Can this kid get any cuter?

I took photos of a friends little boy today. He was a great sport about it. I know all kids are cute, but this kid is ridiculously cute.
This just a little preview for his mom while I finish working on the rest of the shots :)

The man and his broccoli

We have broccoli! Broccoli is probably our favorite vegetable, so we are pretty darned excited to get our first cutting out of the garden.


Our snap peas are ready, too. Most of those never make it into the house before being eaten, though.

I've been really busy with work lately. We have a program to help the Counties with storm damage, so I've been out documenting damage to bridges, roads, etc. Seeing the aftermath up close has been quite sad. We are estimating that around 50% of the crops in the area were impacted.

When it rains, it pours.

The weather has been extremely turbulent here lately. We've had wicked thunderstorms and tornado warnings nearly every day. Last night was the worst by far, with a total rain accumulation of around 10". Yes, you read that right. All of the major roads are closed in every direction in our area. Our county is under a state of emergency and majority of our town is flooded. We are lucky to live on the top of a hill so our home is one of the dry ones. This morning I took this video of McCormick's creek at the falls. I've never seen anything like this in my life. I am in awe of the impact of these storms. The news just said that this is the worst flooding here since the year 1913. I took these videos of the falls at McCormick's Creek.

I took this one from the overlook:





In case you are wondering, this is what the falls look like most of the time.





This one was taken as close as I could safely get to water level:



Another photo of the falls:



Downtown:


They are predicting more rain tonight. Yikes!

Double barrel composter

Corey and I built this composter. I should say, Corey built this composter and I drilled the holes. It was a tough job, I tell ya! It's almost finished. All that we have left to do is attache the door hinges and locks and we're ready to roll (literally). In case you are interested, here is a link to the instructions we used. If you've never checked out Instructables.com, you must.

Garage sale-ing

I took the day off (Corey was already off) so we caught up on one of our favorite pastimes - garage sale-ing! Early in life, we each acquired acute sale-ing skills from our mothers. Yet another thing we have in common. Nothing beats the thrill of finding a great deal. I must say that I have found the iPhone to be an indispensable garage sale-ing tool. They really should advertise it as such. The co-pilot types the addresses from the newspaper into the iPhone and off we go from one to the next. The iPhone also makes it easy to compare prices with ebay, etc. We are serious about this stuff, you know.

Todays haul:
2 Charlotte Russe shirts and a skirt = $3 total
2 bowling balls + case =$4 total
3 DVDs = $6 total
1 collapsable dog crate = $10

Yee-haw!

Pizza

Corey and I like making homemade pizza on the grill. I thought I'd share the best pizza sauce recipe ever. We've been using this recipe for quite awhile now. The only adjustments we make is to decrease the cayenne by 1/2 and use about 1/2 teaspoon salt. We make our own dough too, using the breadmaker. Once you have the dough, all you do is put a little olive oil on each side and throw it straight onto the hot grill. After it sets up a bit, flip it. Take it off the grill while it is still slightly doughy. Then add your sauce and toppings. Put a piece of aluminum foil on the grill, turn it down a bit and put the pizza's back on the grill (shut the lid). Grill until the cheese gets nice and melty. If you feel like it, you can stick it under the broiler in the oven for a sec to really make it nice and brown. Yum.

Lazy Saturday morning

A few little birds have been bugging me to update my babbles more regularly. I shall try.

At the moment I am sitting in bed, eating my yogurt (or as my college suite-mate, Susie from Germany used to say, "joggert") and doing some work on the computer. Don't you love webcame pics of me 1st thing in the morning? I know you do ;-)

We've actually been sleeping upstairs for a change of pace. I love the upstairs bedrooms, but most of the year they are either a little too hot or a little too cold. Right now the temperature up here is just right. The animals LOVE when we sleep up here because they prefer the carpet over the wood floors, although I'm not sure why since they usually spend most of their time on the couch anyway. When we're all upstairs the dogs and cats love to roll around, scratching their backs on the carpet with glee.

At the moment I'm attempting to get our adoption website into the search results on the major search engines. I'm sure we'll be on the 15 millionth page, but we'd still like to try to get on there.

Have a great day everybody! Here in Indiana, it is supposed to be a beautiful one :-)