Date Night

Each week, Jesson and I switch off who is in charge of Date Night. This week it was my turn. I decided I would cook Jesson dinner and then we could go see a movie. The food turned out so well I had to take pictures. Below was our "Date Night Dinner":

These are "Scallop Sliders" (mini-burgers) courtesy of Paula Deen. They have scallops, chives, cilantro, lime juice, and bread crumbs. We also had them with a Cilantro Lime Mayo. Yum!

These are parmesan crusted steak fries. They have a really crispy parmesan outside and a really soft, french fry inside.

And of course dessert. We had Peanut Butter Parfaits with shaved chocolate on top.

Turk's Doggles

Whenever we take Turk anywhere in the car he likes to stick his head out the window. The only problem is, his little eyelids are always blown back and he gets bugs in his eyes sometimes. Enter: Doggles. Yes, this is actually a real product. They are goggles specifically made for dogs. At first, Turk wasn't too sure if he liked them, but once he stuck his head out the window and realized the air wasn't blowing in his eyes anymore he loved them! Below are two pictures from his first experience with his new Doggles.

The New Car

When we lived in Gainesville Jesson was able to take the bus to school leaving the car for me to take to work. Now that we have moved to Tampa and live in the suburbs (away from the crazy college students) we need an additional car to get each of us where we need to go. After a lot of shopping around and test driving we settled on the Honda CRV. We wanted the space of an SUV with the gas mileage of a car. We found a great deal on a used one about an hour away from us. We brought it home tonight and love it! Hondas are the best!

The New House

Below are finally some pictures of the new house (at least the parts of it that were clean when I took the pictures!) I tried to take the pictures in a logical progression so that people could tell where all the rooms were and how they connected. Hopefully it worked. I am never able to do that so maybe some of you out there with better spatial perception will get it.

Here is the front of our house from the street. That is our little lawn that Jesson mows.

This is the view from the front door. On the right, where you can see the wall ending (past the 2nd table) is where the kitchen is. If you were to turn right immediately upon entering the house there are two small bedrooms. We use one of them as an office and another as a workout/scrapbooking/storage room. Neither room was particularly clean, so you don't get to see them right now, which is why I'm telling you about them.
This is a better view of our entryway that you could sort of see in the picture above.

If you walked in the front door and turned to the left this is what you would see. In the bottom left of this picture you can see the gray carpet that is in the entryway (just to give you your bearings). This is supposed to be the "formal" dining room. We don't have formal dining room furniture, so we turned it into a reading corner. We are currently working on upholstering two large (30" x 30") ottomans (one for each chair) that will make reading much more comfortable. For those of you that have been to our old house, that bookcase is actually the top part of the hutch that used to be in our dining room. We took it down, added a base, and painted it dark brown. Voila, instant bookcase. The door on the right hand side of the picture is our bedroom. Also not particularly clean so you will not be seeing it on this tour.

This is our family room. The door on the left hand side is our bedroom door again so you've just turned slightly to the right. The sliding doors on the right side of the picture go out to our backyard. More on that in a second.

A different view of our living room. Again, for those of you that have been to our old house, that is the same coffee table and end table, they just got painted along with the bookcase. We are tired of light colored furniture. The sliding doors lead to our covered lanai and fenced in back yard (which we and the dogs LOVE!) If you click on the picture to make it larger you can see it a little more clearly.

This picture was taken standing in front of the entertainment center and facing our kitchen and eating area. The front door is now to the right in this picture. We love the more open feel to this kitchen and the larger pantry (the double white doors on the left side).

And last but not least, this is the wall that goes from the kitchen (on the left) to the entryway (on the right). We still have some painting and furniture updating to do, and we are working on getting window treatments for the whole house, but it's a good start and a BIG step up from where we were living before. We love being in a house instead of an apartment or townhouse. It feels much more private and much more ours. Thanks for taking the tour, come visit anytime!

Haircut

Jesson has had this idea for a while now that I should try cutting his hair with a pair of clippers. For those of you that don't know Jesson very well, he is VERY picky about his hair. Which is usually a plus because it always looks nice. It was not a plus when he was wanting me to be responsible for it's maintenance. That was WAY too much pressure. We decided to give it a try anyway (with lots of disclaimers from me that I had never cut human hair before and the lony time I had used a pair of clippers previous to this was to shave my horse). Below are the results. Not too bad for my first time. It's a little shorter on top than we would have liked so we'll just have to remember that an 8 guard on a clipper really is too short for on top. Past that, we'll probably try it again.

The Move

Okay, so it's actually been a month since we moved, but I never really wrote about it. No time like the present! The move itself was...not fun. We thought we were really prepared, we packed as much as we thought we could ahead of time. Let's just say you should never ask us to help you move, because we stink at it! We were up at 6:30 Saturday morning and didn't finish until 11pm in Tampa, and we didn't even get the truck unloaded that day! We had to unload it the next day because it took us so long to finish everything in Gainesville that we were exhausted by the time we finally made it down south. The day started with us dumping a full can of paint down the stairs (of course it opened and spun all the way from the top to the bottom). And really, it didn't get much better from there. I do have to say though, Jesson and I both agreed that we LOVED walking away from that house for the last time, we do not miss it at all! Below are the few pictures we did get that were move related, and they're not much.

When we were moving things out of the old house it was much easier to just leave the door open and go back and forth to the truck, rather than having to open and shut the door. This left us with a dilemma as to what to do with the dogs. They couldn't run around on their own, and we didn't have a back yard to put them in. If we closed them in a bedroom they would scratch the door. So we put up the baby gate and they watched us as best they could. They weren't happy about it, but they survived.

Buddy helped us unpack at the new house. Yes, that is him sleeping on our office floor. We didn't get much work out of him that day.

Our Adorable Nephew!

Our precious nephew, Baron Tanner Bateman, was born on July 28th, 2008. He weighed 8 lbs. 7 oz. and is adorable! The picture below is of him at his first hockey game. It doesn't get more Canadian than that! The hat he is wearing is a gift from his Uncle Jesson and I, we are so glad it kept his little ears warm! We don't get to meet Baron until December, but we have no doubt his cuteness will hold till then! Congratulations Nate and Rory! You can see more pictures of Baron on Nate and Rory's blog, there is a link on the right hand side of our page.