Home Improvements

First of all, happy one day early Mother's Day to all you Moms out there. We had a very nice dinner last night with Rick's parents in Salem, then went out afterward with Rick's sister and her husband. We don't get down to Salem very often, so it was nice to be able to do that. Rick also purchased a new car yesterday! He drives a Tahoe and the gas (obviously) has been killing him. I actually had been thinking about trading in my Corolla for a Scion, but Rick swooped in and stole my idea :) That's ok, it makes WAY more sense for him to get rid of his car! So he got one of the boxy Scions, the XB I believe? It's black and really cool. He gets to pick it up on Monday, so he is very excited. He's never had a new car before!
While the weather has been giving us random nice days here and there, we've tried to get outside and do a few things to the yard (which needs a LOT of work). Back in the winter we bought patio furniture which has been sitting in the shed til last weekend when we finally set it up. I still need to plant some flowers in the deck flower bed here.

We bought a new BBQ last weekend which Rick is in love with. I love the idea of not having to cook inside all summer! Don't mind Rick's awesome wife beater :)

One of the best things about marrying Rick is that I get to be an instant home-owner :) Ok, so maybe this isn't one of the BEST things about marrying Rick, but I am definitely excited to be a home owner!
Rick has these CRAZY two White Maple trees in his front yard. They are huge! They're not native to this area so with all the rain they just keep growing and getting more foliage. They're so big that they make it so grass can't be grown in the front yard because it's too shady.
During that big wind storm last winter one of Rick's neighbors called him at work and said a huge limb had snapped off and was hanging between the 2 trees. This limb was gigantic but luckily had fallen at a strange angle and had intertwined itself real good amongst some other branches. It was wedged in there pretty good, but only one branch was holding up the entire weight of the thing. Rick put it off all winter and luckily it was never an issue because it would have taken out the whole front of his house probably.
We finally hired one of his friends in the tree business to come and cut the darn thing down. It took him all day long to get the branch down, and would have charged us extra to haul the debris away so we're taking care of it ourselves (in all our spare time). Here's some pictures of the crazy leftovers.

From the front door looking out

From the driveway looking out-check out how big around the scary branch was!

The house and driveway

Saw dust everywhere!

Oh and one of the bed in front of the wall. I planted some lovely trees and shrubs!

In wedding news we are still making good progress. We booked our entire honeymoon (Maui, here we come!). We started our registry, we also booked our caterer, have been working on invitations and I've been working with our florist. It's a lot of work!
Well I'm off to Merrilee's baby shower. Pics of that to come!