Paint matching?

I remember a few months ago, there was a commercial for Home Depot where someone walks in with a stuffed animal and they were able to match the color exactly for paint. At the time, I recall being so impressed with this new technology. So, when I had my little mishap where I did some touch up work with the wrong color of paint, I did not think it was that big of a deal. John chipped off a piece of paint from the wall (in the correct color) and took it down to Depot. I mean if they can match paint to a stuffed animal, they ought to be able to match paint to paint, right? Ok, so he got the paint and last night after work, I started touching up my previous touch up work with the new, correct color of paint. When I woke up this morning, I realized that the “new technology” is really not that awesome because it does not work. The color was close, but close does not cut it when you're dealing with paint colors. So, looks like we will be repainting the kitchen, hall, staircase (ugh), office, master bathroom, closet, laundry room and master bedroom sometime soon. Now I feel like I need to at least change up the color or something to make the new paint job worthwhile.

Last bird post, I promise

This morning, when I let Morgan outside, I heard a really strange bark like never before. I was not even sure if it was Morgan, but I went out to check on her and she was crouched down barking wildly at the hosta plant. This was really abnormal since she usually does not bark, so I yelled for John (I was scared at what I would find in that hosta plant). Turns out, it was an injured bird that was still alive but could not fly. By the time we figured that out, Morgan was running around the backyard with the bird in her mouth, all the while the bird was still flapping his wings. I think that kind of freaked her out, because she just dropped the bird, thankfully. John took care of it after that. A few hours later, I was watering the plants and I discovered that the birds in the fern had hatched and were hungry! Let's hope it's not thier mom that is now in our trash can.


This afternoon, I decided I would do some touch up painting on our walls (mostly because I moved some pictures around and there were black marks left on the wall). When we bought the house, the previous owners left us some of the paint in the garage, so I assumed this would be a pretty easy task. John found the paint and I tackled the kitchen. Since I had everything out, I decided to go ahead and do the other rooms that were painted that color as well. Now I know that paint dries a different color, so I was not that worried when I put it on and it was not an exact match, but it has been several hours now, and the paint is definitely the wrong color (sigh). Glad I decided to do those extra walls.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day Dad! Wish I could be there to celebrate with you but I am looking forward to seeing you in a few short weeks. Hope you have a fantastic day! Love you!

Weekend in review..

It’s already Thursday and I am just getting around to posting about the weekend, whew! It has been a busy week so far, John is in Atlanta and of course it happens to fall on the week of my sales conference, so I have had stuff going on almost every evening. Back to the weekend, we had a nice, relaxing time. Friday night, we had some friends over to watch the Redwings game. Of course, it did not end favorably for John, but was a good game (I even watched, sort of, I was reading magazines but at least I was in the room!). On Saturday, John went golfing, and I went shopping. I did not buy anything really exciting, but I did find some stuff on sale which is rare for me. Unfortunately, I am not really a “bargain shopper” and if something is on sale, it is generally not in my size, so I was excited about my savings. On Saturday night, we went to one of my favorite restaurants in Charlotte, Roosters. We met the Murphy’s there and had quite a feast. Here is what we ate:

Appetizers: smoked salmon, cheese plate (goat lady chevre, mahon, and cana de cabra* if you like cheese, do yourself a favor and pick up some cana de cabra, it was awesome)

Salad: Iceburg, bacon and blue cheese for Megan and me, the guys shared a pizza

Mains: shrimp, duck confit

Sides: margaux’s succotash, parmesan gnocchi w/ arugula pesto and au gratin potatoes

Even though it seems like a ton of food, the servings are small plates, so you really just get a tasting of everything, see:


Before we went to dinner, we decided to take a few pictures of Morgan. It is really hard to get her settled enough to photograph, and have us look decent too, but here are the best ones:

After dinner, we went to the epicenter uptown to watch “Up” such a cute movie!
On Sunday, we designated it “clean up the courtyard day” and John trimmed trees, I dug up some weeds and cut back the vines growing on the side of the house. It is looking nice now and we are ready to start the summer bbq’ing.

More Birds!

So I got home from work today, and started watering the plants. When I made it out to the front porch to water the hanging ferns, I made this discovery.

That's right, there was a birds nest (with eggs) laying right in the middle! What's the right thing to do here? Water the plant like usual? Don't water and let the fern die? Move the nest? I definitely don't want to kill any more bird eggs, I got my fill of that on Saturday. Hmmm..

A dog and a frog, a mouse in the house, and the bird we heard

Despite the Seussian title of this entry, every word of this story, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, is true.
The day began quite early for John, Morgan woke up as usual at 6:00 and was excited to begin the day. Since it was John's morning to get up with her, he decided to take her to the non-sanctioned dog park (hereafter referred to as NS dogpark) close to our house. On their way in to the NS dogpark, Morgan was sniffing out the path and she came across something very interesting. As John approached what had grabbed Morgan's attention, he found it to be a headless corpse of what was once a large bullfrog. So John pulled Morgan by and she proceeded to romp around in the NS dogpark for 30 minutes. Morgan, being the rebellious teen that she is, no longer comes when called unless it is in her interest, hence the abnormal hours of attendance at the NS dogpark. If Morgan comes across other dogs, she runs over to sniff them out and playfully maul them if they are smaller than her. After half an hour, John decided it was time to depart the NS dogpark. Since Morgan is now wise to most of the tricks used to corral her in, John tries to herd her to the exit. As they approached the exit, Morgan re-discovers the bullfrog. As John realized what she found, he began a belated and futile effort to keep Morgan away from the frog. Once Morgan realized she wasn't supposed to be near the frog, she picked it up by one long floppy leg and began running back into the NS dogpark. Unbeknownst to most, in his time, John participated in many sports and displayed the occasional flashes of adequate athleticism. This was not one of those times. Morgan proceeded to dash by John and run at least 200 yards in the opposite direction, with the former frog flopping back and forth in her mouth with every step. As possible scenerios of how this would end ran through John's mind, many were falling into the "bad" column and roughly zero were falling into the "good" column. At this point, John decided that distracting Morgan away from the frog was his best chance. Once Morgan had stopped, she turned around to face John and show off her prize. So instead of running directly at her, John turned and ran perpendicular to Morgan's spot yelling all sorts of nonsense to try and attract her attention. Had someone witnessed this, or some how recorded this incident, John would no doubt be a youtube sensation by now. If there is one thing Morgan can't resist, it's something fun happening without her participating, so luckily our ruggedly handsome, yet dull witted protagonist's plan started to work. Morgan started to dash towards the idiotic looking John as he ran around flailing his arms and yelling nonsense. John noticed this and realized that the harder part might be grabbing hold of her once she got near. Having dropped her leash once he started his idiotic run, John would have to control her with his bare hands. He was luckily able to drag her by the collar back to the leash. Having removed the former bullfrog distraction from the park entryway, leaving the park was uneventful. Once they returned to the car, John noticed a foul odor eminating from the dog, and knew an early morning bath would be in order. John proceeded to bathe her back at the house, all the while I was still sleeping soundly. John was rewarded with a pancake breakfast though!

After we went to spin class, we decided to tackle the project for the day. For the past 2-3 months, we noticed our dryer was not drying things as quickly as it used to. Since it is a fairly new dryer, we thought something must be up. Previously, we had heard noises coming from our
attic which is on the opposite side of the wall from the dryer. Jen was convinced that there was an oppossum (whistlepig for those of you from WV) in the attic. John had previously witnessed a bird flying out of the dryer vent leading him to believe that there was a bird's nest in there, thus causing the poor dryer performance and hopefully the attic noises. As John climbed the stepladder outside planning to remove the bird's nest from the vent, and earning an early release from his chores, he discovered that the bird's nest was too far into the vent for him to reach. John now realized that he would have to climb into the attic and face the possible whistlepig to properly fix the dryer. As we opened the attic crawl space, there was yet another foul odor coming from the attic. Hoping that it might have just been a mouse and not a whistlepig, we had placed a mouse trap in the attic 2 months prior. The mouse trap had provided no yield after several weeks and was forgotten. It was now discovered that the mousetrap had successfully captured his prey quite sometime ago. John promptly removed the former mouse and trap and placed it in a dignified resting spot, the dumpster. The impact of finding the mouse was twofold on John's motivation (or lack thereof) for the job. On one hand, the likihood of a rabid whistlepig making the noises in the attic was now considerably less. However, on the other hand, there was now both the smell and remnants of dead mouse to maneuver around. So, our courageous, yet dull witted protagonist dressed for battle and craweled into the attic, utility knife in hand. My job was to hold the flashlight, so glad I am a girl! Once inside, John discovered that the bird had not only nested in the vent, it had also ripped several holes in the dryer hose leading to the vent. Unloading several nests worth of grass and feathers from the attic, we now knew a trip to Home Depot was in the works.

John holds the former dryer vent hose

As John removed the hose from the attic, we then discovered that it wasn't only a mouse that had met it's demise in the attic....

Unfortunate casualties

We both were saddened to find that there were eggs in the nest until we realized that the hot air from the dryer had likely already baked them from the inside out... at least that is what we are telling ourselves. Swearing not to fall victim to the same problem again, John fashions a wire mesh to cover the vent and purchases a semi-rigid hose for the dryer. John crawls into the attic for round 2 and immediatly sees the mother bird hovering by the vent outside. The craftsmanship of the cover clearly was obviously lacking and did not hold up. John then wrestled with the semi ridgid hose and proceeded to break the dryer vent. So, back to Home Depot. Apparently bird nests in dryer vents are fairly common, because we saw a dryer vent there which had a cage like mechanism just for keeping out the birds. Of course we bought that, and a flexible hose and we were off. John was back in the attic for round 3. This was executed by me crawling up a ladder on the side of our house holding vent in place, while John was attaching the hose through the attic. Everything went smoothly there, and when we tested the dryer out it was as good as new. The day's work had come to a close a mere 3 and half hours after this 15 minute job had started. The list of casualties was long, and the list of successes short, please use this experience to benefit yourselves.

The morals of the story are:
1. take your dog to sanctioned dog parks only
2. when your dog is misbehaving and you want her to come, pull a John and run around screaming and flailing like a madman (this and other dog training techniques forthcoming in John's instructional video)
3. an uncaged dryer vent is a virtual pandora's box waiting to open
4. beware o' the whistlepig

*PS This entry was written by Jen, but dictated by John. He is getting into this blog thing and may even post a few times, yay!

Morgan Graduates!

Yesterday, Morgan graduated from her intermediate puppy training class! Intermediate is a pretty strong word for her abilities now, but I guess it is a step up from kindergarten. We will probably sign up for advanced class in a few weeks because she likes the classes and it is definitely working. Except lately, she is going through adolescence and has been pretty sassy. Anytime we try and get her to do something, she just kind of looks at us like “yeah I know what that means, but I don’t want to do it.” So it has been frustrating. The other day, John came in the room and frantically said “There’s something wrong with Morgan” so I ask what’s going on and apparently she got a burst of energy, and was just ripping up the hosta plant in the backyard, then racing around, stopping only for a bite of more hosta. She finally calmed down, but she was going manic for a while on that plant and we had never seen her like that before. She is so much fun though and I am so glad we have her! Here is a picture of her from yesterday, and since this is her premier on the blog, I decided to include a few other favorites.

My latest obsession

Recently, I decided that I need to pick up a hobby. I have several interests but I wanted a real hobby. So, I read up on a few things, did some deep thinking, and decided I wanted to take up photography. Yes! I love pictures, I like doing things with pictures, and I would love to take better pictures. Plus, we love to travel so having a good photographer in the group would come in handy. Pictures are simple, unbiased storytellers that capture a moment to save in time forever and I love having them around. So, with that decision I decided the first thing I needed to do was invest in a SLR camera. I have shot with point and shoot (or Polaroid, ha!) camera’s all my life, so I had to do some reading up. I researched many cameras and got lost in a slew of terms like megapixels, ISO, image stabilization, continuous drive and dynamic range. After I educated myself, I found the perfect camera!

That’s right, I need the Nikon D40. Ever since I laid eyes on this beauty I can’t stop thinking about how many awesome shots I could capture if I had one. Plus, this camera is great for beginning photographers like me. My goal is to get a new camera before our big trip to Europe next year since I will have some great photo ops there! Hint to John- My birthday is coming up and this would make an awesome gift.