Billions and billions of spiders

Yesterday we noticed the strangest thing - spider webs everywhere! When the sun started to set we could see just how many of them there were. This is the field across the street from our house:


The field is about 100 acres, and the whole thing was covered in webs like this. Incredible.


The bizarre thing was that as we drove into town to meet friends for dinner we noticed all of the fields were covered in spider webs. Amazing. I'm not sure I even want to contemplate how many spiders it took to do all of that! But it sure was pretty!

testing 1 2 3

Just testing...

Another baby shower!

We had another baby shower last night. This one was with folks from my work. My grad student Elizabeth and my mentor Jill threw us the shower at Jill's house. It was very nice.

We had a nice spread of food. This is me and Jill getting some dinner:

This is one of our grad students, Mari, acting goofy, and that's me and Elizabeth on the sofa.

Here I am opening presents. What is up with me always having a stupid expression on my face in photos? That's my colleague Jeremy next to me.

My colleague Sharon and her husband Dan watch in rapt attention as I open gifts.

This is little Emily. She is my colleague Beth's daughter. She's just over 3 months old. What a cutie!

A couple more grad students. The woman is Megan, she's my TA this semester, she rocks. On the sofa is her boyfriend. Behind them is Dan, he's one of my grad students.

And here we are hanging out after the presents have been opened, the food eaten, and a bunch of people have left. It was a really nice evening.

More fun with the new camera

Kris has been out playing with his new camera again...

And can you guess what this is?

Moonlight and new camera

We bought a new camera. It's very fancy. Kris has been after me to get one for awhile now, but they are so expensive. He finally pulled out the ol' "don't you want to take nice pictures of your son?" And it turns out he had been squirreling away money without me knowing it, so he had almost enough to buy it anyway. So I finally relented. It came earlier this week. We're still learning how to use it.

He took this picture this morning of the full moon. It was a long exposure. Kris said it took about 15 seconds or so to take the picture. The sun was not up at all yet and the sky had not begun to lighten at all. So that is all moonlight in the picture. Pretty cool.

More patio progress

Kris has made a lot of progress on the patio lately. He had some help from Kevin the weekend before last - but he's done most of this summer's work alone since I'm not much help right now. He's getting close to being done! (which he is very happy about!) Here's the big patio area, it's about 2/3 done.


The pathway leading behind the house and to the smaller patio is almost done too. We need to rent the wet saw to cut some pavers to fit and to finish making the stairs.


Here's the pathway from the other direction.


And the big thing he did this weekend was to complete the small patio. The pavers are slightly different colors because some are from last summer and some are from this summer. They will all fade to the same color by next summer. It should be noted that he did this patio once already last summer, but I made him tear it up and re-do it because the pavers went in the wrong direction and wouldn't match up with the pathway he put in this year.

Out of the 12 pallets this project has taken, only 1 1/2 pallets are left!

NASA

So, yeah, I'm a little obsessesed with the weather. For my birthday Chris and Betsy got me the coolest John Deere weather station. It tells you the indoor and outdoor temperature, the barometric pressure, the indoor and outdoor humidity, the rainfall, the forecast, and most importantly, the windspeed. It gets very, very windy out at our house, and we are always wanting to know what the windspeed is. And now we'll know!

We finally got around to setting the weather station up today. It looks a little like NASA has an installation in our front yard. But I'm quite excited about it.

Look! It's telling us the windspeed is 15.4 miles per hour coming out of the Southwest!

Baby stuff!

The stuff our parents got us for our baby shower is starting to come in the mail now. It's quite exciting! We put these two things together last night.

Here is the stroller my parents got us:

And here is the Norwegian high chair Kris's parents got us:

Baby Shower!

Kris's Aunt Delores and Uncle Art threw us a baby shower this weekend up in the Twin Cities. There were lots of folks there from both of our families and a few of our friends too. It was so nice to see everyone and get to catch up. We got lots of fabulous gifts. We're getting more and more ready all the time to bring Jolly home! Which is good since there are only 7 weeks left until my due date!

Here are a few pictures from the shower.

A really big bug

This gal is hanging out on the outside of our screened in porch. She's huge. I would guess at least 5 inches long. I'm glad she's outside and not inside. But she's pretty cool looking.

Nathaniel's Christening

We were up in Minnesota this weekend for a baby shower for us and for Nathaniel's Christening. I'll put up some pictures of the shower later, but thought I'd put up a few from the Christening.

Here's the happy family:

After getting soaked:

The newly Christened chilling on the sofa back at Wayne and Kelly's:



Kelly in the kitchen cooking up a storm for lunch: