quiet for a while

Summer is such a wonderful time of year... I have never appreciated it as much as being done with that year... This past school year wasn't the worst--in fact, I loved it--but it took a lot out of me. I think I'm ready to go back, but I'm more then happy to relax a little longer!

K and I just went out east to visit our sisters! Well, it was more like two weeks ago, but who's counting? Pictures are slowly being posted on my photoblog. We visited his sister who just had a baby, so we did a lot of baby-sitting and cooing and whatnot; we visited my sister who lives in NYC, so we did a lot of tourist-y things.

Our puppy has managed to grow a crazy amount! She's been house trained for a long while now, she knows how to sit and to lie down, and she's just recently getting better at not walking us when we go for walks. She did chew a bit of the house (part of the wall border at the bottom between the kitchen and the dining room), but we knew she would chew something she shouldn't. She's slowly learning how not to jump up or bite when she plays. We've had quite a few playmates come through (dogsitting)--our friends' dog and K's parent's dog--both of whom she adores!

I also joined the Y recently. My goal is to lose a whole lot o' weight in the next couple of months! I am to start trying on bridesmaid dresses this month (gulp) and I really wished I had gotten going on this earlier as I would have liked to come back to school a slimmer me! Ah well--my colleagues and new students can watch me transform instead. I have had plenty of changes in the past year that I don't need to push it. I'm shocked I allowed myself to get this far though. I would stress eat--crabby eat, more like it. And I would also have a beer or two when I came home from teaching. I've definitely cut back on alcohol intake (special occassions now), am doing the Slim Fast thing, AND I've become addicted to the elliptical machine at the gym! In fact, I like it so much, I have been going twice a day when I can (one hour each, about 700 calories per hour, which is kind of sad, but I'll work my way up). I need to add a weigh regiment into that too, and there are some classes I want to take (yoga, spinning), and I definitely want to get into the pool! But we all have to take baby steps!

Let's see... oh, I haven't tackled any of my summer house projects yet and with a few weeks left, I better get going! I would like to change the wallpaper in the kitchen (right now it's a hideous big rose-type flower design), and I've gotten as far as bringing a stack of samples home for K to look at; he's whittled the stack down and I've added a few designs he especially didn't like. The problem is finding a time for him to come with me to take a closer look at the larger samples.

And I've been having an ongoing moderately lazy battle with the yard. Our garden is monstrous (pumpkins and squash and zuccini and watermelon crawling all over!). I managed to beat the dandelions, though I'm not sure how much that was me and how much that was the season passing. Now it's crabgrass. I've got a ton of supplies sitting on our patio to tackle the crabgrass--including lawn fertilizer and seed for when the green of our yard disappears with what we thought was just another kind of grass we accidently added when we used weed & seed on the dandelions! My mother housesat/dogsat while we were on the east coast and she informed us that no, we don't have a more lush kind of grass--we have evil crabgrass that is taking over. Dangit.

That's about all I'm going to share on the blog for now. :)