Done? Darn Close!

Kris is just about done with the patio, and he may be done for this season. All he has left to do is rent the saw and cut some pavers so he can finish the stairs and the few holes in the walkway. He'll have to decide if he's up for it next weekend or if he just wants to wait until spring. But it's looking fabulous!

Obviously next summer we'll have to work on getting grass to grow around it, and doing some plantings of flowers and such. But it's so nice to be this far!



And here's an action shot from last weekend:

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!