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So it has only been a month since my last class. I guess I would have failed had it not been a self paced learning type of thing. I did learn how to post images this week! Week 6 wasn't too complicated, so I am including the link here: http://www.geocities.com/gbldp/sixthweb.html. Now you all can admire my lovely web site.

This weekend has been lots of fun! Saturday I spent most of the day with my sister as her assistant! One of her friends threw a portrait party and people could sign up and bring their kids for my sister could take their pictures. My sister has been taking pictures for years now, but is finally starting to get a photography business up and running. So I went to help with shading and reflecting and that sort of thing. It was a lot of fun and she did such a great job. Her pictures are really good! Take a look at her new blog: http://eastendportraitphotography.com/blog/ She'll have more pictures up soon and if you want to link to her personal blog, you can see all kinds of pictures of her daughter on it. She's going to do awesome!

Today we celebrated Mother's Day and my Mom's Birthday! We went to a great wood fired pizza place and it was nice enough to eat outside. We sat in shade, which was good because it warmed up to 90 here today! Then we went back for ice cream cake at my mom and dad's house. We had lots of fun watching little Violet run around with loads of energy. Now we're getting ready to have some dinner and unwind with the season finale of Survivor. Hope everyone had a great weekend and look for more posts soon. Maybe. If I have time!

Pictures!

So I haven't done my homework for the last two weeks. BUT I will try to do it this weekend. Luckily, no one is actually looking or grading my homework for my HTML class. It makes it a little easier to know that I can catch up on the last two weeks and no one is going to fail me for not doing everything on time!

We had an Easter egg hunt a couple weeks ago at my parents house. We all had baskets and we each had to pick up at least one egg (those were the rules). The best part about it was seeing Violet pick up the eggs and then alternate who she was giving them to. One went to her Daddy, one to her Mommy, one to Grandma, one to Grandpa, etc. It was a great day! We dyed Easter eggs and we all contributed to our Easter Lunch - a taco bar!! It was quite tasty and we all enjoyed ourselves some tacos!

Last week I was in Twin Falls for our Annual Board Planning & Development meeting. This year is a great time of year to visit Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls. These falls are actually higher than Niagara Falls - crazy, huh?? The pictures below are when I was there on Wednesday night - one is looking down the canyon and the other is looking directly at the Falls.
We actually got some more done in the garden this weekend! We bought some seeds and some starters for a few different veggies: peas, lettuce, spinach, cauliflower, broccoli, beets and onions - green and yellow. YUM! So it will be interesting to see what does well and what doesn't. Everything seemed to be pretty easy to plant. We also planted a couple perennials in two pots out front. I think we might eventually plant them in the front garden bed, but we need to do a lot of work on those until we plant anything permanent. So hopefully these will do well in the pots until we get them in the ground. So that's what we have been up to lately. I think the days and weeks keep going by faster and faster now that it is warming up. I guess that happens when you have more to do! I think Mat and I have been hibernating for the last few months!

Fifth Week

I just finished my 5th week of my html class: http://www.geocities.com/gbldp/fifthweb.html. I think I am kind of getting the hang of it, but there is still so much to learn. I like the pace of the class because I don't feel like I need to spend hours every week learning and reading. So now that I have that finished, I am going to head out to the grocery store to get supplies for our Easter Taco Bar!

My family has decided to do a Taco Bar for Easter! I think it will be great and I am really looking forward to getting together. I can't wait to see our niece - she is growing so fast! So that's our weekend. We'll eat some tacos, dye some eggs and watch Violet hunt for Easter Eggs. And maybe Mat and I will hunt some eggs ourselves.

Hope everyone has a great weekend! I'm off to shop!

Square Foot Garden Boxes

If you don't know about Square Foot Gardening, you can do a search on Google Books to see a limited preview of Mel's book. It is an interesting book and I think it should be a pretty good way for us to do things. I guess we'll find out by the end of the gardening season!

Yesterday we built the boxes. Here they are in our yard, waiting to be placed strategically.

Today we mixed up the ingredients to make Mel's mix. This book says to make your own soil instead of trying to improve on what you already have. So we did exactly what Mel said. We bought a tarp and mixed up vermiculite, peat moss and compost.

We found places for the boxes and we started filling those bad boys up. I think they look nice and I hope that it will really help to cut down on weeds. Oh, I sure hope.

Oh and Onions! We planted these last summer and they are sprouting now. Hope they turn out tasty!

Finished!

So I finally finished my homework for this week: http://www.geocities.com/gbldp/fourthweb.html It took me awhile to read through the lessons, but I did get it up! One thing I don't love about this free class is that you have to click through a million pages. For example, you will be reading about font color on a particular page and then it has five different links within the article that you need to read to really understand that particular page. So it is a lot of back and forth, back and forth. I am learning html for free, so I really can't complain! I actually started this homework on Saturday morning, but then have been distracted all weekend by various projects.

My first project was part of a spring cleaning that will play out over several weeks. I'm all about organizing and having things nice and simple. I started with the bathroom, which desparately needed to be cleaned anyway, and I bought some drawer organizers from the dollar store and got everything in its place. You wouldn't think that it would take me that long, but I did clean the whole bathroom and organized part of the linen closet in our hall. The bottom half is for another day - it holds all our games and my crafty things. So I felt like I got a ton accomplished just on Saturday.

Sunday was spent getting our supplies together for our garden boxes. Mat and I are going to be Square Foot Gardeners! I have this book called Square Foot Gardening and it is a fun little book. It is all about getting the most out of a small space garden. I don't know how great it will work, but we're going to find out! We actually built the boxed on Sunday night and finished everything up today. I decided since we were lucky to have some great weather in the 60s that I would take a vacation day! WOOHOO! Today was so busy though! I think my next vacation day needs to be on a beach. :) We went to Costco, two grocery stores, made breakfast for the entire week, made dinner for tonight, mixed up our soil and filled our boxes. THEN we even went to kickboxing. My legs are tired. And I am tired. At least I know I'll sleep great tonight. But before I can do that, I'm going to put a separate post with some pictures from our new boxes!

Ladies, don't be sad that Mustache March is over. There is always next year.

Back Again!

Another week has flown by! Sometimes I just blink and the week is over. I'm always happy for the weekends and thankful that I have lots to do at my work. Not only does the time go by fast, but I don't worry about losing my job right now!

So this morning I tackled my third week of html. I know this is going to take quite a while to master, but at least I am really getting the hang of things. http://www.geocities.com/gbldp/thirdweb.html I just figure that everyone has to start somewhere. Websites really didn't just make themselves up! It is kind of amazing to think about how much work is put into a simple website and how much more time it must take to create a working, interactive website.

This weekend is probably going to pass without any gardening. Again. But the weather just isn't going to cooperate with us. We still have a while until it is time to plant Summer veggies, but I did want to get some Spring veggies in the ground. We're still slowly gathering everything we'll need to create our raised beds and the mix we'll be putting in them. I am just getting antsy and want to get started!

Tonight we are going over to Alana and Ken's house for a little SingStar, probably some Wii Sports activities and maybe even a board game or two. I'm planning to bring a snack for us and can't quite decide on a recipe. I was thinking that I might make this stuffed jalapeno dip that sounds delicious. I'll let you know what I decide! Hope everyone has a great weekend!

2nd Week HTML

This morning I sat down for my second week of learning about html. So here is the link to my new web page: http://www.geocities.com/gbldp/secondpage.html. Fancy stuff, huh?



It is pretty interesting learning about html and I look forward to doing more in the future. I am just going to take it nice and slow and learn a little at a time. Maybe someday I will even have my own website that I created from scratch!


For Mat's birthday this year, we drove about an hour outside of Boise to get to a tubing hill and went tubing for 2 hours! It wasn't too packed and we had a lot of fun. It was just as scary as I thought, but I still had a good time!


I wish I had a better lens to zoom in on Mat as he was flying down the hill. You probably wouldn't have wanted to see any of me screaming and clenching on the tube as I flew down the hill at warp speeds.

Hope everyone has a great weekend! I'm off to scan in some pictures from the pre-digital camera days.