Alaska: Ketchikan

Our final port was Ketchikan!

Alaska: Skagway

Our third day in port brought us to the charming town of Skagway.

Alaska: Juneau & South Sawyer Glacier

On our third full day (second day in port) we spent the morning in Juneau panning for gold and eating at a salmon bake before heading to the South Sawyer Glacier for the afternoon. 

Alaska: Hoonah

Our first day at port was in the town of Hoonah where we had a whale watching expedition booked. The town itself was super small but had gorgeous scenery (seriously, everything in Alaska is gorgeous!). 

Alaska: Hubbard Glacier

Our first stop on our Honeymoon cruise was Hubbard Glacier!

It was a breathtaking view to the glacier that was most impressive.

Alaska: Anchorage & Seward

We decided on an Alaskan cruise for our Honeymoon and I'm so glad we made this choice! The weather was purrrrfect for our Mid-West bones that were dying of the heat which had swept through the state this last month.

Can you believe this was taken with a phone?!?

Changing My Last Name Part 2

So after the shenanigans with the family the big day finally arrived! Eek!

Changing my last name

Our wedding day finally arrived! 

It's been a hectic and crazy couple of weeks, especially the week leading up to our wedding, but the day finally arrived and we were able to celebrate and rejoice with family and friends on our day! 

Eggplant Pizza

With the wedding around the corner, my no carb diet is being kicked into high gear (like no more cheating...oops!)

So I decided to make some yummy delicious eggplant pizza that I had pinned quite a while ago.

Double awesome because our local sprouts had eggplant on sale for .48 cents this week!

Yum!

Hallway Face Lift

I've been in my house for a little over a year and I'm just now getting the hallway painted. 

I chose the same gray color that I used in the living room, check out the post here to see that transformation. 

July Garden Updates

Ugh, my garden is drowning in water!

We've had so much rain this summer.

I know that rain is great for gardens and everything, but seriously, its a week of torrential downpour followed by a week of super hot sunshine, rinse and repeat.

All. Summer.

And my garden has been suffering from it!

Sad squash plant :(

Book Page Flowers

We're two weeks away from the wedding!

2 weeks!

It's still pretty surreal to me and I don't think the time frame hasn't set in yet.

However, with the deadline nearing, it was time to kick it in to high gear with making flowers from book pages.

Cards Suitcase

We're three weeks from the wedding!

3 WEEKS!

It seems like time is flying by while also taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r!

One of my final wedding tasks (seriously though, most of the to-do items are finished which is a yay for me!) is to create our Cards box for the reception.

Side note* just had an amazing idea for a "Honeyfund" box that I will think about creating this week!

I've had several Pinspirations that I've come across which have led me to create the card box for our reception.

Eggers!

We got our first egg!

Our girls are officially egg layers!

Just in time for the avian flu that is going around and hiking up the price of eggs, am I right?

Broccoli!

It's like Christmas day around here!

I love when the fruits of my loins start producing.

And by that, I mean, we have broccoli!

Old Fashion Doughnuts

The fiance wanted doughnuts.

Because his birthday is coming up and I have a tendency to celebrate the entire month instead of just one day (or maybe I just celebrate my own birthday during the entire month) I happily obliged in whipping up a batch of homemade old fashion doughnuts!

Squash!

We have squash!

Just a quick update that we have our first squash of the season growing on one of our squash plants!

Laying Eggs

My girls are about 5 months old and *should* start laying eggs soon. We're crossing our fingers that it'll be within the next month as egg prices are rumored to go up and we tend to eat a lot of eggs since we're both on a paleo-like diet (like meaning I sometimes LOVE a good loaf--er...piece of bread).

Any who, we eat a lot of eggs and I'm ready for my girls to start giving back and contributing to the family (because the cats contribute sooooo much).

Some of the research I've done said to put some golf balls in the coop to help the girls know where they should be laying their eggs. Well we already had a bunch of ping-pong balls so I figured those would be just as useful.

Set up in the coop! 

Harvesting Time!

It's finally time to harvest some of the fruit (vegetables actually) of our hard labor in the garden the past several months. Since we planted several different types of vegetables at several different times throughout February/March, our plants will be on a rolling basis of harvest.

The last several weeks the peas gave us a great harvest and are now starting to die as the heat of the South finally set in for the summer.

Sad summer peas

Harry Potter Monopoly

I spent this Memorial weekend putting together my very own Harry Potter Monopoly and I'm super in love with it!

Honeysuckle

I was amazed this spring when the plants finally bloomed to find out that our neighbors have a huge honeysuckle plant that grows along our back fence.

April/May Updates

The month has definitely flown by!

We've had a lot going on lately with preparing for our wedding. My sister threw a gorgeous shower for me and I truly felt loved by my friends and family!

Super Easy Herb Garden

*Updated Pictures at bottom!*

I'm not ashamed to say that the fiance and I have done our fair share of dumpster diving.

Yes, that's right!

I've gone into (well watched mostly) a dumpster and retrieved items that I think are still usable.

One of those items happened to be a pallet that was of no use to the store anymore but that we saw potential in.

Here is said pallet:

Building the Chicken Coop: Part III

We're reaching the end of our chicken coop building journey! If you'd like to read about the first two parts of the journey, you can go here and here. We actually finished the coop a couple weeks ago but I'm just now getting the last bit updated!

Materials Used:

OSB Sheathing @4'x8'
Cheapest exterior siding we could get
1 - 1"x2"
1 pack of vinyl flooring
Lots of screws

Total Cost of Coop (once its all said and done) - 350-400ish

We cut down all the siding to fit the framing we'd set up and screwed it all in.

Building the Chicken Coop: Part II

Previously, I blogged about the begginings of our chicken coop. You can read about it here.

Once we finished the base of the coop, we began on the framing.

To build the framing we bought these:

14-ish - 2x4@6ft
4 - 2x4 @5ish feet
1 - 2x2@8ft
1 - 16" board (for hen house flooring)
1 - Fiber/Asphalt Roof Panel
2.5" nails
3" nails

Total spent so far: 250ish

Okay, so on to building the frame!

Peg Doll Exchange

Previously, I posted about my friend organizing a Saint Peg Doll exchange. You can read about it here.

Finally it was the day of our exchange! I had so much fun seeing many women that I had missed and meeting new women from around the area.

Building the Chicken Coop: Part I

With having the chickens for several weeks and the weather finally warming up, it was time to begin building the chicken coop.

Ideally, the coop should be built before you even get chickens so that you're ready to move them whenever they're big enough. We, however, got the chicks on a whim and didn't built the coop beforehand. The weather was also really cold (had several snow days from school) and neither myself nor my fiance wanted to get outside and start building. 

Building the Garden Beds

In my last garden update I realize that I hadn't talked about how we built the garden beds and what we initially planted inside of them.

The easiest way to do this is to buy fencing posts. You can find these at your local hardware store for about 1.50-ish each. They come in 6 or 8 feet long (ours only came in 6) and we needed 3 per bed. We now have 4 beds that are 6x3 and 2 beds that are 3x3.

We also bought a piece of 2x4 for the corner braces on each garden bed. Cut to about 6 inches each (the height of the fencing board) we could get 8 corner pieces on a 4ft board.

To construct the beds, each end is attached to the 2x4 that acts as the corner brace. Once the beds have been built we laid down a layer of cardboard in order to help kill the grass below. To speed up the process we gave them a good soaking down. This would've been done the previous fall with new beds but I'm behind on setting up the garden.

Wedding Picture Frames

My wedding is now four months away and I haven't really given a lot of thought to it.

Scratch that--I've given thought to it but not a lot of action.

Then I finally decided to start doing something. So I put together a centerpiece that I'm going to use.

While searching Pinterest; I came across this photo of an easy DIY centerpiece that I decided I wanted to recreate.

March Updates

It's finally Spring Break!

This past month seems to have flown by and I've made several improvements around the house! 

After finishing the bookshelf in the dining room and setting up our garden beds I moved the chicks out to their next home in the laundry room. We've had the chicks for almost a month (Feb. 20th from my count) and they've certainly been growing; enough to almost completely outgrow the bathtub we started them in. 

The laundry room that I have is attached to the house but isn't air conditioned or heated. This makes it the perfect go-between for the chicks as the weather starts to warm up because the room stays extra warm. 

Best Valentine Gift Ever!

I'm so excited by what I deem my true Valentines gift this year!

Since the fiance is prone to buying me flowers, taking me out and being sweet year round, I don't feel the importance of flowers, chocolate, etc on Valentines day.

What I do want, however?

Chickens.

Yep.

I got chickens for Valentine's Day!

Garden: Round 2

Two weeks ago I started our first round of seeds for our garden. We had a good number of them sprout (apparently the seeds were three years old which means only 25% of them on average would sprout) and I had to thin out the dill.

Painting Peg Dolls

Recently, a friend of mine came across this blog Catholic Icing that talked about the authors involvement with a Saint Peg Doll Exchange. She thought this was an amazing idea and, since there are ton of us crafty Catholic women about, quickly put out the feelers to people in our city.

Our group was ecstatic and quickly grew into a size of 32. Being a lover of spreadsheets, I put my sister to the task of creating a way for people to sign up with the saint they wanted to paint with googledocs.

I chose Saint Teresa of Andes and am basing my peg doll off of the following picture from Shower of Roses blog.

What to Have in a Car Survival Kit

I've recently become somewhat-obsessed with survivalism.

If you've watched the show Doomsday Preppers from National Geographic then you'll quickly know my feeling of needing to stockpile canned goods and toilet paper.

After watching several episodes I talked to my fiance who has lots of experience with survival skills. He then surprised me with a car survival kit on my birthday and I think it's valuable for everyone to have these with them in case of emergencies.

Everything that is listed fits inside of this small medicine bottle and is kept inside of my center console. It's small and compact for easy storage.

The One About Sourdough Bread

Mmmm sourdough bread!

Is there anything more yummy?

Perhaps, but we've gone on a sourdough baking kick!

And it isn't even me!

Recently, the fiance and I have been discussing our future and what we ideally would like in our marriage, family, life, etc. One thing that we're both pretty passionate about, and slowly making steps to achieve, is living self-sustaining and being aware of home preparedness skills.

Beef Jerky

For a while, the fiance and I have dabbled with the Paleo diet (okay, I've dabbled, he follows it much more regularly). While doing this, I realized that I have a huge love of beef jerky. The price of buying jerky, however, was not something I loved.

Thus, the fiance said he would start making me beef jerky from home and it has been delicious!

Ingredients:
1.5-2 lbs of eye of round roast
soy sauce
Worcestershire sauce
pepper

To make, quarter the roast into smaller chunks that are more manageable. Place the chunks on a freezer safe plate and let them harden. This makes it easier to slice them into thin strips (if there are extra chunks we give them to the dog as a treat). When the meat is frozen (we set it in freezer overnight) remove from the freezer and place in the fridge.

If you give a mouse a cookie...

If you give a mouse a cookie (or in our case, dog food), he'll likely take over your laundry room and begin to torture your existence with his little mice friends!

I, my friends, have an infestation of mice!

Yes, I know...its disgusting!

They showed up about two weeks ago when I noticed that there was a corner of the bag of dog food chewed out. Yes, chewed!

After noticing the chewing, I saw the droppings.

And after the droppings, I saw...IT.

The One Where I Fall in Love with Wood Filler, Part II

It's finished!

It's finished!

Thank God Almighty, the bookshelf is finished!

Like, seriously, it's completely finished.

Sanded, painted, done!

I've never been so happy in my entire life!

Starting the Garden

Our 2015 Garden is underway and I'm excited for what we're going to be growing!

The fiance and I are super excited for this years garden! This is my first time being in a house where I can do more than what I was limited to in my container garden.

Technically, last year I was already in my house by April and did try a limited garden but I wasn't fully acclimated with the layout of the backyard and ended up planting it in the middle of a very shady spot. Oops! Needless to say, things didn't grow that well.

The One Where I Fall in Love with Wood Filler, Part I

I've recently been binge watching Friends on Netflix. It's perfectly acceptable in my mind to admit to this since Netflix made all 10 seasons of them available as of Jan. 1, 2015.

If you haven't started watching them yet then you need to stop whatever you're doing and go do that now. Except finish reading this first and THEN switch over and start watching them.

Or if you're like the people in my family, hook up multiple computer screens and then you can do both at the same time!

.....Right?

A New Year!

Ahhh, 2015, we made it another year!

2014 held many new adventures for my life. I was able to buy a house, adopted a dog and became engaged to a wonderful man! 2015 is going to have a lot of living up to do in order to beat that, but I have a feeling it will come through for me.

With this new year, one of my resolutions is going to be actively working on my blog. I firmly believe that writing is a wonderful outlet for so many things in life, including boredom.

Not to say that I'm bored by any means (I actually have a problem with saying 'no' to volunteering for things which often gets me into an overworked frenzy) but I do find myself at times sitting in front of the television mindlessly engorging myself in Netflix because I'm...bored?