Just for you, Laurie!

Per your request, here's some photos of the inside of our Parisan apartment.

Our little balcony off of the living room

Living room from the balcony. Through the doorway to the left is the entrance, to the right is the kitchen and straight ahead is the bedroom.


Kitchen. We even had a dishwasher!


Kitchen from apartment entrance doorway


Looking into the living room from the entryway. Through those French doors is the balcony.


Bathroom and stained glass french doors


tub (that back wall is a wall of mirrors. Behind it is the closet with the non-working washer/dryer combo). I'm standing in the bathroom/bedroom doorway. I guess I don't have any photos of the bedroom :(

Second Anniversary

We headed up to the lake on Friday morning and got there early in the afternoon. It was rainy, but soon the rain stopped and it was nice the rest of the weekend. Still a bit chilly, but definitely warmer that it was on our honeymoon!

So there's this winery up there that's fun to go to, not because they have good wine, becuase they don't, but because they have these awesome bikes that you can ride with 2 or 4 people. They have paths that go up into the vineyards that you can ride them through and it's really cool. They also have a building in which they display art made by local artists. They change it up every so often so you're not always looking at the same bad art, but rather a variety of bad art. They have the cleanest horse stable with, of course, horses in it and a big fenced in area with more horses and adorable little ponies. In the tasting room they always have cheese and crackers to sample with your wine. They also sell the cheese and it's good!

So we were really looking forward to going there, so after we got Lola all settled in her bag



we took off for Carlos Creek. Normally when we pull up we can see the bikes around, because they have a bunch of them...but they were no where to be found! I was sad. So we decide that we should go look at the horses and ponies because they're always cute and eating grass. Where are they? No where to be found. Boo. Okay, lets go into the art building. Oh, surprise! They gutted it and made it into an overpriced pretend French cafe. Boo again. Well, at least we can go inside and get some of that cheese! Wrong again! They don't sell it anymore. So we taste some of their nasty wine and decide to walk around a bit before leaving.

We thought we'd check out the "Nation's largest permanent maze". There's a reason we've never gone into the maze before. It sucks! It was all overgrown and we're lucky we're still not stuck in it.

The whole thing was a bust, and it's not like we even had any good wine either!

The next day we went on a hike and had a picnic at Lake Carlos State Park. It was great weather for hiking and we had a good time. Andy found some gross looking mushrooms too. ick.

Lola likes being on the boat.

We had campfires.

Ick. On our anniversary we decided that we wanted to go out to eat. Only problem is that there are NO vegetarian restaurants or restaurants that have good meat-free food up in that area. They all serve the same kinds of food--seafood, steaks, burgers and pasta (which includes spaghetti and fettucini) or salads with meat in them even if you order them without it, they'll still put it in, just at the bottom so you don't notice it until you're almost done eating. We ended up going to a joint on a lake (as they all are!) and just getting a bunch of appetizers that sounded good. They weren't. I think we'll have to go back to the King & I Thai and get the Mock Duck (what's that!?!?) again.

But we really did have a great 4-day weekend at the lake. On the way home we stopped at Andy's dad's new business and got the grand tour. It was very impressive!!

Also on our way home we stopped at my sister and brother-in-law's house. We saw our niece again! She's 4.5 months old now! Andy taught her how to say "duck". That kid's gonna be a genius. It's sooooooo much fun being an aunt and I know Andy likes being an uncle! We highly recommend it!

First Things First

I realized that I never really blogged about our first anniversary...so here goes.

We went to a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and Andy had them fill it with rose petals.





That night we went to the King and I Thai just down the street and I had fried rice with Mock Duck and Andy had Pad Thai with Mock Duck and a "3" on a 4-level spicy scale. He about died. Those Thais like their food spicy! It was really good though, so he ate as much as his burning mouth would allow.

On our way back to the hotel we saw my sister & brother-in-law's last name graffitied on the bus stop

The next day (our actual anniversary) we went home and ate the top of our cake (not all at once). It still tasted great.

I forgot to mention that Andy had a dozen red roses (just like he gave me when he proposed--awww!) delivered to me at work on Friday.

That was the end of that.........BUT............. the best is yet to come! 2 weeks later we left for 2 wonderful weeks in Paris.

What follows is a grossly brief photo essay of our trip.

We rented an apartment in southern Paris. While a bit tricky to arrange and get into, it was the best decision we made about planning the trip. We got to really experience life in Paris. We had a huuuuge bathroom, bedroom, full kitchen and living room with a balcony. The bedroom had a great view of the Tour Eiffel which we loved. Our street was busy, but you couldn't hear it at all when the windows were shut. We were on the 5th floor.



Of course we saw all the famous sights:









One day we took a bike tour. We rode bikes from the train station out to Giverny where Claude Monet lived. We saw his family tomb, his house and his water & flower gardens (and a cool graffitied truck on the way out there)









That was my favorite day. Andy's favorite day(s) were when we went out to the wine country. A couple hours' worth of train rides and we were in his paradise. We took a few tours of different wineries and one day Andy tasted so many red wines that his entire mouth & teeth were stained purple. I don't have that photo, but it's pretty gross.

On our way home we had some time to kill in l'aeroport.

A Couple Years Ago....A Couple Days Ago....

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We got married!

Stupid Monday

I've never been a fan of them. This morning I got all ready to go to work, go out to the garage and lo and behold the garage door opener wasn't lit. I push the button to open the door and nothing. Everything was plugged in like it should be, so Andy tripped the breakers. Nothing. We tried manually opening it, by pulling on the cord that "disengages" the opener. Nothing. So we call the number on the unit and they're "not open". We call the repair shop that had a sticker on the garage door. Nothing. Jerks. I get out the phone book and Andy calls the first place listed--they "might" be able to get out there in an hour or 2. Great. I call into work and as I'm talking to my boss, Andy starts yelling "Jenna! Jenna! JENNA!". He figured out that somehow, between 10:00 last night and 7:30 this morning the outlet that the unit was plugged into stopped working. We got an extension cord and re-routed it. We were in business.

Thankfully the rest of my day hasn't been as exciting as the first 1/2 hour was.

A Hoppin' Good Time

Andy and I went to the Art Hop on Saturday...well, we really only went to phase 1 of the Art Hop, the Uptown Art Fair. Neither of us were overly impressed. There was a bajillion vendors there, but nothing really blew us away. One guy takes photos of the solar system through a home-made telescope. His exposure times are from 30 minutes to 9 hours! I thought that was impressive, but then we overheard the guy talking to a passer-by and he really sounded like a pompous, egotistical jerk. Sad, but true.

We saw this though, and it was cool so Andy took a photo.

It was hot and crowded so after we made our way through the entire thing we went home.

Funniest thing I've read all day

From the Star Tribune:

LaFountain was originally described by police as Samoraj's live-in boyfriend, but the gender classification at the jail was changed from male to female following a routine strip search.

Hot Hot Heat Weekend

We had a great weekend at the lake, albeit a little warm with no air conditioning. We survived and here's the proof!

On our way up we ran into a bit of rain and these cool clouds

But by the time we got there it was nice and sunny

Lola told me she was very excited to be back at the lake. She loves it up there becasue it has a big yard for her to romp.

We took the boat out for awhile--that helped us to cool down some.

I made kebobs on the grill for dinner and they were soooo good!

On Sunday we went to the art fair. If you thought the Craftstravaganza was hot, you should have been at this one!!! Andy and I were wondering if these vendors were going to complain to the organizers that they were too hot too? We didn't buy anything because the heat put us out of the shopping mood (actual high was 100, heat index was 115 that day) but there was really only a couple things we would have purchased anyways. Much of it was Kountry Krafts.

It was a fun weekend and I'm looking forward to going back in 3 weeks.