so long snow

so this was the one "big" snow we had this month. seriously if you blinked it was pretty much all gone. with march around the corner it seems kinda pointless to wish for snow. i'm pretty much in spring mode now and ready to be outside enjoying the weather. as i'm sure everyone else is.

spring is in the air

or at least teasing us with a stint of warm weather. we've been taking full advantage and getting out as much as we can. i was actually able to walk 4 days last week. (need to whip this body back in shape)

the boy absolutely loves it. he's still a little shaky on his feet, but loving it nonetheless.

snow baby

so this has pretty much been our winter so far. snow, snow, snow! of course it's nothing like the record breaking snowfall the rest of the east coast got this past weekend, but it's been pretty consistent for us. there was probably a day, maybe two that we haven't had snow on the ground since avery's arrival. so we are getting a little stir crazy waiting the arrival of spring.

yes, i started this post about 3 hours ago and am just now posting it. someone asked me what i do all day and it's pretty much the same thing avery does. eat, sleep, poop! lol! avery is starting to nap on his own so it frees me up to get a little housework done. so blogging has taken a backseat to other duties. i would like to get back into it, mainly so i can document the goings-ons in the westphal house. it's hard to believe it's already been six weeks since avery's arrival. time is definitely flying by!

made for walkin

$3 thrift store find. yes, my shoes match my decor. they've been getting much love the past week. the sun finally decided to make an appearance today.

everyting irie

monday was a long day for us. we left the house at 6:30a to make our 9:35a flight from charlotte. when we got up to check in at the airport the steward started freaking out. "you're supposed to be here an hour before the flight leaves" it's 8:37. "your names don't match" the name on my ticket didn't match the name on my passport. yep, i forgot to change my maiden to my married. please don't tell me this vacation is gonna end before it even begins. luckily his supervisor got everything under control and they ended up changing my ticket to my maiden name. after all that, we ended up having to rush through security and jet down to the gate where they were already boarding. have i mentioned that i haven't eaten anything yet? i buy a muffin, granola bar and a bottle of juice for $9 at the newsstand right next to the gate. outrageous, i know! we board. it's about a 3 hour flight. come to find out u.s. airways doesn't have anything complimentary. sodas $2, no peanuts, no inflight entertainment, nothing. did i forget to mention we had to pay $15 a bag at check-in? let's just say we won't be flying with them anytime soon. we get to jamaica around 12:30p, collect our luggage and head towards the couples waiting area. by now, we're both starving. aaron has a red stripe, i have a ting and we wait for our shuttle ride to the resort. it's about 1.5 hour car ride to the resort. i'm absolutely starving and have the beginnings of a migraine when we arrive. we check-in and make a bee line to the grill. ahhhh, the best jerk chicken we've ever had. mmmmmmmm. afterwards, i'm in dire need of a nap to quash the headache. aaron heads straight for the bar. we pretty much stayed in the room the rest of the evening and both were asleep by 10. which is way early for me.

tuesday we got up early to an overcast sky. we decided today we'd just chill on the beach. aaron read, i dozed and we both sipped cocktails all afternoon. seriously, time seems to not move at all in jamaica. i'm thinking it's gotta be around 3p and it's only noon. we grab some lunch and head back to the beach. i didn't realize how hard it is for aaron to relax. "you wanna do this, you wanna do that?" uh, no. i don't want to do anything. i thought we'd agreed we weren't gonna do a thing today just chill. "oh, yeah." he continues reading his book, we people watch and that's pretty much how we spent the rest of the day. that night we got all dolled up for our anniversary dinner at feathers, the hoity-toity restaurant on the resort. all in all it was a good day.

wednesday we went horseback riding a few miles from the resort. this activity is not a resort related one so you have to pay extra to do it. last time we did the canopy tour/zipline this time we rode. it's the first time i'd ever been on a horse and we both had a good time. with this ride, you rode into the mountains and then along a beach. about a two hour ride. the sun did pop out briefly at the end. we did get to swim with the horses. we were actually horizontal with the horse for a bit. it was so cool. unfortunately one of our guides was taking the photos and they turned out a bit blurry side. at least we did get some documentation. afterwards we went back to the resort, ate lunch and headed for the beach again. we signed up to snorkel the next day and for the catamaran on friday. another day down.

thursday we woke up to rain. looked up the forecast to see what the rest of the day was gonna look like. 60% chance all day. bummer. we decided not to go snorkeling, which we later regretted and spent the rest of the day under overcast skies. drinking, lounging and playing horseshoes and bocci ball. set up snorkeling for the next day and ate at the thai restaurant, lemongrass that night.

friday, overcast again. notice a trend and have you noticed no blue sky in any of our photos? but on this particular morning the waves are crashing on the beach. this is great for aaron. as soon as we lay our towels down, he's off into the water. bodysurfing. he pretty much goes non-stop for about an hour and he's about the only one that can do it. after a while, i joined him but didn't have much luck. it's easier for me to use a boogie board, but the resort didn't have any. i guess they don't get much in the way of wave action too often. i did manage to catch one good wave on my own and pretty much rode it all the way in. i did notice all the watersports crafts were not seaside and the only boat anchored was the scuba one. i look over at the activities flag and it's red which means no water sports today. this includes snorkeling and the catamaran ride we had scheduled. kinda sucked but we made the best of it. the big shipwrecked beach party they had scheduled for that evening was moved indoors. we ate dinner, enjoyed a reggae band trio and had a martini before turning in that night.

on our final morning aaron decided to go for a run along the beach. he'd been doing it every other morning since we'd been there. a few minutes later he was back in the room. no run? no beach to run along! what? apparently overnight the waves were huge and everything had been pushed/moved up to the building line. it was really weird to see. sidewalks were covered with sand, tiki huts blown over, tree roots exposed. we walked along the shore to breakfast and it just started to pour. all of this bad weather...compliments of hurricane paloma or the residuals from her. after breakfast we just sat up on a balcony and watched the waves crash. it was pretty cool to see. we ended up staying there til we had to go back to the airport. we both had a good time despite the weather. last time we went, i don't think we had a single cloud in the sky and we were there twice as long. hopefully it was a fluke and next time, yes next time, it'll be much better!!

eat at cho's

i'm amazed at what you can find at a asian grocery store these days. you can now get kimchee on the go. and not just one type, but a huge variety. if we lived close by, i think i'd be there weekly, if not daily.

we've had five straight days of rain. and i think we're all getting a little cabin fever. it hasn't rained continuously, but it has daily. planning an outing has been difficult. tomorrow i think we'll brave the forecasted downpours and get a little site-seeing in.

tonight aaron ran in the bear. the race was all uphill and the elevation changes 2000 ft. he finished 377 out of 897. (not sure if that's the correct number of people that participated.) for his first time, he did great. one of the nurses finished 8 minutes behind him and there were about 200 people who finished between them. (gives you a better idea of how the numbers work) not sure if this is gonna be an annual thing with him. i have a feeling it will since he did so well.

sleepy hollow

unfortunately the weather has put a damper on our zipline plans. it's about 20 degrees colder today than it has been all week. plus it's rainy and just a little foggy. just a tad.

bad dog momma

lately i've been taking the dogs with me when running errands. we've got christmas decor everywhere and i'm paranoid they're gonna yank, pull, demolish something if left alone. yesterday i looked up from the computer to see bosco standing on our dining room table. so my concerns were well founded.

with it starting to get colder i decided to pack a blanket in the car and put the two in warm outfits, bosco in a smoking jacket and marley in her sweater. none of them bought by me. (i think i have brian and irina to thank for both.) ran my errands, got home and decided to leave them in their outfits. of course, aaron wanted to take them off as soon as he saw them and i told him to let them be. i think they like 'em i told him. a few hours later, marley was upstairs with aaron and didn't come down when he did. which was very unusual. we just thought she was very tired and decided to crash in her crate. then we heard a whimpering from her and we both shot up the stairs. there she sat, looking up at us from the top of the stairs. is she feeling sick? are her ears warm? aaron picks her up and says her paws feel wet. i grab her paws and they're ice cold. take the sweater off, i think it's cutting off her circulation. a few minutes later she's running around like nothing was wrong. problem solved! the price we pay for fashion!

record highs

still no internet/cable, hopefully the problem will be remedied tomorrow. the cable company keeps sending installers before they’ve laid-the-line. and since the local office doesn’t have a phone number, at least one available to the public, we’ve had to physically go down there and make arrangements three or four times. so they finally laid-the-line wednesday, which was scheduled for friday, and we’re supposed to have everything (phone/internet/cable) installed tomorrow. i’ll be quite surprised if everything goes according to plan. i guess it was a good thing they didn’t come friday, they would have been vying for a parking spot in our driveway. we had the invisible fence installed, the plumbers working, and both our real estate agent and builder all here that morning.

even when you purchase a new home, you’re still going to have a few kinks that haven’t been completely worked out beforehand. ours was no different. luckily it’s still under warranty and all the problems are being fixed at someone else’s expense. the main culprit seems to be sediment from our well clogging screens and building up in our toilets causing them to continuously run. we noticed a wet spot on the ceiling in the living room after one toilet ran all night and immediately shut that water off. then the toilet in the master bedroom started to run, so i shut it off as well. (didn’t want to have a bigger problem than a few running toilets.) this was about a week after we moved in. we called the builder and informed him about the problem. he said he’d send a plumber to fix the problem, we hadn’t heard from him or a plumber since. jill and jerome suggested we call vivian, our real estate agent, and sic her on him. plumber was here two days later. we now have functioning toilets upstairs. thank goodness, i was getting tired of running up and down stairs to relieve myself. jerome with the help of aaron installed a filter on our water pipes and it has made a huge difference. i don’t have to fill the washer with buckets of water anymore. it was much easier to do that then to unscrew the hose, clean out the screen and reattach the hose again.

then a few weeks ago i was reading the Mountain Times, which is the equivalent to the Illinois Times, and i couldn’t believe how bad ‘design wise’ it looked. i ran upstairs to grab a copy of the IT to do a side-by-side comparison and when i walked into the guest bedroom i noticed a shard of glass on the carpet. i walked into the bathroom and the plate-glass mirror had fallen off the wall and shattered into a million pieces. it must have happened while we were bike riding that day and luckily we had closed the room off so the dogs were unaffected by the crashing glass. it looked like it was only held up with double-stick tape, which i found quite disturbing. we ran out and bought brackets for the other mirrors and replacing the mirror has been added to the list of things for the builder.

i did start painting some rooms this past week, the mudroom, my sewing room and two bathrooms. i didn’t have any problems till i reached the second downstairs bathroom. i decided i wanted to paint it yellow along with the other bathroom downstairs. so i bought a gallon of “pale butter” paint. i put on one coat and decided the color was too yellow, almost florescent for my taste. i only used a quarter of the paint so when i went back to lowes i bought a quart of the “sunglow” color. i was quite happy with this choice but it ended up taking me five coats and two quarts to cover up the other original yellow. i couldn’t figure out what was going on. i knew that i was covering up another color but it shouldn’t take me 5 coats to do so. i finally figured out the new paint roller i was using was spooging out some type of gray color along with my yellow and that was why i wasn’t making any progress. i switched rollers and problem was solved. i felt like i was in a steven king story and the room refused to be painted. after that ordeal, i’ve taken a short break from painting, mainly to give the blisters on my hand a rest. later this evening i’ll start painting the computer nook/craft room gray and red. i’m starting small and will eventually move up to the bigger rooms, but that might be a while.

tomorrow will be a busy day for all. aaron finally starts working. bosco and marley will get their first taste of the “correction” (shock) from the invisible fence, and i’ll be painting and waiting around for the cable people to install everything. it’ll be easier to update once we have everything in-house. i’ve only been going up to use internet every other day. it’s too much of a chore to make a special trip just to check email and browse. yeah, i’m lazy like that. i’ll post our movie listings tomorrow. we’ve watched an abundance of them the last month, probably more than we have in the last year. a lot rented and many from our own stash. we’re on a coen brothers kick. new favorite movie for me…the big lebowski.

till tomorrow.

oh, the reason for the title. apparently they’ve set record highs in temperature this summer, highs in the upper 80s. the humidity is what’s killing everyone, every single person i talk to says it’s never been this bad. i guess we brought the midwest weather with us. although i’ve heard it’s reached over 100 in springfield, so i really can’t complain.