Our Second Anniversary

I meant to post this a few days ago, but haven't had time, so it had to wait until now...

Monday was our second anniversary. We took the day off work since we had vacation days to use up, even though we had no plans. It was actually nice to just play the day by ear.

To be honest, we just lazed about all morning. Most days that would bother me, but we kind of needed a day to rest after the past few (busy) weekends. Then we packed a picnic lunch and went to the park to enjoy the beautiful weather. The neat thing is the walking path that goes around the park and along the river. I was in the mood for walking, so we did a lot of that.

Afterward, we went to check out a local shop that was going out of business and was selling everything half off. They had a bunch of wine-themed decorations left, and we somehow ended up buying a few of them. Even half off the price, it still cost a lot! I thought we'd just call it our anniversary present to ourselves since we didn't really do anything special.

Of course, we haven't gotten around to hanging up most of them, but here's a picture of the metal wine bottle wall hangings we bought there:

I'm kind of annoyed at where they ended up on the wall, even though I'm the one who told Dan where to put the nails, so it's my own fault. Anything that's not a square or rectangle is impossible to hang properly! Anyway, I'll eventually get around to moving these a little down and to the left.

That night, we weren't really in the mood for eating out (I rarely am), so we picked up Chinese from the buffet and brought it home. Oh, and then we had South Dakota State University ice cream that we'd picked up from the grocery store, which actually turns out to be incredibly expensive, for dessert. Dan wasn't very impressed with the flavor, but I liked it. I just had another small bowl of it, actually. :)

Well, there you go - a pretty boring account of our second anniversary. I'm kind of tired and wanted to get some posts scheduled and published for my other blogs, but we'll see if I can muster the energy for that....

Summer's End

August, the month for visitors :)

Well, we're almost at the end of the summer, and I'm kind of sad. I had been waiting for this summer to arrive for so long, and it just flew by. We did do a few fun things, and we've had a bunch of visitors this month, which only made it go by even more quickly.

Karissa, Tyler, and Isabelle came a few weeks ago on their way to the Black Hills. Isabelle was as smiley as ever!

They stopped again on their way back the following weekend, and Dawn and Jake came with the kids too. We had fun taking Jeremy to play at the parks around here...

And this weekend, one of Dan's buddies came to visit with his girlfriend. Since they weren't going to be here until Saturday evening, we went to Menard's in the morning to pick up our vinyl siding. What should have taken less than a half hour to pick up turned into an hour and a half of waiting for the employees to figure out what they were doing and actually find everything we had ordered. After that, we still had to go into the store to pick up a few more things we needed.

We finally headed back home, and didn't get here until 3:00 - thankfully our company had gotten going a little later than planned, which gave me time to eat lunch and clean the house. By that point, I was exhausted! They left this afternoon, so now I have a little time to work on blog posts. Before long, I will need to work out and shower, then get supper started.

Thankfully we decided to take tomorrow off work for our anniversary. I am SO not ready to go back yet! We definitely need a day to rest. Then we get another three-day weekend for Labor Day. Sweet!

What's New in Huron {August 2014}

*Whew!* 

Time for a break from all the serious blog posts. I have been re-publishing a lot of my Yahoo! articles on my various blogs and a couple different websites following the shutdown of Y!CN. I've made a small dent in the hundreds of articles. It's going to take a VERY long time to get through them all!

In a way, I want to get them all back up as soon as possible so I can start earning money from them again, but on the other hand, I'm worried that Google will think I'm posting duplicate content, since my articles are still coming up in some search results (though the links just go to the Yahoo! home page).

Well, I guess I'll take my chances....

What's new here? Well, for starters, we started scraping paint from the garage last weekend in preparation for re-painting. Stupidly, we tested for lead after starting the removal process. It tested positive. So now, rather than putting a ton of work into properly scraping the paint off the wood siding, we're going to tear it down and put up vinyl siding.

So this past week, we went to Menards in Mitchell to look at our options and we placed an order for light blue siding. It's going to cost a lot more than painting, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. The only painting we will have to do is going over the trim and painting all the doors to match one another.

In other news, Karissa, Tyler, and Isabelle stayed over last night on their way to the Black Hills (no, we still haven't been there!). They will be coming back through next weekend, and we will also have Dawn and Jake and the kids over. The following weekend, one of Dan's friends from high school will be here. We haven't had visitors all summer - apparently August is the month to come to Huron! Even though nobody got to see our yard when the grass was green and the flowers were blooming :(

Well, that's about all I've got. 'Til next time....