Garden Week 2 Update

Today my garden is 2 weeks old and thriving!! Here are some pics:

My carrots and green onions are growing nicely (I figured out which ones are which now :)
These are my beautiful bush beans. Aren't they gorgeous! I am so proud of them!

So the garden is doing great, and I have high hopes for this summer's harvest. I have plans for expanding my garden by adding some more plants in containers surrounding our back patio. Hopefully I can get tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and more squash growing soon!

Garden Week 1 Update

Today is exactly one week from when we planted our garden and here is our progress: I think that the leaves of the plants already look leafier (that's a word, right?)
Look at the green!!! (You can see it really well if you click on the picture) I was so excited once I noticed the green shoots coming up through the soil. I only wish I could remember what exactly I planted there... I think carrots? Definitely either carrots or green onions. I do remember that the seeds were so small that I just planted a bunch of them, thinking that maybe 1 in 5 would start to grow. I may have been mistaken...but I am pretty sure that I can just go through and prune them out. Once I figure out what they are. (I really should have written that down!) This is in my bush bean section. I planted four beans in this square and this guy is already coming up! There is another one coming through in a square next to it, but the picture didn't really turn out so you will have to take my word for it.

Yea for getting things done!

Today I was bitten by the productivity bug! I got so much done and it felt sooooo good :) The weather was gorgeous this morning so I decided to go for a run before meeting up with my neighbor to go to the gym. I usually take a 2 mile route near my house that goes by the hillsborough river and this morning the sun was shining and reflecting off of the river and the wind was nice and cool. I'm trying to work on my speed, so unfortunately for the first mile I didn't notice any of this. Instead, I was thinking about how tired I was, how stupid running is, trying to convince myself to not wuss out and regretting having cookies for breakfast (what? vanilla wafers aren't the breakfast of champions?) In the end it was worth it because I did the first mile in 8:47. Woohoo!! Of course after that I had to choose between continuing to run and probably throwing up my very healthy breakfast or walking home. I walked home.

After going to the gym with my next door neighbor, I came home, took a shower, and planned out the rest of my day. I decided to go to a nearby town about 15 minutes away in an attempt to find a Joann's so that I could get some yarn for an afghan I want to make. I got a little lost, but I stumbled onto a Michael's in a shopping center with a Beall's Outlet AND a TJmaxx. I had so much fun looking through clearance racks and thinking of decorating ideas for our apartment. After at least an hour I made my way to Michael's only to spend at least 30 minutes in their yarn aisle trying to decide what color, type, and texture of yarn that I wanted. Decisions!!

Now, in order to make this trip I had to laugh at how much courage I had to muster to drive by myself. The roads here terrify me! To get anywhere you have to get on at least some sort of highway that has all sorts of different types of merging lanes and exit lanes and crosslanes with other highways. I see and hear about crashes all of the time, and my car is not known for being reliable under pressure (i.e. going more than 50 miles an hour, maneuvering in high winds, or basically anything out of the ordinary). On the way home, I had to exit off of one road onto a very curvy off ramp which then turned into an exit only lane so I had to switch lanes AND accelerate immediately. The entire time, without even realizing I was doing it, I was doing breathing exercises like I was in labor, "in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth". My entire body was clenched and I had broken into cold sweats! Did I mention that relatively, this wasn't that big of a road and the average speed was about 55 miles an hour? Yeah. Ummm, I hate to say this but I really need to force myself to get more comfortable driving around here. (Don't tell Anthony I said that!!!!)

As for the rest of the days accomplishments:
-I did three full loads of laundry all by myself, quite a feat when you have to use a laundromat (boo!).
-Did a weeks worth of dirty dishes. Yep, let the dirty dishes pile up all week and then tackle them on the weekend, that's how I role.
-Put up the rest of the pictures and decorations that have been leaning against walls waiting to be put up since we moved. Eight months ago.
-Did the grocery shopping
-Tried out a homemade concoction on a few white shirts to try to get those annoying yellow sweat stains out. And yes, they were my shirts because I sweat like a man :)
-Worked on my YW's lesson for tomorrow and made little trees out of tootsie roll pops and green tissue paper because it wouldn't be a young women's lesson without crafty treats!

Now at the end of a very fruitful day I am going to set my clocks forward, get ready for bed, and thank Heavenly Father for days like today :)

Square Foot Garden

Today I took a half day off of work and Anthony and I got all the supplies for our very own square foot garden. I have been thinking about doing this for awhile, and I spent a good amount of time on the internet planning how I wanted to do everything and in the end it was pretty easy. (Which doesn't usually happen for us) I am hoping that I am able to keep everything alive...and make it grow bigger...and have tons of veggies...but no high expectations or anything :)

Here is what it looks like on the side of our back porch:
The garden soil we bought for this smelled suspiciously like manure. A lot like manure. I wonder if they repackage it is as "organic manure" instead of "organic garden soil" how much they will sell?So there you have it. Cross your fingers that I don't kill everything!

Spring Break Belongs to Fishermen

Anthony FINALLY got to go fishing yesterday since it is spring break and boy did he do it up! He caught some people-sized fish:
He was so excited when he got home he didn't even take a shower, he went straight to the computer to upload the photos and start brag posting. And who could blame him? Did you see the size of those fish???

Having fun!

It's been a pretty eventful past few weeks in the Lagana household. We've been trying to make an effort to do more than just our everyday routine and we've had a lot of fun in the process.

The first thing that we did was to go to a Postsecret event held at USF. If you haven't heard of Postsecret before, it is a community project started by a guy called Frank Warren. He started to have strangers send him postcards with their secrets on it, secrets they have never told anyone. That was years ago and now he gets hundreds of secrets delivered to his mailbox everyday. He puts the best ones together into a collection and publishes them as well as travels around the country to give lectures. It was really interesting to hear him talk about the power in letting go of a secret, whether it is a secret you are keeping from yourself or from other people. Here is an example of the types of postcards he gets (I really like the happy ones): It was fun to hear him speak and to see some of the secrets he wasn't allowed to put in the book because of copyright issues, etc...

A few days later, it was my 24th birthday!! Yea for birthdays!!! We didn't have anything big planned but it turned out really good. My coworkers got me some really thoughtful gifts and a delicious cookie cake (my fave!), Anthony got me a new memory foam pillow, chocolate, and flowers. Plus, Ant and I met my mom in Orlando to have dinner with her. It was so nice to have the time driving there and back to catch up with Anthony and to have the time during dinner to catch up with my mom. The only sad part of the day was when I had to go to bed and realized that the day was over :(

A few days after that (last Saturday in fact) I ran in my second 5k! I hadn't been training at all for it but I signed up because a few of my friends were going. Plus, it was such a big race that I figured that I had to go at least to experience it :) The race itself was called "Gasparilla" and it has a long history in Tampa. It is similar to Mardi Gras, they have beads and a parade and all sorts of partying but it is all in celebration of a Spanish pirate that operated in Southwest florida. The race was reallly fun, the 5K alone had over 8,000 participants! Here is the official pirate ship that stays docked for the festivies:
So, the actual race was pretty miserable. It was cold and rainy and windy. I seriously wondered how many participants they would have had if they had a refund policy. I know I definitely had in the back of my mind "I paid $30 to run in this race, I better go!" even though the weather wasn't ideal. There were so many participants that they had to stage us in front of the start line according to how serious we were about running it. The fast people got to go first, followed by the not so fast runners, followed by the walkers. I started in the not-so-fast group. There was such a variety of runners! I saw little kids, older adults, and everything in between. I finished with a time of 33:49, which at least was better than the last one I did. I'm going to try to do another one in a few months and really speed it up!

Hello, weather? In case you didn't know, we live in Florida.

Is everyone as sick of the cold as I am? I never thought I would say that, but the cold just will not go away! Especially since we live a few hours south of Gainesville now, I thought for sure that I would be complaining about how hot it is, and not researching ice scrapers for my car's windshield. In the past few weeks it has become a tinsy bit more bearable, but there have been at least a few days recently where walking outside felt like walking on a windy tundra.

It is like the winter refuses to go away! Around a month ago Anthony went on a hike with the boy scouts and they even got snowed/sleeted on! Now I'm tired of the cold after all of this time but Anthony is an even bigger cold hater. Seriously. That boy should have been born in the Caribbean because he never gets hot, loves to be out in the sun and in the outdoors (unlike me who is half ginger-kid and freckles or burns after 10 minutes outside without multiple forms of skin protection) and he acts like he is DYING when it is cold outside.

A few weeks after what he refers to as his "Death march" with the boy scouts, I went out to my car to go to work in the morning and found these on my windshield:

Yep. Those are snowflakes, folks. Did I mention we live in Tampa? Just saying.

Another interesting by-product of this unusal season we are having is that everyone talks about the weather constantly. Sometimes I feel like I am in the middle of a Victorian-era book where everyone makes polite small talk:

My coworker: "Did you see the weather this morning?"
Me: "Why yes I did. It is unusually cold, don't you think?"
Another coworker: "They say that is should be like this for another week or so."
Me: "Did they? I hope that it gets warmer soon."
Coworker #1: "I agree. We live in Tampa/Florida/the South, we shouldn't have to deal with this cold."

I have had this conversation or some variation of it WAY too many times in the past few months. Every once in awhile I get the urge to affect a british accent, say the word "quite" as many times as I can in the conversation, and then ask anyone if they would like some "crumpets, my good man". I think the cold is getting to my brain.

Contrary to my lack of posting, I do still exist

So, I haven't really had the motivation to any blogging lately. I'm not exactly sure why... I've gotten over my tiredness streak from awhile back (I'm thinking it was just some bug I was fighting off), and even though I am busy, I'm not really any busier than I used to be. And I can't honestly say that I don't have anything to talk about, because it's not like I would often write about big and profound things. In conclusion, I think I have a case of the blog/life blahs. Not bad, but not all that exciting either :)

Work, for me, is going on the same as usual. I am in a kind of perpetual limbo, waiting for someone else to make a decision about my position in order for me to be able to make a decision for myself. I'm not the best at waiting around to make decisions. I like to make a choice and then take action!! Like, right now, today! The fact that I have been waiting to figure out what is going with my job for the past four months now and that it will continue for the next three tells you what kind of "character building" I've been going through. Anthony always laughs at me when we get to talking about what I want to do, because I always end up trying to make a plan for each scenario:
So, if she makes this decision, then I can do x, y, z. BUT, if she makes this other decision, then I can do a, b, c. OR, if she doesn't make a decision at all, then I can plan on e, f, g." You get the idea. In the end, I am lucky that I do have options even if it makes the decisions harder to make.

School for Anthony is going much better this semester than last semester. He really likes his clinical placement, he is with a family practice doctor at a clinic about 18 miles away from our house. The doctor he is working with is really nice and even though Anthony doesn't get so see too much variety of conditions he at least gets to work with a really good preceptor.

Other than that, we really haven't been doing much besides our callings and vegging out in front of the TV. Thinking of that, I will leave you with something truly horrific that I saw last week on Antiques Roadshow. It is an early 1900's children's toy:

The best part is, it rolls towards children when they touch it. The appraisers described this as "charming" and "cute". He forgot to mention, "CREEPY!"

Things I haven't done

Ok, so things I haven't done this week:
-put away our mountain of laundry. It just keeps moving around from place to place as I rifle through it every morning to find some clothes
-put away christams decorations. My friend Rob tried to sell me on a business idea of a moving company that comes to your house around the holidays and takes away all of your decorations, stores them for you, and then reinstalls them in your house on the date of your choosing. I said that I didn't think it was a good idea UNLESS he came and tried it out on my house. For free. As soon as possible.
-coupon shopping/deal hunting. Seriously, I haven't even really checked out what deals are available this week much less, next week. This is totally weird for me!!!
-reading. Barely read, maybe a few pages in the morning or so. Again, so weird for me!!
-gone to the gym or exercised at all. I keep meaning to get back into the groove, and then the days go by and it just seems wrong to start a new resolution/workout program not on a Monday. I mean, that is just crazy talk!
-Had a good conversation. I keep thinking that maybe I just need to have a good heart to heart with someone to get me out of this funk, but every time I attempt to I sort of sit there and stare blankly.

Things I have done this week:
-Go to work everyday. Even though I wanted to fall asleep at my desk multiple times, I powered through and I am looking forward to my bed at 5:30Pm today.
-Made a visiting teaching appointment. (it fell through at the last minute, but hey I tried!)
-Went to YW on Wednesday night.
-Complain about being tired. A lot.
-Started a farm on facebook at the prompting of my mom (!) who is currently a higher ranked farmer than me.

So all in all, this week has been pretty blah. I keep hoping a good nights sleep will fix things, but apparently 8 1/2 hours is just not cutting it for me anymore. I've become the sleep bottomless pit, always tired no matter how many naps or good nights rest. I'm thinking it might be that I am fighting off a cold or something and my body is exhausting itself trying to keep me from getting sick. I don't know, but hopefully it will pass soon so that I can get back to my usual perky self!

Even more family pics!!!

Family Portraits 2009

While we were in Ohio all together as a family, my sister wanted to make sure she took some family pictures. I can't stress enough how talented a photographer she is!!! She has such a good eye for things and I totally get/love her style of photography. We took the pictures in the snow, so it was pretty cold but she still ended up with a serious amount of photos. They take a long time to process to get them up to her standards (which are high because she is so good :)but luckily she gave us these to begin with. The entire family
The boys Me and my brothers Me and my mommy :) Me and my big sister.
Aren't they fabulous? And these are just the beginning! There were so many more favorites of mine that I glanced at while she was going through them. Seriously, now I want her to come and take pictures of me on a regular basis for any and all occasions. If you ever need pictures done around the Ohio area, she is the best person to go to for sure!

Parkes/Fillon/Lagana Family Christmas 2009

I just got back from Ohio where I spent the last 4 days visiting with family at my sister's house. It was cold, but the snow was beautiful!!!! It made everything look like a Christmas card!

We spent a lot of time on my sister's super-comfy couch watching TV or playing board games by the fire. We ended up watching a lot of Thomas the Train episodes courtesy of my 2 year old nephew Savino. Seriously, he is like a Thomas the Train savant. He sits there, barely even looking like he is paying attention to the TV and then a train whistle sounds and he just keeps on playing and says which train it is (they each have distinctive whistles, by the way). It was too cute!

My brothers wanted to buy sunglasses and excitedly found some matching aviators. They wore them ALL the time while we were there. What goofs!

When I first arrived on Tuesday, the snow looked really inviting. Sooo, we had a snowball fight!

The snow was too powdery to make good projectiles, but we did our best at throwing snow dust at each other.

I also couldn't resist making my first snow angel. The snow looked so powdery and soft, so it was a little surprising to realize how cold and wet it was. I know that sounds like "duh!!", but to this Florida girl snow is a new and unfamiliar creature.
Not bad, right?

We had so much fun hanging out as a family, it seriously was one of the best vacations I have had in a long time. I didn't have any responsibilities or worries and there was no stress or drama. I really am lucky to have a family that I love to spend time with. I would do things with them all day all the time! I know a lot of people who have a hard time spending extended periods of time with their family for various reasons, and I am so glad that mine is not like that :)