I am just full of updates today!

In more trip related news Jamie and I are headed to Minneapolis next week to visit his family. This is my second time going and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone again. We get to stay with his sister, brother-in-law and their 2.5 boys (she has one on the way). Her kids are so cute and we had lots of fun with them at the water park last year. So now I need to use my deal finding abilities (check last post) to find us a rental car so we can make sure we get to see everyone.

I think we're going to spend a little of our time seeing if some of the shops in the city are interested in carrying my shirts. I haven't put any time into pounding the pavement here in Portland since I need to sit down and come up with some more shirts or even have tome to turn my ideas into fruition so this will be a good test run.

Need to beat the heat?

I stumbled across this list of frozen summer drink recipes and thought I'd share it. There are a ton of smoothies on here which are my favorite when it's too hot out to cook and I want a snack. Also drinks with Alcohol for your summer get-togethers. Enjoy!

House update

The house is almost done being painted so I thought I'd post a new pic. The windows are going to be replaced in a couple weeks, so the red of the windows will be gone. Also the shutters will be back up and probably a red color, or the lighter trim color.

It's been a ton of work, but I'm very happy with the results so far.

My poor house

So we've been working on the house getting ready to paint the exterior for about a week and a half. We finally started with paint yesterday. I wish I had some I'll have to look around in my photo albums to see if I have some good before pics but here's what's going on now. So, we had to strip the paint off on one of the sides of the house. If that doesn't sound like a big job to you, well, your wrong! :) We started with a paint scrapper and got nowhere. Then went to a heat gun and got nowhere. Then bought paint stripper and were in crazy respirators and chemical resistant gloves in 90 degree weather. Oh and be "we" I mean me and my poor mother. Then we realized that the paint wasn't coming off enough so Jamie rented a pressure washer and got more off. Then we sanded everything. Then I had to fill in gouges in the wood with wood filler and re-caulk everything. Next came priming and finally we started to paint yesterday. To top it off it's been HOT here so ice-cream breaks to Baskin-Robins have been a blessing. It's so nice to see the color going on though, I love it!

The right side of the pic is what it looks like once it's stripped and sanded. The black spots are a spray paint I used to cover rusty nails so the rust wont come through.

We started putting on primer

This is the front after we took of the shutters and sanded a few spots.

Grandma Ghost Ridin' the whip

This is really funny if you've ever watched any of those stupid videos of kids "ghost riding." The best part for me is the lady has a similar accent to my Grandmother.