The Day the Maple Tree Died

Two years ago, this happened:

In the middle of a torrential storm, this huge branch from one of our maple trees fell down. Lucky for us and our neighbors, it fell right in between our two houses. Not on our house, our neighbor's multiple sheds and/or garages, or anywhere else where it could have caused major damage. God was really looking out for us that day!

It took out the corner of our family room addition, but the damage was so minor that Travis was able to fix it without any trouble. You can see from this picture that the rest of the tree limbs stand precariously close to our house. This picture was taken from our 2nd story deck. So any other tree limbs to fall down would land either directly on our house, our deck, or the neighbor's sheds. 

We hemmed and hawed for 2 years on whether we should cut it down. Should we have a professional service do it? Could Travis just cut it down? What should we do?

Our yard definitely has it's share of trees. We have no fewer than 19 trees on our property. In town. On less than an acre. That's craziness.

So this summer, we finally called around to get some bids on taking this tree down. It was time. The bids we got ranged from $575 to $1300+. For $1300, you better be hauling all the wood and grinding the stump up but that's not what their bid included. We decided to go with the cheaper service, which used a crane, and clean up the remains on our own.

The tree trimmers put us on their list, and I figured they would call to let us know when they'd be coming by. Imagine my surprise when the tree guy randomly showed up on Saturday morning! Luckily we didn't have any plans, so he got started right away.

 We had to get permission from the neighbors for the truck to sit in their yard, since our family room addition pretty much goes right up to our property line.

He was way up there!

The sad remains of our tree:

We were worried about getting in and around the fencing, so Travis is going to cut this part down on his own. I'm kind of sad about losing the shade from this tree; it really helped keep our family room cooler in the summer. Buuuuut...I'd rather not have a branch come down and ruin said family room.

It only took the tree trimmer about 3 hours to cut everything down, including two smoke breaks (I counted). However, it then took Travis the rest of the day to clear all the brush and larger logs out of our neighbor's side yard. I tried helping for a bit, but with Emily it was hard to really be of much help. He did get it all cleaned up though, and now we have to figure out how to get the rest of this ugly tree down. Not exactly how I planned on spending my Saturday!

Are you working on any home projects, planned or unplanned?

2014 Book List Check In

I meant to do this post at the end of June, as that would have been a full 6 months into the year. But with vacations, holidays, and you know...life...things got a bit delayed.

I'll keep my opinions brief since it's a long list already. Some I've reviewed and linked back to previous reviews. So here's what I've read so far:

1. Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson - I love all things Joshilyn Jackson, 'nuff said.
2. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg - Good book if you're looking to empower yourself a little more in the workplace (and you're a woman). Some common sense stuff, but sometimes we need reminders of that. 
   
3. It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Same and Infamy by Laurie Notario - Funny, quick read with lots of short stories. 
4. Emily & Einstein by Linda Francis Lee - Not my typical cup of tea, but a cute story. 
5. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson - This bored me to tears! Given the title and subject matter, it could have been so much better. But par for the Larson course, he weighs his books down with tons and tons of details that get a bit exhausting.
6. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn - Yes. Just yes. Read this and Flynn's other 2 books. 
7. Triangle by Katharine Weber - Interesting book about a time period I knew nothing about.
8. Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani 
9. Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber - Another book I probably wouldn't have picked up on my own if it weren't for book club. Really though, this is a great book about how God loves all of us, how he works in everyone, and how Christianity doesn't always look like Sunday morning khaki's.
   
10. In the Woods by Tana French - I really enjoy reading French's Dublin Murder Squad series. They can be read together or alone, as some characters show up in each novel but each book is entirely independent of the other.
11. Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick - Not my favorite thus far. A little slow at times, but interesting enough.
12. Takedown Twenty by Janet Evanovich - Pass. Don't waste your time. If you've seen the movie "One for the Money", then you've read all 20 of Evanovich's books.
13. Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah - Really interesting story about a daughter growing up in China.
14. Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger - This was a good mystery, but I only gave it 3 stars on Goodreads and now can't remember why.  
15. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling - I so wanted to love this book. I could hear Kaling's voice in each story, and I think she is so, so funny but this one was a miss for me.
16. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - So trippy! Gaiman takes your imagination on a wild ride with this one.
17. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - Unbroken has received rave reviews by so many sources; I cannot speak badly about it. At times it was a little slow, but also riveting in other chapters. A must read!
18. Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler - I liked this short novel a lot more than I thought I would when I picked it up, although I don't know why. A story about forbidden love in the South during the Civil Rights Era. What's not to like? 
    
19. Orphan Train by Christa Baker - Another really good historical read about a time period I really knew nothing about. I could have done without the "present day" part of the story, but overall it was really interesting. 
20. Outside - a post-apocalyptic novel by Shalini Boland - Interesting read. I had some issues with the writing style in the beginning, but it tied together nicely at the end.
21. The Garden of Happy Endings by Barbara O'Neal - Kind of a chick lit, feel good book.
22. Trafficked by Sophie Hayes - Probably a must read for any woman or mother, but I really wanted to reach in and shake Sophie for her stupidity in so many situations.
23. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty - Goooood read, a real page turner. I was so into this book that my husband even noticed and said "so what's the big secret?"
24. Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl by Susan McCorkindale - Skip it. Boring and self-indulgent.
25. Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Lorna Landvik - Yet again, a feel good type book picked by book club. We needed something like this after all the heavy reads we've gone through. 

Right now I'm reading It by Stephen King. Is it weird that I just felt like reading a scary book? I'm just about halfway though (at 1100 pages, that's some feat!), and so far it's not so scary. But I read 11/22/63, and it had some scenes in Derry, Maine where It takes place so it got me interested. Since this one is so long, it'll take a little while for me to get though it. 

I made a goal of reading 24 books this year, which I have clearly blown out of the water. We'll see how many more I can get through by the end of the year! If you'd like to read more of my reviews and see what else I've read in the past, or future books, or just keep track of your own books, check out Goodreads. 

What are you reading now? Any suggestions for me?

3rd Birthday Recap

Get ready to be spammed with cuteness.

Emily's 3rd birthday was Wednesday. I can't even believe she's that old already. But time really does fly! Two more years and she'll be starting Kindergarten. Yikes!

I was so sure that Emily would want a Frozen themed birthday party.  I started pinning all sorts of cute ideas, and really had everything coming together. Then I thought "hmm, maybe I should ask her just in case." To my complete surprise, Emily said she wanted a Cinderella party. Well then! Back to the drawing board...

We ended up just having family over for BBQ on her actual birthday. I hung up some balloons, bought Disney princess plates from Walmart, a cake with the princesses on it, and called it good. Way easier than all my original planning.

I mentioned in my last post that we surprised Emily first thing by hanging balloons on the outside of her door.

She was so surprised!

At first, she didn't really know what to make of that. Then she laughed and played with the balloons for a few seconds before she declared that she was going downstairs for breakfast. Alrighty then.

Here's the birthday girl before everyone arrived. I started running out of room for all of her presents at one point. Why yes, my daughter is slightly spoiled. But not by me! It's all the Grandma's fault.

In fitting with the princess theme, Emily received no fewer than FIVE princess dresses. Five. Here she is holding up the Snow White dress, and you can kind of see that she's wearing her new Cinderella dress. She also received Ariel, Queen Elsa, and Princess Sophia. Since we already have a Belle & Rapunzel dress, I told Travis he's going to need to build her a small wardrobe for all her play dresses!

Wal-mart provided this awesome cake for us. I was really quite impressed with this because although I willingly ordered the cake, I was expecting something from Cake Wrecks as the final product. It's pretty tasty, too!

All in all, Emily had a great birthday. We are still cleaning up all the wrapping paper and balloons, but my little girl is happy and that's all that matters. 

A recipe and a birthday!

Boy do I have a yummy recipe for you! I found this recipe for One-Pan Chicken Burrito Bowls over at No. 2 Pencil. Since we have a seriously lack of Chipotle here (sad face!), and we love Mexican food, I thought this would be a for sure winner in our house.

Pic from No. 2 Pencil, because I suck at taking pictures of my food.

I couldn't have been more right! This recipe is also super easy. 

Ingredients

2-3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut up into bite sized pieces

3 tbsp of olive oil

1/4 c of diced yellow onion

1 c of uncooked extra-long grain rice (we used brown rice because we had more of that)

1 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, drained

1 15 oz can of black beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 tsp of garlic powder

1/2 tsp of chili powder

1 tsp of cumin

2 1/2 c of low-sodium chicken broth (could be a little less, actually)

2 c of shredded cheese (whatever you prefer, we used cheddar)

salt & pepper to taste

diced tomatoes, diced green onions, sour cream, and guac as toppers. 

Instructions

1. Saute onions in 2 tbsp of olive oil until translucent.

2. Season diced chicken with S&P, add chicken to pan and cook over medium heat until it's started to brown.

3. Move chicken to one side of pan. On the other side, add 1 tbsp of olive oil and saute uncooked rice for about 2 min or until it's a little brown. 

4. Stir in black beans, canned tomatoes, chicken brown, garlic powder, chili powder, and cumin.

5. Bring to simmer then reduce to low heat.

6. Cook about 20 min or until rice is tender and some of the broth has cooked off. 

7. Sprinkle with cheese, let set for 2-3 min off heat for cheese to heat.

8. Garnish with green onion, tomato, sour cream or guacamole. 

It takes about 30 minutes from start to finish, and makes a lot. Travis had seconds, and there's enough for probably 2 more bowls. Emily ate everything but the chicken because she's weird and picky. Some days she likes certain foods, other days she doesn't. However, we will definitely be adding this to our recipe rotation. 

Speaking of Emily, today is her 3rd birthday! I don't know when that happened. How did 3 years go by so fast? This picture feels like it was yesterday:

We surprised Em this morning by hanging balloons on the outside of her door this morning. She was so surprised! I got a great picture of her shocked little face, and then she laughed and squealed! It was so cute. I hope she talks about it all day at school. We sent her with birthday cupcakes to share with her friends. Tonight we're having a BBQ with family, complete with a "Cinderella" cake as requested by the birthday girl. More pictures to come! 

Do you have any special birthday memories from your childhood?

Running, running, running runningrunningrunning....

Guess what is on my mind lately? Guess what is the only topic on my mind lately?

Chocolate!

Just kidding, it's running. No duh, right? We're less than 3 weeks out from running the Ragnar Relay, a 200+ mile relay race with 12 people in 2 vans. There's over 400 teams in our race alone, so it's kind of a big thing. I somehow became the captain, and now am slowly losing all my sanity. Do you know how much organization it takes to coordinate 12 people to run 200+ miles, 200 miles away from home? Ok, it's actually closer to 300 miles away.

There's hotel rooms to book, vans to rent, run legs to assign, food to buy now, food to buy then, safety equipment that every runner has to have (every runner!!), van decorations (oh yea, we should think about that). Plus all the rules to follow, like what happens if we have an injured runner. Please God don't let us have an injured runner!

In the midst of all this,  I still have to train, too. My run legs are 8.2 miles, 3.8 miles, and 5.3 miles. I anticipate to be running around 4:00 in the afternoon, 3:30 in the morning, and then again at 12:15 the next afternoon. Yes, you read that right: 3:30 in the morning. I am not too excited about that, but at least it's my shortest and easiest run.

Also, I know this because I have a very, very detailed spreadsheet to keep track of this all. Organization is my middle name.

Ragnar Relay is craziness. For real. But I'm so excited! Nervous too, but mostly excited. August 15th cannot get here fast enough!

So how am I prepping to run this? By simulating the runs at home, of course. I'm not really running the same mileage, but I did read that the best way to train is to get used to running on tired legs. Which means running twice a day, or every 12 hours. Not all week long, of course, just once a week to prep.

I've started running my normal 5 miles on Thursday morning, a quick 2-3 miles on Thursday afternoon, and then 3 miles again on Friday morning. It's really not so bad. I'm slowly increasing the mileage in that second run, but it feels ok. I'm definitely tired come Friday, and I want to eat everything in sight. But that's maybe not so different from a normal day.

I still do my long runs on Sundays to keep up the long miles. This past Sunday I woke up to rain and wind: not my ideal running weather. If it were a race or something that I had to run in, then I'd tough it out. But for a training run? Bump that! I settled in with a nice long movie and ran on my treadmill for 1:20:00. I run slower on my treadmill, but I figure that time is about what 9 miles takes me. I'm good with that. Running on the treadmill always feels like cheating, but it's better than not running at all.

Hopefully I will be ready to rock it out in a few weeks here. Fingers crossed that all of our runners are healthy and no one drops last minute. I'm praying for our overall safety and health until then, and during the run. Team D'range'd Dozen is going to kick some asphalt!

What's on your mind lately? 

Book Review: Welcome to the Great Mysterious

For my August book club, we chose to read Lorna Landvik's "Welcome to the Great Mysterious". Lorna is the daughter of the church's old pastor, so I guess some of the older book club members feel a special connection to her books. Most are set in Minnesota, and we've also read "Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons", which was pretty good.

The description from Goodreads: "Broadway star Geneva Jordan reluctantly agrees to take care of her twin sister Ann's son, a boy with Down's Syndrome, while Ann and her husband take a vacation. Returning home to Minnesota, Geneva steps into her new role every inch a star, but the boy and an interesting man begin to open her heart."

Not much to go on, if you ask me. But the story is pretty simple and straight forward. I enjoy Landvik's writing style, which gives you enough detail with out being over the top, and she keeps it interesting to carry you through the book.

Geneva is every bit a Broadway starlet, so taking this role as caregiver to a 13 year old boy with Down's Syndrome is quite out of the box for her. But she sucks it up and plows forward with good intention. When they find an old book that Geneva and her sister made as kids, called The Great Mysterious, things get a little more interesting. The book asks "the big questions", and each member of their family was supposed to write in an answer for questions like "What is the meaning of life?" and "What is true love?". It's fun to hear the answers from her different relatives, and get a little insight into some of the characters. I also think it gets the reader pondering what their own answers would be. I haven't decided what my answers are, but it did get me thinking!

It's also interesting to see Geneva's character evolve as the book goes on. She goes to being quite self-absorbed, to caring and understanding that there is more to life than Broadway.

Overall, I thought this was a wholesome book that makes you laugh, cry, and ends on a nice note. 4 stars from me.

Lake Days

Part of living in Minnesota is going to the lake. I mean, the state nickname is "Land of 10,000 Lakes". Everywhere you look, there are lakes!

Which means that on hot days, that's where you find most people. Now, this Florida girl is definitely more of a pool person. I like to be able to see the bottom, not worry about what's swimming with me, and I believe a healthy dose of chlorine is good for just about everyone (the Surgeon General personally told me that, so I know it's legit). However, real pools are few and far between up here because of our long winters. So, over the past few years, I have been getting acclimated to swimming in lakes.

Ok, that's not true. What I do cannot be called "swimming". I put my bathing suit on, and stand in the water. Sometimes even all the way up to my shoulders if the water is warm. But usually my suit doesn't even get wet. We're still working on it, ok?

But when it's hot, it's still nice to dip your toes in. Since Travis grew up swimming in lakes, he's trying to get Emily used to it, too. I'm ok with that; I don't want her to be paranoid like her mama. So on Monday when the temps reached nearly 90 degrees, we headed out to Side Lake for a dip.

My favorite "beach" here is McCarthy Beach, which is a state park. You have to pay $5 to get in, or $25 for a season pass. The beach is long and skinny, but it's shallow for yards and yards, and they have a little kid section roped off. There's not much in the way of weeds or wildlife either, so I'm pretty comfortable there.

But instead, we went to a house at Side Lake. Travis build a slide for a customer that goes off their dock, and he needed to make some minor changes and thought it would be fun for us to go too. It was fun! The water is still really cold, but once you get in it's not so bad. Emily took a while to get up enough guts to stick her feet in, and then stand on the dock steps that are in the water, and then finally walk around in the shallow area on her own.

Imagine my surprise when she decided to go down the slide, all on her own! I was slightly freaked out at the idea, but Travis stood at the end and caught her. Once she started, she didn't want to stop!

Eventually the sun started going down and the bugs started making an appearance. We literally had to pry her away from the dock, and I had to hold her hand while we dried off so she wouldn't run back out. She loved it!

1st lake trip of the summer: success

Do you swim in lakes, or do they freak you out, too? What do you do on a hot day to cool off?