Happy Birthday to me!

For my birthday, Ethan took me to the Ft. Worth Botanic Gardens. They are the oldest botanic gardens in the state, and they are FREE (mostly... the Japanese portion has a small entrance fee) Compared to the Dallas Arboretum, which charges $10 per adult for admittance plus $7 for parking (and that's not even valet, y'all!) it is a real steal. and the gardens were beautiful!
We did decide to pay to see the Japanese portion, which was nice.


It was also very crowded as there was a Japanese festival going on; I think I would have appreciated it more sans festival.
The other portions of the garden included a perennial garden, which had what looked like mostly native Texas plants,


a rose garden


a scent garden (with fragrant flowers and different kinds of herbs), a wooded area, and another area that was more open with a lot of climbing roses on arbors.


poppies!!!

After the botanic gardens, we went down the street to the Kimbell Art Museum (also free!) Which is a nice-sized museum, large enough to have some really quality work, but small enough not to overwhelm. When we go back, I want to pack a picnic lunch and sit out in the park next to the museum.
For dinner, Ethan took me out to one of our favorite restaurants, and the place where we had our wedding brunch, Angelo's. It was as always delicious and we can't wait to go back for our anniversary.

Home projects

As a fourth year medical student, I have several months off at the end of the academic year in which I am finished with classes, but have yet to receive my diploma. I am about 1 month into a 3 month long vacation! One thing I have learned about myself is that if I am not consistently busy doing SOMETHING, then I will get really, really crabby. Because of this, I have been giving myself projects to do over my 3 month break.
On my list:
1. I made a bed skirt long enough to hide all the junk we store under our bed. Our bed is on those cheap plastic risers that everyone uses in college for both storage and comfort reasons, but they are really, really ugly. I used an old bedsheet for the fabric, hemmed it with fabritac, and safety-pinned the skirt to the top of the box-spring.
Before:

After:

2. I re-covered an old chair that was my Mom's, whose fabric was out both of date and destroyed by my mom's cat.
Before:

After:
I also plan on making pillows out of a very pretty chenille fabric (as seen folded up on chair) that I found for quite a reasonable price at a store in Hurst called "Home Fabrics and Rugs". We will use this in our next house with Ethan's couch, and move our current "couch" (really a daybed) into a guest room.

3. Ethan had an old bookshelf whose paint was dirty and chipping (not in a cute way, even if I were into shabby chic). I stripped it, sanded it, primed it with oil-based Kilz, and painted it with Martha's Sultana in Semi-gloss. I don't know if I will ever strip paint again unless I have a real antique, because it is very messy and not that cheap. However, if you ARE going to try and strip paint, I recommend the citrus-based gel over the more toxic stuff. And don't get the spray-on stripper, because it covers about two square feet.
(I'm waiting to post pictures of this project until the paint has fully cured and I have styled the bookshelf: it takes a while in this humidity!)

4. I have taken a few trips to thrift stores looking for old silver/silverplate serve ware to clean up. my most recent score was a Reed & Barton Electroplated Silver serving tray from 1928.
Before:

After:


5. I am going to dye our current loveseat slipcover (right now it's beige, and I think we're going to try and make it gray) and tailor it so that rather than loose-fit, it will be fit to the loveseat. I have never tried to dye anything before, let alone something that already had color in it, so this project will be quite an adventure.

Other projects: finishing the mountain of paperwork involved with starting a new job, finding a house to rent, and working on my crochet wool blanket that will coordinate with the Uzbek suzani currently hanging above our bed.

WTF?

since when did a nalgene turn into a toilet?
although when we were stuck on a 2 mile section of I-35 for like 3.5 hours because a robber ran into highway traffic and got hit and they made EVERYONE exit just because of the grossness, I would probably have broken down and used the my peepee bottle. I ended up getting out of the car and running into a mechanics shop. When I got back, Ethan had moved approximately one car length.