Ceiling Fan

I've wanted to put a ceiling fan in our bedroom for awhile now. We received one as a gift from Luke's brother for our wedding. Papa Bear came over and the project began. We couldn't just climb in the attic through the hatch. He had to wear his Tyvek suit and a special mask since it was "fluff" insulation. We determined where the center of the room was and he drilled a hole in the ceiling. Then he climbed into the attic and sawed a bigger hole so we could insert the mounting bracket to secure the fan. Little scary hearing him move around the attic and seeing the ceiling wiggle as he cut. Next, we (Papa Bear mostly) had to run the electric to the fan from the outlet in the room (I selected the one that operates off the switch). This involved getting the wire through the wall and then he stapled it up the internal attic access cubby. At least that was the plan until he dropped his hammer and it went between the drywall of the stairs, lost! He plans to retrieve it with a giant magnet someday. Some pain in the neck ceiling fan installation directions later, a flip of the circuit breaker, fingers crossed, and let there be light!I love the fan and how it lights up the room rather than needing 3 lamps. Thanks Papa Bear for another home improvement project at our house!

What does 20 miles look like?

Earlier in December I had several long runs. People ask me how do you run so far? Or, more often, Why? Well, when I leave for a long run (and by long I mean over 14 miles or about 2 hours or longer) I head out the door with some candy and a drink or two. This particular run was a warm-ish day so I brought 2 bottles of watered down powerade and starburst and chocolate chips. I also bring my cell phone just incase I get into trouble with blisters or just extreme fatigue or a severe weather change. My favorite thing to eat on the run though are those gum drop like fruit slices and pez. Happy Trails!

Christmas Day Festivities

Luke and I hosted Christmas at our house. Year number two seemed to go more smooth than the first time around. I was busy so didn't get many pictures during Christmas, just these few before photos. I guess I didn't do a bad job since Jen told me it was less ghetto this year. She was probably just talking about the fact that we used ice in the ice chest instead of shoveling them full of snow. We would have used snow, but it was out of stock. Our front hallway stairs that greet guests when they walk in the door.Tree one of two. Sorry I didn't take a picture of our basement tree that we used for our kid gift exchange and grab bag swap. All the decorations were put away the day after Christmas with the house vacuumed and put back to every day appearances.

Festival of Lights

We went to the Festival of Lights in Syracuse way back during the first weekend in December. There were a ton of lights and several themes. When we pulled into the park all in the car were amazed by the speed limit sign.Mom liked the huge pointsettias and thinks papa bear needs to make some for their house to decorate the yard and bear.In the area called Santa's Workshop we saw the elves pushing a cart from Wegman's. Did you really think Santa would have any other grocery store at the North Pole?There was the Land of Oz. We had a nice drive through the lights and great weather for driving in. Thanks again to mom for driving and the parents for dinner.

Christmas Decorations

So, I was ambitious after Thanksgiving and decided to decorate. My ambition ended after I carried all our decorations up from the basement. Yup, that's all the decorations for our house, including ornaments, in just those boxes. We have one additional bin for our outdoor net lights. One bin is all Disney Christmas stuff and is my favorite bin. Perhaps this is the real reason my ambition ended... plus the fact that there was the Grinch on T.V. I did manage to get this little bit done though.I will be spending this Saturday decorating since last weekend I worked on report cards and took a mini-cottage overnight break paired with the Festival of Lights in Syracuse. (2 miles of lights and Christmas music)

Cookie Day

So I fail miserably at taking pictures. I brought the camera, but did I take pictures. Nope. These are the few I took from the typically chaotic baking day. Baking this year on a scale of 1-10 was probably a 3. A huge failure in quantity of cookies produced, likely due to the lack of Martha aka Jen. Here are the peanut butter kiss cookies. Later, Jen's father-in-law stopped over to install wireless for my mom and then let her borrow his ipad to facetime chat and "bake" with the aunts. Lack of baking lead to Jen taking us on a walking tour of her decorated for Christmas home. We also got to watch the dogs play/fight with each other and Paco ignore Jen. I will try to do better at remembering to take pictures. Blogs are real boring without the pictures. Although making spritz cookies and using red hot dollars instead of the cherry center taste pretty good. No pictures of that though. But mom did throw red hot dollars at Max to catch in his mouth. She threw them as if they were darts. When she threw them for Wes to catch it was the rainbow, softball toss. There's no favoritism there.

Holiday Invitation

Well, I love Disney and since we had a Mickey Snowman for our Christmas day invite last year I decided to go with a Disney theme again this year. I only colored one since it took longer than I anticipated and Manfriend wasn't in the mood to help with the coloring. We'll just say I didn't color them incase a kid wanted to. I figured it also went well with the apparent "Red Neck" style hosting we did last year. If you want to see our snow packed coolers check out my sisters blog about it here.

Patio Done!

Here is a picture of the finished patio.
I am very happy with how wonderful it came out. Papa Bear and I decided that it needed that little step in the one corner since it is quite bigger than a normal step and the slope of our lawn. Although most people wouldn't care I insisted that we put the grill off to the side of the patio, which involved building up the area with dirt, packing it down and leveling it. What a pain in the neck, but I am glad that we did that. I DID help with the grill addition on the patio before helping Luke with some raking. My dad finished the leveling and placement of the stones for it though while I made tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.
In the spring I am going to move the lilies that are where the chairs are in the picture to the side of the patio. We will put Port Bay stones in since barely any rain gets there anyways. We are thinking some small shrubs or bushes along the side with the step so people don't think it's level with the lawn and hurt themselves.