All By Myself (Don't Wanna Be)

Emily and Brenna have officially made it to Pennsylvania for the weekend. Emily tells me that Brenna did very well on the flight to Chicago and even made a new friend in the seat next her, a nice fellow that picked up stuff that she threw overboard, and even let her sprawl out across his leg while napping. The flight to Allentown I'm told was cramped and stuffy, and Brenna crashed early tonight, no doubt from the excitement. I'm very proud of wife who braved this journey on her own to see so many of her new found friends across the country!

As for me, well, I'm staying busy around the house. Below are a few pictures of the flagstone out back, FINALLY grouted to completion after six months of "getting around to it".

The bulk of this stone in this first picture was already done, I simply finished off the last few that rounded the bend at the end.

This was the other side of the yard, once covered with bark and bird seed, it's now been spiffed up. This morning was beautiful for getting this done. It actually rained here on four different occasions yesterday, totalling about a third of an inch. We were one of the lucky areas that had a few strong isolated storms pass over us, which makes up for all the times this past summer I was out in the front yard shaking my fist at the monsoons mockingly skirting the house.

Seeing as Brenna is not here, I went back into the archives and pulled a few more shots from the past few weeks for your viewing pleasure. A few more shots of her in her Scooty Puff Jr mobile, and one her curiously checking out some other toy that I'm not recognizing from the picture.

In other random news, I'm wrapping up painting part of our bathroom, which we started about three years ago and abandoned. I also have officially replaced all of our standard 60 watt bulbs in the house with the energy saving kind (forget what they're called). I'll be curious to see how much a month we see in savings going forward. We're already on the time of day program with our power company, which has saved us some nice money already (running high power appliances during off peak hours), and despite running our A/C a lot more this summer, our monthly average bill for the year has been lower by about 10%.

I'm now working on my second Starbucks of the evening, to try and power through a number of other projects. I'll report any new Emily and Brenna updates as they become available throughout the weekend.