onward to wedding planning...

Oh and little Anthony is still in the hospital. He's recovering slower than we thought he would but still doing good and hopefully he will be home in a few days. He had strict instruction from his Great-Aunt Jeanette to not be there when I came back to work on Monday!

Until the next time.....

Woo Hoo!!!

This was the longest week! Not only because it was my last weekend before my vacation but I was anticipating a particular event.....

Last Tuesday Brad asked Shauna to marry him while they were on vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC! 

He came over to our house about 3 weeks ago to tell us what he was planning. He asked us to not say anything to anyone so we have been bursting at the seams for three weeks. Now it's official and we can shout it to the world. We are so happy! We couldn't ask for a more wonderful man for Shauna to be married to!

 Another wonderful thing was Anthony had his surgery on Wednesday and everything went wonderfully! The surgery didn't take as long as they anticipated and he was only in ICU for less than two days. He's in  regular room and doing well...probably will be going home by the middle of next week!

Last Friday we all went to dinner for my oldest brothers birthday. Here he is with Dominic enjoying some chocolate birthday cake! 

And finally here is the best substitute for noodles I have found to date! 

Shirataki pasta! It's perfect for this diabetic, wheat-free dieter!

Until the next time...

Summer Marches ON

Remember Bugsy from Christmas time?

Here he is today!

He''s already over 60 pounds and not even a year old yet! He's going to be a big dog...and a good dog, too! He was very well behaved when we were over there last week and he's not even a year old yet!

This is my sweet little great-nephew Anthony.

He's having surgery on Wednesday to close a hole in his heart. It's a scary thing but thankfully he's having it done by renowned surgeon at Mott Children's Hospital at University of Michigan where I work. He will be at the best place he could possibly be and I have all the confidence they will take good care of him there!

That's pretty much it for now. Shauna and Brad are off to Myrtle Beach this week. I'm very excited for them! They plan on leaving at 4:00 on Sunday morning  to reach their hotel in MB at the approximate check-in time at 4:00 on Sunday afternoon! Oh to be young again!

Then Rich and I are on vacation the following week. We are planning a small trip into the UP to see some waterfalls!

In the meantime, try to spend some time in the sun!

Until the next time.....

What's Going On Lately

Summer sure seems to be flying by. It's been pretty humid the past week or so which makes it hard to have any ambition to do much, but there's been a few things worthy of posting about.

We switched cable companies a few weeks ago and at the same time  my lap top computer stopped connecting to the Internet. We knew it wasn't a problem  with the cable because it received a strong wi-fi signal, it just wouldn't connect. 

Shauna's boyfriend Brad is a computer programming engineer so I asked him if he would take a look at it. I figured if anyone could figure out what was wrong, he could. So one night I hauled it to their apartment and let him have at it. He worked hard, too.  See?

He had the laptop open on the left and his computer and he was looking up stuff and trying different things and rebooting the lap top, but nothing was working.  I sat there with them for a few hours and he still hadn't figured it out so I left it with him to do whatever. I figured if he couldn't fix it then it would make a nice hot plate because without connecting to the Internet it was pretty useless to me! 

Anyway,  he worked on it whenever he could and finally got it working! Seems it was some remote file that needed to be updated. He said from what he read about that particular file it should have stopped working shortly after we got it in 2008! It had nothing to do with our switching cable companies, just a weird coincidence! Oh well, it works now and I am grateful for his hard work! 

Talking about weird, you see the light fixture in our small 1/2 bath with the globe missing? One morning last week I was sitting in there minding my own business and the globe suddenly fell straight down hitting the faucet and smashing into the sink! It probably was around last Christmas when I took the globe off to either change the bulb or clean it, so it's been slowly working it's way off all this time! I'm just glad I didn't get cut with flying glass, or there wasn't damage done to the sink. Just a very tiny scratch on the faucet. 

Plus we found this pretty replacement globe which I like much better than the plain white one!

There's a few more things but I'll save it for the next post.

Until then......