Plant Update

Well, the plants all went within hours of posting this, so unfortunately there are no more left.  We've got a few other things we'd like to get rid of, so keep your eyes open for more!  :)

Plants for Adoption

I have a hard time throwing away perfectly good plants and their pots, so I've decided to put my plants up for adoption.  Below are pictures of them in their pots.  Let me know if you'd like any of them.  We'll deliver!  First come, first served!

Bikes, Groceries, and Camera

We've gotten a few new things in the past couple of weeks and I'm finally getting around to taking pictures and showing them to you.  We're pretty excited about it all and are looking forward to using them more.

On June 12, while in GR, we bought new bikes for both of us.  We'd been contemplating getting new bikes for our move to Germany and finally made the decision to do so.  I got a Trek bike and Brian got a Gary Fisher bike.  I don't really know a lot about bikes, but they're supposedly nice ones.  These will be our main form of transportation while in Germany, so we wanted to get decent ones.  When we bought the bikes, we also got racks for the back with bags so that I can go grocery shopping with my bike.

Here's our bikes stored in our office.  We wanted to be able to break them in before we move, so we decided to bring them to Belleville with us.  We can fit them both in the car which is quite a feat in and of itself.  The two flights up to our apartment is not the greatest and Brian has to bring them up and down when we use them because they are too heavy for me.  They move constantly while in the office so that I can get at my bookshelf and closet, but it will work for the time being.

This is my bike with my two grocery bags.

Here's Brian modeling his bike.  He has a bag that goes on the top of the rack, but he didn't take that grocery shopping when we took this picture.

On Tuesday, we decided to try out the bike grocery bags we bought and rode our bikes over to Meijer to get our groceries.  Meijer isn't very far away, so the bike ride was not difficult at all.  Unfortunately, we forgot that we had to buy charcoal for our small group picnic this Sunday, so Brian ended up balancing it on his rack the whole way home.  We filled both of the grocery bags almost full and I took those two.  When we got home, we counted up the pounds of food we bought and figured out I had taken 27.5+ pounds of food and Brian had taken an 18 pound bag of charcoal.  We were quite pleased with our accomplishment!

Here's my two bags full of groceries.  I learned you have to be careful when taking them off because the bike falls over once one of the bags is off!

Here's Brian's bike with the bag of charcoal balanced on the rack.  It worked fine, but he did have to go a little slower.  He has plans to make some sort of platform for his rack for the future.

Here's me modeling my bike with the groceries on the back.

The other purchase I made recently was a new camera.  I've wanted a small point and shoot camera that I could just take with me wherever without having to lug our bigger one around.  I got a very generous gift from the staff at the Allen Park Library and my parents for my graduation, so I was able to use that toward the purchase of my camera.  It is a Canon PowerShot SD3500IS Digital ELPH with a complete touch screen on the back.  I'm still getting used to how to use it, but it will come with practice.  It came in the mail on Tuesday, so all the pictures above are taken with my new camera.  We also went and got a hard case for it because we plan to take it backpacking next weekend and wanted to keep it safe.

Here's the new camera and the case.  I was excited that they had a purple case because the camera is just plain black.

We also bought new hiking backpacks in the past few weeks, but I will save pictures of those until I have pictures of our hiking trip.  We are going to the Adirondack Mountains July 1-5 with several friends of ours.

Father's Day 2010

This year we got a bit creative for Father's Day for my dad.  My mom had the idea to get Dad the ladder golf game and we went a little farther with it.  Instead of just buying him one, we decided to make him one because it was about half as much to do.  Brian had a lot of fun making a mess of our living room with PVC dust and then gluing the pieces together on our balcony in between the rain we've been getting.  He also drilled holes through the golf balls and made a pile of multi-colored confetti on our kitchen counter.  I put the golf balls on the strings and tied them together at the right lengths.  We celebrated Father's Day last weekend and gave Dad the game then.  I'm looking forward to playing it with him!  Here's some pictures of some of the steps that took place in our apartment.