New Floors are In!

The floors are installed! We had to estimate where the base cabinets will go, but since they're on feet we wanted the floors to extend to most of the way around the walls. It's a night and day difference over what we had before!

Our new(er) pantry space with a complete floor! I think I'm more excited about this space than anything else!

Next up - electrical tonight, framing the doorway to the pantry and patching plaster. Oh yeah, and we also need to take the sofit down. We're hoping to be able to work on the walls on Thursday and Friday, so we can hang cabinets this weekend!

Demolition Pictures

As promised, here is the before picture of our kitchen (which is really a "during" picture, as the stove and fridge are out of the room, and the floor has been torn up.

Pantry in the hallway. The pantry space had been added in the past, but the doorway was only 11 inches wide! We are opening the wall and changing the layout of the space to be much more effective.

Me scraping wallpaper glue off the walls. We discovered after removing the first cabinet that the gray paint on the walls was actually covering a layer of wallpaper below. We're taking that all off, patching rough spots in the plaster, and will then prep the walls for paint in a few days.

Bottom cabinets totally removed! There are some fairly large gaps in where the subfloor doesn't meet the walls, so we will be filling all of those spaces in. Hopefully we'll fix that mouse problem once and for all! (wishful thinking, I know!)

Our new kitchen in the back of the car. I actually had to remove about 6 boxes to be able to take this picture. All of the kitchen cabinets, light fixtures, drawer pulls, faucet, even the kitchen sink are inside!

A little backwards, but this is our kitchen floor during demo. The white with black was peel and stick vinyl tiles, on top of a cardboard layer, on top of those lovely red and brown clay tiles. You're seeing the tar residue on top of the subfloor, which was all that was left from the tiles.

And the Remodel is ON!

Joe and I spent a few days, after learning that our floors sloped too much to lay the laminate we wanted, deciding how we wanted to proceed. We figured we had two options - not worry about the slope, lay some cheap vinyl flooring and get on with our lives, or fix the problem, get the floors we wanted and be happy with the kitchen. I went home for Christmas thinking we'd take a few days and make our final decision. Well, my grandmother gave my sisters and me each a wonderful gift from her personal savings that allowed us some breathing room, and gave us the boost in the budget we needed! We had seen IKEA kitchen cabinets in our few trips to that fantastic store, and knew they'd fit into our budget. After playing with their kitchen designer software, we realized new cabinets were in fact affordable. Unfortunately, the closest IKEA to us is in Chicago, so we never get the chance to go.

Since we were in St. Louis for Christmas, we decided that on Friday after Christmas, Joe and I would get up early, make the 4 1/2 hr trek up to Chicago, and go shop for our new kitchen! We arrived Friday at noon, and spent the next 5 hours shopping, evaluating, checking out and loading all of the boxes for the kitchen into my dad's Denali. IKEA is able to keep costs low by selling stock cabinets that are unassembled, so we were able to buy an entire kitchen full of cabinets for about half as much as the next cheapest estimate we got, and had them with us the same day! We had to spend about half an hour just loading the car, figuring out the best way to get the two and a half carts of boxes to fit just right, but we managed with a little room left to spare!

The weather prevented us from heading back Friday night like we wanted, so we got up Saturday and headed for St. Louis. After a great party Saturday night celebrating Ashley and Mikael's engagement, Joe and I headed for KC bright and early Sunday morning. We spent Sunday taking out the dishwasher, sink, disposal and base cabinets. In the process we discovered that the previous owner had painted two coats of paint over wallpaper that was still on the walls, so I worked on tearing all of the paper off. I still have a while to go, but we're getting closer! We also started expanding the doorway to the small pantry off the kitchen, so that we can open it up and make it fully functional.

Today the flooring guys are here, fixing the slope in the floor that started this whole mess. Joe, a friend and I are going to work tonight on patching the plaster, stripping the rest of the wallpaper and getting the walls ready to paint and assembling cabinets. We're trying to document the whole process, so my next post will have a bunch of pictures that will have to be our "before", even though the floors and appliances were already gone!

Another adventure in our old home

Joe and I decided it was time to replace our failing oven a few weeks ago. We went to the store, finally picked out a new range, ended up also getting a new dishwasher, as that was old and breaking too. Well, our kitchen floor was old peel and stick vinyl tiles that had become discolored, cracked and pulling up. We thought, if we're putting new appliances in, that would be the perfect time to redo the floors!

B/c we really don't like the white to off-white/yellow the current floor has become, and since it shows dirt like crazy, we opted for a dark slate look laminate. The sales person was concerned about the few tiles that were peeling up, and asked if we could pull them up to see the condition of the subfloor. Off came the peel and stick, to reveal a cardboard layer underneath. Thinking there's no way we have cardboard for a subfloor, we kept going, this time uncovering red and brown clay tiles! Below that we hit the first layer of subfloor.

The gray tiles are the laminate that we chose to lay in the kitchen. That plan has run haywire, though, once we discovered that the house has settled and the kitchen floor slopes too much, according to the floor install guy, so we had to halt the new floor process. And now the floor is completely stripped down to the subfloor, and the appliances are all sitting in the dining room... We're going to try to figure out what we are going to do next, b/c our options are to tear out and fix the slope by replacing the subfloor, or pick a different type of flooring that will conform to the slope of the floor and deal with this old house quirk. We're still deciding what to do. Another floor guy is coming tomorrow to give us their estimate and opinion on what our options are.

Peanut Butter Cookies

So if for nothing else, I suppose I can use this blog to list recipes I make and give reviews of what Joe and I (and in some cases, the dogs) thought about each. Last night I made Joe's favorite peanut butter cookies, which honestly is the recipe off the back of the Jif peanut butter jar. They never fail to please!

Irresistible Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

•	3/4 cup Jif® Creamy Peanut Butter
•	1/2 stick Crisco® All-Vegetable Shortening Sticks
OR	1/2 cup Crisco® All-Vegetable Shortening
•	1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
•	3 tablespoons milk
•	1 tablespoon vanilla extract
•	1 large egg
•	1 3/4 cups Pillsbury BEST® All Purpose Flour
•	3/4 teaspoon baking soda
•	3/4 teaspoon salt 1 bag of Hershey kisses (enough for 1 per cookie)

Directions:

1.	HEAT oven to 375°F. Combine peanut butter, shortening, brown sugar, milk and vanilla in large bowl. Beat at medium speed of electric mixer until well blended. Add egg. Beat just until blended.
2.	COMBINE flour, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture at low speed. Mix just until blended. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls 2-inches apart onto greased baking sheet. Optional: sprinkle cookies with white sugar.
3.	BAKE one baking sheet at a time 7 to 8 minutes, or until set and just beginning to brown. Set a Hershey kiss on each cookie as soon as they come out of the oven and while they're starting to cool. Cool 2 minutes on baking sheet. Remove cookies to cooling racks to cool completely. Watch them disappear!

Yield: 3 dozen cookies

Late Pictures from Thanksgiving

Better late than never, right? We spent Thanksgiving in Detroit with Joe's dad and his family and had a wonderful time. It was very laid back, but gave us plenty of time to catch up and enjoy each other's company. We went a little crazy in trying to spoil James... I guess that's first kid syndrome - Joe and I both know how frustrating the next kid in the family can be when you're trying to keep the spotlight all to yourself! :) We also got to meet the newest members of the family, Ruth and Ethan, who are as adorable as you can imagine. These pictures don't do these babies justice!!

Joe showing James how his new Pez dispenser works. It didn't take too long for James to figure that one out!

We also got James some play dough with different moulding accessories, based on Dan and Lisa's recommendations. Man, was it a hit! After exhausting Grandma Dianne, I took over to the play dough games, which ultimately kept him entertained for quite a while!

Linda with Ethan, and Lisa with Ruth. Aren't they so cute??

Joe with our stack of gifts for the kids. Don't worry, not all of those gifts were for James. But most were...Ethan was really getting into the picture taking session. He was incredibly alert and more than willing to throw out a few cute poses. Not bad for a 6 week old!

I hope we're able to see everyone again soon, as it seems like we missed out on a lot of James' getting older over then last two and a half years. They just grow too quickly!

Pumpkin Cookies

I discovered this recipe last fall and added some elements from my favorite pumpkin bread recipe. After a few batches of Joe's dutiful reviews, I have perfected what he calls "the crack cookies" - they're incredibly addicting, and you can't stop at just one...or two...or three...

I'll admit, I am a baker who takes liberties with adding and deleting ingredients, so this is as close as I can get to writing the recipe down. I always sample as I go along to make sure everything looks/smells right, and with this recipe, when in doubt add more spice!

1 cup shortening
2 cups white sugar
1 can pumpkin puree (approximately 2 cups)
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 tsp cinnamon*
1 tsp nutmeg*
1 tsp allspice*
1 tsp ground cloves*
1 bag white chocolate chips, but could also use butterscotch chips

* I also play around with these proportions until I can smell and taste the spice in the batter

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease cookie sheets, or line with parchment paper.
2. In a medium bowl, cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the pumpkin and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder and spices; stir slowly into creamed mixture. Then mix in white chocolate chips.

At this point you could just drop teaspoonfuls of the dough mixture onto the cookie sheets and bake. Our favorite method is to turn this into a pumpkin snickerdoodle of sorts, and roll the indivdual cookie dough balls in a cinnamon/sugar mixture, coat the ball entirely, and then place on the cookie sheets.

3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. Allow cookies to cool for 1 minute on cookie sheet before transferring to a wire rack.

I'll say this will make approximately 45-50 cookies, but if I make them with Joe in the house, I never get a final count.... he sneaks them off the wire racks as fast as I pull them out of the oven!

Cleaning House

I finally got around to switching my winter and summer clothes a few weeks ago. I knew I needed to do it, but the weather here wasn't that bad, so I didn't have a true incentive to do it. When I started, however, I realized that I would need to go through my drawers and shelves in the closet and figure out what I wanted to keep out through winter, and what I'd put away. As I started going through clothes, I decided to evaluate when I had last worn each item, whether it fit right, or if I was hanging on to things that were cluttering up my wardrobe. After about 15 minutes, I realized that it was time for me to truly evaluate my entire wardrobe, item by item. It seems that I've been going through the motions since I graduated from my college days... if something fit, I might as well keep it. You never know when something will come back in style, if it isn't in style any more! Well, I faced the facts, and began purging. Piece by piece, I faced the fact that no, I did not need that shirt that I hadn't worn in 4 years, nor did I need every workout top and sports bra I've had since 2002. The pile of clothes to give away kept growing and growing, to the point that the pile toppled over and it was time to start the second pile! After a few hours, I made it through every single item of clothing, from shirts and pants, to skirts and shoes. And when I was all said and done, I not only managed to fill 5 boxes with items I no longer wore, but also eliminated the need to "swap" summer and winter clothes! They all fit in my drawer and closet. (And yes, Joe still has his whole side of the closet and his share of shelf space!)
I'm amazed at how much I was able to get rid of, that had been simply taking up space and cluttering my life. And the best part? I can give a whole lot of good clothing to people who may actually wear and need it, and I'm left with the items that make me feel and look my best! It's a win-win situation in my book. :)

Hunter or Hunted?

Last night the reality of the dogs' innate natural tendencies as, well, dogs, hit home like never before. I let them out for their last chance at going to the bathroom before bed. Lucy came back in when I called, but Molly didn't. I called and called, listened to hear the sound of the tags on her collar jingling, like they do when she's walking or running, and heard nothing. Getting concerned, I peered into the backyard and thought I could barely see Molly, laying in the grass next to the second biggest tree in the yard. Now, since she loves to jump and try to climb the trees, I was afraid she had jumped, fallen funny and hurt herself. So I grabbed the flashlight, put my tennis shoes on, and ran into the yard where she was. I kept calling her name, expecting her to move, or whimper, or at least acknowledge that I was coming to help her. I was definitely NOT expecting her to start growling as I reached down to pet her. I stopped, called her name, and watched as she buried her head into the grass, crunching on something. At this point, I figured it was one of their chew toys or something. No such luck. As soon as I convinced her to drop whatever was in her mouth, Lucy grabbed it up and ran to another part of the yard. I scanned the patch of grass where Molly had been laying, which was sopping wet from dog slobber and one tiny tuft of gray fur. Uh oh. After some serious coercion, Lucy finally dropped the prize, which turned out to be a rabbit HEAD! Ears, eyes and all, the dogs had made quick work of this poor rabbit. You can imagine how loundly I screamed when I realized what they had been eating! So gross.

Joe had been in the shower while all of this was going on, and I made him go get the head out of the backyard and throw it away, since I had to deal with the whole mess. Luckily for us, the dogs haven't gotten sick today, which I was partially expecting.

Oh, how I love these days when I am forced to remember that as much as they're family, the dogs are still animals, plain and simple!

Attempts at running

Joe decided a few months ago that it would be a good idea to run the Disney World Marathon in January. I've always wanted to be able to say that I had run a marathon, and in a weak moment, signed up for the race.

Oh, how I regret that decision right now!

Sundays are supposed to be "long run" days. My training plan says that today I should have run 12 miles. Now, I did complete a half marathon (13.1 miles) last month, but my lower half has not been the same since. I can run, but not for long distances. The weather today was quite nice, so I sucked it up, grabbed the dogs and set out my long run. I figured I would go for 10 miles, then see if I could squeeze out another two. Joe and Kyle had just gotten back from a 16.5 mile run, so certainly I could manage, right?

Wrong. The dogs were so excited to run a new route that they acted like crazed idiots for the first few miles. It got to the point where I was constantly pulling or being pulled, and decided that I wasn't going to continue like that for another 8 miles. I called Joe, who came and took the energetic girls home.

I set off, by myself, through the streets of Mission Hills, this incredible city just south of Roeland Park. If I had to guess, the cheapest house in the city/neighborhood is probably worth 1.5 million and would only have 4 or 5 bedrooms. Talk about stately mansions! I had never wandered by foot through the area, and was simply astounded by the sheer size beauty of some of the homes! Well, that only lasted for another couple of miles, before my knees, hips, feet, etc really started to hurt. I managed, in the end, to push on and complete 8 miles. Hmmm. 8-13 miles is the furthest I've ever run, and yet I'm supposed to go for 26 in another 2 months? We'll see about that... I may have really overestimated my own athletic abilities this time!

We conquered the garage

Our lowly single car garage became the storage place for everything we worked on this summer, from bags of mulch, grass seed and fertilizer to lumber, screening and trim pieces. Unfortunately, that meant that neither one of our cars fit into the garage at the same time. Now that we finished the first phase of the porch and the landscaping is sleeping until next spring it was clearly time to clean out the garage so we could use it for its true purpose! Earlier this fall I decided the walls needed a coat of primer as they were full of creepy stains and marks. It's amazing how much brighter it looks! We also realized we desperately needed more storage for all of the things we wanted to keep in our little garage. Joe and I spent a few hours on Sunday hanging shelves along our back wall, to complement the hanging storage system he put in a while ago. Now everything is up off the floor and we can actually walk around a car in the garage, without having to wiggle our way around everything! It's not nearly as exciting for everyone else, and certainly not something most people would even realize we had worked on, but it's one more space that's finished!

Pictures of our hard work!

As a refresher, here's what the back of the house looked like .... and this was taken while the house was on the market. There's a picture below that shows how tall most of the stuff growing around the porch had gotten. Oh, and take notice of the huge evergreen tree/shrub on the far left of the picture...

Yeah, we finally went ahead and cut that tree down! Now we just have to get some grass to grow, and pull the stump out. (All after we rake all of the leaves that are falling like crazy now!) Next spring/summer we'll continue working on the "beds," if you can call them that, around the porch. I hope that this time next year, the picture of this same space will really start to look like a nice, manicured yard, instead of the crazy overgrown mess we bought into!

Ok, so I'd be lying if I said we both spent equal amounts of time on the porch and back yard this year. Well, I focused mainly on pulling out bushes and other "landscaping" while Joe spent way more time than I did working on the porch. Phase 1 is done (yes, it's now a multiple phase project!), which means that all of the wood supports have been torn down, rebuilt and stained, the porch has been screened, the ceiling has been pulled down and carpet (for now) has been laid. What's left, you might ask? We need to rehang the ceiling fan, which will require some rewiring, installing the new ceiling, and finishing some exterior trim pieces that just don't fit right. We initially wanted to lay tie , but for the time being decided to go with cheap outdoor carpet to make it look more finished. I'm also really excited about our new doggie door - it's doing a great job at keeping most of the falling leaves out of the porch!

Here's a view from the kitchen door of the porch. My camera ran out of batteries before I could take more pictures, but you can get the idea. And yes, every single one of the vertical wood supports were replaced. The only thing Joe left was the header...

The old porch.... (note how crazy the overgrowth is around the corner of the porch! It seriously looked like a jungle out there!)

So that's where we stand. And yes I do still need to post pictures of the bathroom, but I wouldn't say it's anything incredibly exciting. We're still hoping to find the time and money to actually redo it in the future, so we're not putting much into that space right now.

What's next, you might ask? Well, this winter we are thinking about rearranging the basement to do a partial finish of the space that doesn't get wet when it rains. Around here finishing basements into a "loft style" space has become quite popular and is rather economical. People aren't putting up ceilings; rather, they're painting the joists, subfloor and other stuff above, installing track lights, then laying inexpensive carpet, put up a couple of walls and voila! a new basement rec room. Someone in the past had done even less of a finish down there, but there are electrical outlets, along with all of our new basement windows that we had put in earlier this year. So we're going to explore this option as another space for us to hang out this winter.

Ok, I lied

I forgot to take my camera home last night. Regardless, I wouldn't have captured much, since it was dark by the time I actually got home. Today, the camera's already in my purse, so I will take pics and post them!

We finally got word that the pictures taken at the half marathon last weekend are online, so I'm going to sort through them and see if I can't find any of us. For those who didn't know, Joe, our friend Kyle, Ashley, Mikael and I ran a half marathon last weekend. It was the first one for all of us, and I think we all did quite well! Our finishing times for the 13.1 miles around Kansas City ranged from 2 hours, 14 minutes to my 2 hours, 35 minutes. I don't care how slow it was, I was amazed that I finished at all, especially since I hadn't run in the two weeks leading up to the race, due to being sick.

Now Joe, Kyle and I are training for the Disney World Marathon in January.... 26.2 miles is WAAAY longer and scarier than 13, so we're going to be running non stop to get ready for that race!

What have we been up to?

Wow, I knew it had been awhile since I'd posted, but didn't realize just how long ago my last post was!

Since then, Joe and I have been focusing primarily on two things - finishing the screened porch, and training for various sporting events. After volunteering at a triathlon in mid July, I decided it was time for me to try one. I signed up for the Olathe Medical Center's Women's Only Triathlon, on Sept.13, thinking it would be a great first race and give me a few months to train. They only offered one length, a sprint, which consists of a 500 meter swim, 13 mile bike ride and a 2.6 mile run. No big deal! I started training right away, and managed to stay with it right through the end.

The night before the race we had crazy storms, torrential downpour and even a tornado near the area where the race was to be held! It continued to rain all night, and when Joe and I got up at 5 to head to the race, it was still looking ominous. (Ok, who's kidding who - that early in the morning, we couldn't see anything... but we could tell the rain hadn't cleared the area!) Joe and Kyle were planning on volunteering to support me and the others who had ventured out for the late season race. Once I got my transition area all set up, it started to pour again. 30 minutes before the race, the race director decided to cancel the bike portion, due to the weather. We went ahead with the swim then proceeded directly to the run, which had lots of standing water on the course. My times in both event were far less than stellar, but my finish time was average, and hey, at least I did it! I hope to keep racing in 2009 as I really enjoyed the training and think I would have had a much better feeling about the race had the weather not imposed.

We have finished part 1 of rebuilding the porch, which looks quite nice. I will take the camera home tonight to take pictures, esp. since I spent most of yesterday cleaning the house! Joe came home, noticed how nice it was to have everything clean, and we vowed to work much harder and cleaning up a little every day so I don't have to spend hours and hours cleaning on my day off!

It finally happened...

When we bought the house, Joe looked and me and said that it was only a matter of time before he'd leave for a few hours and come home to a different colored room. Joe's prophecy came true a little under a year later - when he left for work Monday morning, our bathroom was a lovely sponge-painted mess of three shades of green and white. When he came home just 14 hours later, the green had been replaced by a lovely shade of lavender!

I woke up yesterday morning and decided that even though we are hoping to completely redo our one and only bathroom soon, the time had come to relieve our eyes of the horrible paint job. The previous owner must have loved green, because the walls, floor and tiles in the bathroom were all ugly shades of green. Add fake white wainscoting, cream toilet and tub and a white vanity with cream colored vanity top, and it was all just a little too much. Now, we don't really like much of anything in the bathroom, but I knew I couldn't get carried away. So I grabbed a spare green tile, one of our bath towels and headed to Lowes. Figuring that purple and green are complementary colors, I went with a not too pale but not too dark shade of lavender that looked like it would work, and if nothing else, brighten up the room. I started the project around noon, arrived home with the paint at 1:00, and finished painting by about 6pm. Luckily, Joe was working late, so I had plently of time to clean up, rehang the mirror and shower curtain and put up the lightswitch plate again, so it actually looked finished.

My camera is at work, but I'll try to post pictures tomorrow of our partial bathroom remodel!

Landscaping and other house updates

Landscaping Fun

Before shots of our house, taken September 2007.

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted anything! I guess that's what a new job and lots of house projects will do to a person. This spring and early summer the focus has been on landscaping the house. When we moved in, everything was incredibly overgrown.

I started tackling the back yard bushes once it was warm enough, way back in April. If you notice in the before picture, the bushes spread out almost to the tree next to the shed. Now, the vines still cover the back fence (I just can't kill those pesky things!), but we have gained about 8 feet of back yard space! Now we just need to finish the bushes on the corners, reseed and we'll have a great back yard.

In May we took out the first half of the front yard bushes and plants, and added flower beds under our two magnolia trees in the front yard. Inspired by the difference that made, we decided to continue on with our efforts. After our Memorial Day/anniversary trip to NYC, we returned home with a desire to continue working outside, noticing that the days were simultaneously getting longer and hotter. We bit the bullet and had a big dumpster delivered to our house for a week in early June. During that week we attacked both the front and back yards, tearing out trees, shrubs, railroad ties, and even managed to finally tear down the old shed in the back yard. Joe became my hero with that part of the project - I had absolutely no desire to tear up the floor of the half rotten building and see what was waiting below... He was wonderful in tearing the whole thing apart and sorting through the brush under the flooring to make sure I wouldn't have any creepy surprises. Which isn't to say that he didn't uncover a few himself!

We were amazed how quickly the dumpster filled up - if we had more space (and a few more days of rest in between hauling loads from the back yard to the front) we probably could have tackled even more. In the end, we were happy with how much we had accomplished.

This past weekend we continued the landscaping efforts. Sunday morning we went out and bought a bunch of plants and flowers for the front yard beds, which we had spent a few days trying the clear out. The verdict's still out on whether we were able to get rid of all of the ivy and periwinkle that choked out everything else trying to live in the beds. I finished up the planting on Monday, and besides a little bit of edging work that still needs to be done, I think we've done a great job, and gone a long way toward helping our house's curb appeal. If only we could convince our next door neighbors to do the same!

New landscaping in front of house.

I love craigslist

I've been searching for a dining room table and chairs for a while now, as our dining room is terribly empty. What's worse, is you have to walk through the dining room to get to the kitchen and garage, so it's not like one of those rooms that you can close the doors and ignore the fact that it's bare. Realizing that we can't afford the nice new sets that we've been looking at, I decided to start looking at craigslist. A lot of the pieces of furniture listed in our area are either really old and outdated, or too expensive. The good but cheap pieces go so quickly.

Today I was searching again, trying to get caught up from being away for a week. This morning I found a nice cherry wood table and 6 chairs, and luckily it hadn't been sold by the time Joe got home from work. We went over to check it out, and it's definitely a good set! We managed to buy it for $200 - not too shabby! The picture of it is from the craigslist post - I'll be sure to take pictures once we get it all moved in and set up. The cushions will need to be recovered as the family we bought it from had a couple of small kids, which didn't mesh well with the white fabric. But for now, I'm so excited that we have a dining room set!

So Long, Farewell...

After a little over 1 year of working for my current company, I have decided it's time to move on. It's hard to believe, but tomorrow is my last day. I'm definitely going to miss a lot of the people I work with, especially since my new job won't have nearly the employee base that I have here. Other than that, I'm really excited to move on. I'll try to continue updating the blog, but I'll be traveling quite a bit over the next few weeks so I'm not sure how consistent I'll be.