Picture frames and cabin trip

When we first moved in, I put up these five pictures: Us, friends, and cats. But since then, it's really looked a little sparse.

Inspired by YHL's gallery of frames project, I started collecting frames from garage and thrift sales. I bought several at a "barn" sale in Bloomington earlier this spring, and spray painted them black to match our existing frames (with feline assistance, of course):

No before picture for those--but they were all ugly to start with, so much better now!

We took a trip to visit my parents' cabin in northern Wisconsin over Memorial Day weekend, and stopped at a few garage sales while we were up there. I picked up even more frames there (although I forgot them in Roscoe), so I'll be painting them soon. Eventually I'd like to cover the whole wall.

Our trip up north was fun--great weather, Friday night fish fry, went out on the boat, and rode the ATVs! Here's the view from the front yard:


And Adam on the dock:


We spent a lot of time playing with our digital SLR camera. We got it as a wedding present from Adam's parents and have been using it for the past three years, but are just now figuring out how to change the more advanced settings. It was pretty fun to see what you can actually do, but we've still got a lot to learn.

Spring Fever

So sorry for the lack of updates. No. 1, we've been busy, and No. 2... we're slacking off on the home projects and other fun things to write about. But, don't worry! With warm weather rapidly approaching (it hit 65 degrees today!!), I'm sure we'll have plenty more projects, especially outdoors, which we haven't even started/considered at this point.

For our most recent adventure, we traveled to Boston a few weeks ago to visit our friends Brent and Andrew. Neither of us had been to Boston before, so we got the full tour: Boston Commons, Beacon Hill, Harvard, the Freedom Trail, riding the subway, visiting historic gravesites, eating clam chowder.... just awesome! Here we are in the Boston Commons:

The guys also took us to the Samuel Adams brewery, where we got to taste several different beers:


And Brent and Andrew let us crash in their living room, so that was especially fun :) We'll be back in late May for their wedding, and are looking forward to their big day!

In other Julian news, we're getting soooo close to having all the painting done in our main living space. One more wall, and we're done! We're planning on finishing it up this weekend. After that, we have many, many projects to be done... we'll just be waiting for our tax refunds to show up before starting.