CHECKING IN

Hola!

It appears to have been a little while and I could say things that bloggers say like sorry and I missed it but meh, let's get down to it. 

So what's been happening lately? 

 Well, for starters, M and I finally tackled one item from our spring to do list and painted the front of the house. 

As you'll recall it looked like this before:

 

I'll acknowledge it's not terribly offensive... but it was time to go. 

We talked in the original post about painting the entire exterior grey and then doing dark navy or dark grey accents with white trim. 

Then when I started to contemplate how much work painting the ENTIRE house would be I thought up a solution that involved only half the effort- let's start out and paint the trim white, the window boxes and triangle navy, and then add some navy shutters and see if the brown doesn't suck so hard. 

And wouldn't ya know, it did the trick: 

We got quite a few comments from neighbors during this project that led me to believe the red was not well liked. We left the door red because it's a really nice contrast when it's closed..and it sort of accidentally looks patriotic but not too chintzy (or so I hope).

If I took a photo of the side or back of the house or the garage you'd see our secret: so far we've only painted the front. It's easy to ignore the rest for now when the curb appeal looks so much better.

What else, I've been eating some insanely delicious (and easy) meals (click photos for recipes):

and lastly, but probably most excitingly, M and I have booked trips to these places:

{photo via; Michael Riffle}

{photo via}

{photo via}

{photo via- by MPearl}

so. freakin'. excited.

Needless to say things have been pretty good lately, overall.
Now, if you don't mind, I have a super needy kitty to snuggle, a hotel in Seattle to book, and some trashy TV to watch while listening to the rain.