Howdy everyone! Happy Thursday. I am currently at the office having my lunch, and I felt like blogging! So I’ve got a few things to catch yall up on, so I’ll start with our camping adventure that happened a few weeks ago!
So as I may have mentioned before, this was Branden’s and my first camping trip together, so we were super pumped. We’re hoping to make this a family tradition. So anyway we drove down to Huntsville on Friday night, and our campsites were right by the water and also right next to a fishing site (which I know Greg was happy about!) 
We met up with the Matterns, Perots, Coopers, and the Rodrigui. We set up camp and hung out, did some fishing, walked around, and made smores. Mmmm smores… Saturday we all got up when the sun came up (it’s pretty much impossible to sleep late while camping) and did something that at least I had never done before, called ”geocaching”. It’s basically a treasure hunt that is monitored online. So you go to this website and look for “caches” in your area, save the coordinates, and then use a GPS to go traipsing around wherever the cach is hidden until you find it. In our case, that meant climbing through the back woods of Huntsville State Park. Ohhh yeeeeah. And then once you find the cache, there is usually a log book that you can sign, and then you can take stuff out of it and put something in to replace it. We actually found three different ones! It was really fun and I recommend trying it with a group of friends. I think this is the website we used: http://www.geocaching.com/ For the rest of the day, we fished, played games, went for walks, kayaked, cooked fajitas, and dodged the rain by setting up these amazing tent-like pavillions that some of us brought (thank goodness!) We were able to still hang out in the evening even though it was raining. Sunday morning we all went home, some of us left early enough to go to church, but others of us decided we were on vacation, dang it, we were going to take it easy (guess which category Branden and I fell into?) So all in all it was a great weekend and we can’t wait to do it again. Thanks to Jana and Greg for organizing our trip! I feel so blessed to have so many great friends who love the Lord and have so much love for life! Here are some pics from the weekend:
We met up with the Matterns, Perots, Coopers, and the Rodrigui. We set up camp and hung out, did some fishing, walked around, and made smores. Mmmm smores… Saturday we all got up when the sun came up (it’s pretty much impossible to sleep late while camping) and did something that at least I had never done before, called ”geocaching”. It’s basically a treasure hunt that is monitored online. So you go to this website and look for “caches” in your area, save the coordinates, and then use a GPS to go traipsing around wherever the cach is hidden until you find it. In our case, that meant climbing through the back woods of Huntsville State Park. Ohhh yeeeeah. And then once you find the cache, there is usually a log book that you can sign, and then you can take stuff out of it and put something in to replace it. We actually found three different ones! It was really fun and I recommend trying it with a group of friends. I think this is the website we used: http://www.geocaching.com/ For the rest of the day, we fished, played games, went for walks, kayaked, cooked fajitas, and dodged the rain by setting up these amazing tent-like pavillions that some of us brought (thank goodness!) We were able to still hang out in the evening even though it was raining. Sunday morning we all went home, some of us left early enough to go to church, but others of us decided we were on vacation, dang it, we were going to take it easy (guess which category Branden and I fell into?) So all in all it was a great weekend and we can’t wait to do it again. Thanks to Jana and Greg for organizing our trip! I feel so blessed to have so many great friends who love the Lord and have so much love for life! Here are some pics from the weekend:
We’ll find it!
Geocaching!
Lynn, Jana, Ashley, Jenny, and me
Joey and Jenny
Lynn and me
Manly men doing manly things
I totally jumped, dang it
So since the camping trip a few weeks ago, Branden and I have been spending our weekends working on our house! Our latest project was to replace the tile floor in our bathroom. The tile itself wasn’t ugly, but it was starting to come up in a few places and I was tired of stepping on gravel every day!. So we finally picked a company and a tile that we liked, and they installed it a couple of weeks ago! (No way were we going to do that ourselves!) (I have some before and after pictures, but I’ll have to upload them later when I’m at home.) I really like the results, and once we vacuumed all of the dust out of our house, we were able to enjoy it!
We’re also working on replacing our door knobs from brass to satin nickel (thanks for the hookup John!), and then this coming weekend we’re starting the process of having our countertops and backsplash replaced!! Yippee! The countertops are definitely the project I’m most excited about. (Side note: Lest anyone think that Branden and I normally drop serious cash like this, we have been saving and pondering for months and months, and everything just seemed to happen all at once!) So, yeah, we’re not the big spenders that I’m making us sound like. :P Unlike this guy:
(My favorite is the guy on the left with the stack of cash on his head)
So this weekend Branden, Branden’s dad Ernie, and I are going to demo the kitchen, which means we are ripping out the sink, current countertops and at least part of the tile backsplash. Ourselves. Am I nervous at all? Maybe a little… But fortunately Branden is handy and Ernie is Mr. Fixit himself, so I think we’ll be okay. I guess the hard part will be not having a kitchen for a week! Tonight we’re going to enjoy our last real meal.
Anyway, I think my post has grown long enough, so I’ll stop it here. I hope everyone’s having a great day!
Love,
Liz
Good luck! Its inspiring to hear about people doing things to their house!
By: Lynn Cooper on June 11, 2009
at 10:38 pm