Victory at Bunny Hill!

DSC00634.JPG, originally uploaded by somegoodgoing.

K and I have been taking bike rides on weekend mornings for the last few weeks. Last week we set a goal of reaching a local park that's about 4 miles away but didn't quite make it.

The route includes an arching bridge over the freeway and it's a pretty big hill. K was concerned that she wouldn't be able to make it back home so we turned around early. Not this week. This week we made it all the way to the park!

As you can see in the photo behind K there are dancing bunnies. They don't look very big in the photo, but they are about 30 foot tall cast metal bunnies. Just below the surface of the bunnies they are covered in old household items of every sort. Our goal next time is to actually get to the park with the bunnies and then go up the bunny hill so we'll take some detail pictures and post those too.

Jalapenos!!

Well, we have used real ingredients from our garden!! We made our favorite tomatillo salsa the other day and were able to use our first jalapeno! M was so excited. M thinks that it was the best tomatillo salsa we have ever made.

Today, we used another jalapeno. We made some avocado coleslaw that needed a small jalapeno. We used one from our garden. Yeah :) That is some good going.

Stink-eee!!!

M and I received a chest freezer from M's parents a few weeks ago. We were very excited to have some extra freezer room in our basement. We got it all set up, plugged in. We let it get cold and laughed about how we had something in our basement that had cold air in it! In case you weren't sure, M and I are a little bit silly. We bought some salmon in bulk at the grocery store and put in the freezer. We made lasagna and put the leftovers in the freezer. We put a few other miscellaneous things in there as well.



I came home from work the other day and I walked into the house and there was a terrible smell. M proceeded to explain to me that the freezer died. It was pretty bad. We opted to go out to dinner instead of dealing with it. When we got home, we decided we had to deal with it or the whole house would smell. We carried it up the stairs from the basement. Any wafts of smell were unbelievably offensive. We got it out onto our back patio. M got rubber gloves and some garbage bags. We opened the freezer, it was awful. He was sooo brave. He reached into the freezer and pulled out the items. Grrrroooosss. It smelled so bad. He immediately closed the lid again as it was terrible. We double bagged the garbage bags and he was green. I thought he was going to lose it in the garden. We moved the freezer to the end of the patio so the water would flow out of the patio area. He had to remove a plug from the outside AND from the inside of the freezer to open the drainage pipe. We opened the lid and he went back in. I thought to myself it must be true love that he is not making me go in there! We borrowed bleach from our neighbor and dumped it in with a lot of water. Miraculously, it didn't take much. I was surprised how quickly the smell came out. The freezer is cleaned and back in the basement. Still broken but at least it doesn't smell!

Friendly exchange

M and I always play "one good thing" at dinner. That means we take time out to tell each other one good thing about our day. We have a rule that it cannot be something we just did together, it has to be something the other doesn't already know about that day.

The other day my one good thing was something that doesn't happen every day. I drive along Broad St. every day on my way home from work. The speed limit is 50 in most parts and I think 40 in others. I saw brake lights ahead of me in the right lane and all the cars were stopped so I started to break. I eventually came to a stop because the car in front of me was stopped. The lady in the car to my right was stuck behind about 15 Canada Goose (OK, I looked this up on Wikipedia and am always confused about how to make it plural... you get the idea!) who weren't really moving. When the car in front of me went (the goose were no longer blocking our lane) I waved her on as she had clearly been waiting longer than I had and was definitely not going anywhere soon. We came to a stop next to each other at the next light. She rolled down her window and said "Thank you very much". I said "Oh, you are very welcome". And that was the end of the interchange. It was nice to have a friendly exchange on the road instead of road rage. It made me smile and it was my one good thing.

I Miss My Dad

We found out yesterday that our friend Bob's father passed away on Friday. He had the same kind of cancer that my father had. The short length of his illness was also very similar to my Dad's. It brought back so many thoughts and feelings of what I experienced just over a year ago. I'll sum it up with it's not fair.

I have written about 10 different versions of this post and keep deleting, typing something different, deleting... I don't know how to put what I am thinking and feeling into words that I am comfortable writing down or that would even make sense if I did. I guess I just wanted to say I miss my Dad.

Bob, I am so sorry for your loss, my heart goes out to you and your family.

Quality Time

We have been so busy lately that although we spend time together, M and I don't feel like very much of it has been quality time. Today, we made time to have quality time. We slept in... a little bit. After breakfast we headed for the Worthington Farmers Market. We walked around the market and saw many stands with vegetables and herbs, a few stands with local meats, flowers stands, and a few miscellaneous stands. We tasted some chutney which M thought tasted good but I don't think he was sure about what to use it for. When "Lady Chutney" mentioned cheese and sandwiches, she had herself a deal. M bought Hot Cilantro Chutney and is very excited about it. I think he might even use it in scrambled eggs. With each stand, we commented that "I can't wait until our zucchini grows" , "I'm so glad we grow our own basil", "I wonder when the tomatoes will grow. Ya know, they are about the size of my fingertip now." Yeah, like I had to tell M that. Like he didn't already know ;)

As we walked through the market, holding hands, M said to me he was glad to spend some quality time.

Thank yous...

We've had some help from friends this week. One friend printed our invitations for us. We did the layout, which seemed to take FOR-EV-ER and he was kind enough to get them printed and returned to us quickly. We did such a great job at procrastinating that I was worried we got them to our friend too late but he was great and we got them back with plenty of time to spare.

Another friend is a scrapbooking genious! We told her what we were hoping to do and she told us exactly what we would need to do it. We bought the supplies and she came over when we had eveything ready to go. She was awesome. She knew the best way to run the assembly line and we had the stickers created and invitations attached in no time!

So I say Thank You! To our friends that we cherish and appreciate. Thank you.

See how our garden grows!

So we are continuing to be excited about our garden. We have little jalapenos that are about an inch long. We have flowers on the zucchini, tomatillos, roma tomatoes and the eggplant - which I am hoping will mean they might produce soon! We compared the before and after pictures to see how much they have grown and I am impressed. We have had to water them pretty regularly though as we are not having any luck with rain.

We had a squirrel that used to hang out in our yard all the time last fall and apparently he has wreaked havoc for me! We have a purple emporer planted and it seems there are hundreds of little offshoots from this plant. That darn squirrel must have broken apart one of the root balls and moved them around! They are everywhere. I spent some time last weekend "weeding" to get it under control but I think I need to continue doing more this weekend too. I don't think I knew how much I would invest emotionally in this garden, but I have. I know M has too. My mother must be proud!

Time to make some breffis before getting some good going done for the day!

Our garage sale!

Our garage sale!, originally uploaded by somegoodgoing.

Our condo association was having a garage sale. We decided to take the opportunity to clean out our basement. The weather was perfect, it was mid 70s and sunny.

At the point of this picture, we had made $66.50! We were both pretty impressed since neither one of us has ever been part of a garage sale before. So we ended up at $68.50, which is better than if we hadn't done it, and we had fewer things to haul back down into the basement! Yeah! The president of the condo association said we might do this again in the fall. We have learned a valuable lesson, if someone shows an interest in something, you tell them a price, if they put it down, lower the price! We also decided that garage sales might only be a good idea if it is a community wide thing, you will get more foot traffic than doing this on your own.

Good going in the garden

DSC00122, originally uploaded by somegoodgoing.

Team Good Going (henceforth TGG) did some good going Monday night. We completely re-arranged and replanted our little yard into an herb, fruit, and veggie garden!

We have basil, parsley, cilantro, sage, tarragon, oregano, chives, and thyme for herbs and we planted eggplant, zucchini, jalapeños, and bell peppers for vegetables. And to round it out with fruits we have roma tomatoes and a tomatillo!

We're hoping that at least the herbs stay alive. Those little $3 packets at the grocery store are getting old :-)

the clematis is blooming

Multimedia message, originally uploaded by somegoodgoing.

Inugural Post

So we - okay, mostly I - gave a lot of thought to the name of this blog and are very excited with the name that chose us. M and I try to be very thoughtful of each other and encourage each other when appropriate. When we have done something good or difficult, something we didn't want to do or needed to be done, we are rewarded with "That was some good going!". We strongly believe in the power of positive reinforcement. Having said that...

We have been doing so much good going that we haven't had a change to blog about it! Here is some of the good going we have been doing recently:
We went to Rochester to meet with our wedding photographer - he took some great shots for our "engagement" session! Frank DiMeo
We ordered our wedding cake, ordered the paper & envelopes for our invitations, met with pastor Charlie to discuss the ceremony, bought an elliptical machine to collect dust, spackled & started painting our linen closet, and are working on rearranging our garden.

Having said all that, we will keep you posted when we do some "good going".

K & M