We weren't able to do anything for Fourth of July this year (the tradition is to spend it on the beach in Anna Maria), so instead we took a long weekend to have friends down for a pool day for Wade's birthday weekend. We had so much fun with friends in fact we forgot to take a single picture! There was an absurd amount of snacking, grilling, and homemade ice cream cake to go around and plenty of good times with good friends. The rest of the weekend Wade and I tooled around the island on bikes, lazed by the pool, and on his birthday morning went out for omelets at the Rod n Reel pier after opening presents. Since his birthday was on a Monday, we hung around for most of the day before packing up our stuff and the furry kids and heading back to the house.
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| The birthday boy opening his cards and gifts. |
Right after that relaxing weekend I headed to DC for a few quick days of meetings and enjoyed seeing friends, but did not enjoy the steamy pavement in DC. I forgot in the summer in large cities that the heat gets trapped by the pavement, making it even hotter. When the wind blows it's like standing in front of a hair dryer and the pavement radiates steamy heat through your shoes and around your calves. There is no relief - ick. It made me realize how lucky we are to have so much green space and cooling sea breezes in St. Pete! In fact, the heat has actually been, dare I say, almost tolerable this summer?
The rest of July we enjoyed spending time with friends, puttering in the yard, and getting house projects done. We've started cleaning up the attic to get it organized, added some storage in the guest bathroom, and are thinking about ways to move around the layout in the living room to add more seating and wall shelves for books and things. We also finally had two chairs recovered we found on the curb near the beach house. Here's before:
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| Hilo LOVED the original knobby old fabric on these chairs so much they started turning orange from all his fur! |
And after:
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| Baby seems to approve of the upgrade in chairs and continues to claim them as his throne. |
The yard continues to grow and change and you can check out what's blooming on our Picasa site. We even harvested our first pineapple this year! We also continue to be entertained by the chickens. Everyday they seem to find something new to enjoy in our wild yard. In this video, they have recently discovered the beauty of dust bathing and sunning in a pile in the dirt under our new Meyer Lemon tree. So silly.
The other silver lining of not going to Australia: to make it up to me, my work is paying for me to attending a facilitative leadership training workshop in San Francisco in October that I've been trying to get to for over a year. This has also proved the perfect opportunity to make up my lost vacation (again, planned for Australia) but this time I can include Wade. So we're tacking a week on after my training to drive and camp down the coast to see the Monterey Bay and Big Sur areas. Fortunately, I've accumulated enough frequent flier miles at this point that we were able to get Wade's plane ticket for free!
