I’ve decided that I want to occasionally post about life on this blog, instead of just the food that we eat. I also have a personal family blog, but as this blog has been taking the front burner that one hasn’t been reheated at all in a while if you will. I’ll still post the most personal stuff there, if there is anything I think worthy of sharing, but I think I’m going to start posting a little more real life on here too (and I welcome mom to do the same if she’s interested). Don’t worry, if and when I do these posts it will be on an off day, when I don’t have a recipe scheduled anyway, and you’ll still get the same regular 3 to 4 delicious recipe posts from us every week (give or take life circumstances).

I hope you’ll stick with me through this ride, and some of these posts may still end up being about food that we’re eating without an actual recipe attached. (Take what I’m going to write in this post for example). For now it’ll be a 5 Fact Friday (that might not happen every Friday), and I hope you’ll stick with us through it!

#1 The weather is finally getting really warm. It’s been warm on and off for at least a month, but now I think it is finally getting consistently warm.  It’s hot enough during the day that the evenings are a nice cool temperature that is actually quite perfect for relaxing outside. One blessing of the warmer weather means more and more grilling. We actually started grilling a couple of months ago before it was very warm, but we decided it might just take the food a little longer to cook, but our grill could still get plenty hot. But with this summer weather that is coming, you had better believe that we will be grilling our food at least once or twice a week. And if not grilling we will definitely be eating dinner outside more and more often anyway. My absolute grilling favorite foods are chicken kebabs, with bell peppers, onion and pineapple marinated in yoshidas sauce and good ol’ bbq chicken. Nate is an amazing grill-er and  he is seriously an expert at cooking chicken just right, all the way cooked, but not over cooked, no dry chicken in this house. He is also a pro burger maker, but we haven’t made any yet this year.

#2 Another great thing about the warm days is that we planted our garden! We planted seeds in side, but due to lack of sun or lack of watering (we had them in our basement this year to save our kitchen counter top space) and I didn’t see them as often so I forgot to water them as often. Thus, none of the seedlings really made it. But we still had more seeds and some things were going to be planted straight outside anyway, so about two weeks ago we planted all of our seeds and many of them are starting to poke through the dirt now!

We switched a couple things up in our garden this year (learning what grew well last year and what didn’t). I meant to do a post on our garden last year, but apparently never got around to publishing it. So in our garden we have 8 raised boxes that Nate built. Our soil was pretty crappy and pretty rocky so we though raised beds would be the best solution. We also installed a drip system or misters to cover each box. So we have 1 box of raspberries (we didn’t get a single berry last year, but we’re crossing our fingers this year is better), 1 box of strawberries (we got about 4 tiny strawberries last year, but we’ve already had 1 mid sized this year – that we cut in half to share – and so we are very hopeful), we have 1 box of roma tomatoes (since neither of us are tomato lovers, except for sauces and salsas we don’t care what kind we have, but our romas grew MUCH better last year than the others – think 100s of little tomatoes per plant!), we have 1 box of herbs (which has 12 herbs in it : cilantro, tarragon, mint, cumin, marjoram, basil, rosemary, dill, chives, thyme, oregano and sage), we have 1 random box with spinach, tomatillos, broccoli and snow peas, we have 1 box of cucumber, zucchini and yellow squash, we have 1 box of peppers (we have california wonder, grand bell, anaheim, banana and jalapeno) and we have 1 box of watermelon (we did pumpkin last year and only got 3 pumpkins in the whole box, so we’re hoping the watermelon does better).

Anyway, having a garden has been so much fun. I love being able to grow our own vegetables (though ours aren’t completely organic -we use miracle grow occasionally) and go into the backyard and pick something to use in our meals. I can’t wait as our plants start to really grow and to see them develop over the next few months and to enjoy their fruits. Oh, and we also have a peach tree that we planted last year, and on its first year we got about 20 peaches from it. We are so proud of our peachy, and he’s grown about 2 feet, so we’re hoping we get even more peaches this year, so we can make lots of home canned peaches, and cobbler, and pies, and more.

We also planted seeds in our hanging pots that we painted last year and I can’t wait for the flowers to bloom! Some of the seeds have been growing really fast (namely a wild flower mix) and some have hardly popped through the soil at all.

#3 Last night, I don’t know what brought it up, but I remembered something funny that I don’t think I ever shared with you. Nate has a little window well next to his office and sometimes little animals fall inside. One day a mouse fell inside his window well and he decided to capture the mouse to bring it home to see what our cat would think of it. When I got home from work that day he was already home, and he explained all of this to me. The mouse was waiting in our bedroom in a box with the door closed. We went into our bedroom and their was an empty box, so as usual I expected that Nate was trying to tease me and there really was no mouse. He assured me that there was a mouse and we frantically started to search our bedroom to look for the mouse. We looked in our closet, under our bed, in our pile of laundry – no mouse. A few minutes into searching Nate glanced out through the bedroom door, down the hall and into our living room. What did he see crawling across the top of our couch, the little mouse of course. He was able to catch the mouse and introduce it to our cat who couldn’t care less about the mouse.

#4 Today is pay day. One of my absolute favorite things in the whole world is transferring money from our checking account to our savings account. I just LOVE seeing that savings account number go up little by little each month. But I just love the actual act of transferring the money over!

#5 It’s Memorial Day on Monday and a much needed day off of work for both Nate and I. This week has been dredging on so slowly as we’ve both been excited for our weekend plans, but now only a few hours left of work and we can head off on our adventures. What are you doing for the 3 day weekend?!

Ps. Now tell me 1 fun fact about yourself? I’d love to get to know our readers better 🙂

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