Chickens and stuff

These little chicks are growing every day, and today I decided they were big enough to move from our garage to their outside chicken run and coop.  They love to scratch around for tasty tidbits.

We are slowly coming up with names for our cheery chickens.

Cleopatra

Oprah

??? (any suggestions?)

Umm..., I forget.  But she does have a name... 

Spencer will be thrilled to have the chicks out of the garage.

In other news, I have been baking up a storm lately!  In the last week, I have made about 90 red velvet cupcakes (one practice batch followed by two more batches for a wedding open house), a mini red velvet heart cake, zucchini bread, and banana bread -- all from scratch.

 I've also done two batches of fresh salsa.

Here's one batch of salsa and the red velvet cake with homemade cream cheese frosting.

Yesterday I picked a box of peaches (courtesy of a lady in my grandma's ward).

They should be ready for canning in a day or two.  I have never canned anything by myself, but it sounds like peaches are fairly easy to do.  We'll see.

There is NO WAY I could have done all this if I had been teaching right now.  I even have time to play spider solitaire and update my blog!  

Did you know it is still summer?

For the last eight years, my summer has ended right around the beginning of August, when it is time to get set up for the next school year.  But this year, I am taking a break!  That's right, for those who don't already know, I am not teaching this school year.  Spencer's office is doing well, so I am staying home.  It is quite nice.  And it means that I can enjoy my summer straight through August and even into September!

Since the school year has started, I have...


...built a chicken run with Spencer...

...purchased four little chickies...

...harvested a plethora of veggies from our garden...

These were all picked on the same day, by the way!

...and gone climbing with friends.

Yes, I like this continual summer.  I like it a lot.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

I am on a roll - two blog posts in two days!

A couple of months ago I entered a photo contest held by Utah Senator Mike Lee.  He was looking for photographs of Utah to put on his website, and one of my entries was chosen!  If you go to his website here and scroll over Constituent Services, you'll see my photo of a sego lily plant (Utah's state flower).  Or you can just look below to see the photo.

It's about time!!!!!

Sooo......, you'd think since I've been out of school for over a month and a half, I would have found the time to blog before now.  I am way behind on posting all the fun things we've been up to, but for now I am just going to post a few projects we've been working on at the house.  

Let's start in the front.

BEFORE

DURING

The trees were dead, and now they're a stack of firewood in the backyard thanks to a chainsaw and Spencer's new winch.

AFTER

The next area is the east side of the front yard.

BEFORE

AFTER

crookneck yellow squash, pear tomatoes, goliath tomatoes, zucchini, acorn squash, bell peppers, and two types of lettuce

And now let's venture inside the house, shall we?  Starting with the family room.

BEFORE

Sorry for the lame photo - I couldn't find another one.  The walls had blue wallpaper under the chair rail (which was painted navy blue) and a border just above it.  It was gross.

AFTER

And finally, the kitchen!  This is my favorite interior project so far, and it was also the most work.

BEFORE

Yum, shredded carrots!

DURING

cabinet doors removed

sanding

painting (our garage was unusable for a while)

tearing out the drop ceiling

It took Spencer a while to figure out how to push all these wires into the newly raised ceiling.  He had to extend some of them, put in a few junction boxes, drill holes through the floorboards, and more, but he did it!

After painting cabinets, raising the ceiling, installing canned lighting, painting walls, and getting new counters...

AFTER

My favorite part is the granite countertop.  

It's also the easiest part because we didn't have to do any of it ourselves!  We hired out the countertops and the drywall on the raised ceiling, but everything else was done by us--with the help of our families.

We've done a lot in the backyard too, but you'll have to wait a little while to see those pictures.  

Last Night

We're slowly settling into our home in Pleasant Grove.  Overall, we LOVE it!  There's just so much to do, and my commute is about 45 minutes each way now, so our free time is pretty limited.  But last night we took a little break from the unpacking, cleaning, weeding, etc. to have a little fun.

My brother Michael and his wife Jessica came over to help us get our new fridge moved in, but we got a little "distracted."  Michael and I recently both got new cameras which just happen to be the exact same model.  So we thought we would practice using them.

First, we admired the sunset:

But I must admit, that was a little boring.  As the night grew darker, we moved to the backyard to mess with the exposure settings.  Here's what we got:

The red name was done with my headlamp's red light.  An LED flashlight was used to create Spencer's name.  I turned the flashlight on and off to separate the letters in the image above.

It was so much fun, we all wanted to take turns.  Then we thought - why take turns?  We can all play at the same time!  Here is what two flashlights and two headlamps can create in a 20 second exposure:

As we were about to call it a night, I glanced over at a tree in the corner of our yard and just had to take a few more pictures.  Here's my favorite:

I love my new camera.  Spencer bought it for me and surprised me with it a few days after my brother got his.  Spencer is the best.

Stay tuned for some pictures of our trip to southern Utah to check out the pioneer trail, "Hole in the Rock."

More Manly by the Minute

Well, It's been a while since I blogged, but I'm excited about my day yesterday.  Through work, Michael (my brother-in-law and business partner) and I have arranged to come up with performance incentives.  The first incentive that I received was a welder; a Hobart Handler 140, seen here:

I have rock sliders on my 4Runner for off-road armor so I don't turn my nice car into a scratch & dent.  Sliders are the tubes under the doors, and they are generally used for two purposes: 

and

You can see the shape of the sliders (if you can look away from my cute wife) 

When I initially built them (or had them built, I just put plastic end caps on, and they were getting all rusty on the inside, and filling up with dirt.  I decided to cut off the ends and use my new welder!  I ultimately thought they looked pretty terrible anyway.

So I made the first incision:

Ground the paint off:

Made my first official weld ever!

Cleaned it up a little bit (not too shabby, I say):

Ground it smooth:

Primed and painted!

It's basically a custom set that would cost over $300 that I made for under $100 total.  Plus I learned to do something new!  I like the way they look much better now too.  I only ruined 2 jackets and started one small fire (oops!). I've got the bug now, so I'm probably going to be spending some more quality time with my welder soon.  Any suggestions about what to build?