When it rains...we PLAY!!!

It's been raining all day here in Peoria, which mean we now have a roaring river in our yard! Hooray!

OK, so it's not actually a roaring river. But there was still an opportunity here. What do you think this elementary-school teacher thought when she saw this scene?

BOAT RACES!!!! (of course)

When I picked Braden up from work we set to the task of making and decorating a pair of paper boats. I think they look pretty good...So now we needed to test them.They raced and raced and raced. But in the end there had to be a winner. It was Tiffany's boat!!!

Braden had the fortunate job of fixing the new sod after the boats were done racing.

Then again, maybe he was just playing in the wet dirt...

For the Birds

So, if you've been following the blog, you probably know about the blackbird. Well, Tiff was running the other day, and it got her, now all I can figure is she's turning into bird.



We were putting together our new futon, and the urge to take up wings and fly overcame her. Then, we were walking in a parking lot and all of the sudden Tiff shouts out "it's a frog!"



The thing was barely the size of my thumbnail! And against a gray background! Incredible! Precision vision like that is only seen in the grand raptors of the sky, and I'm pretty sure she was about to swoop down and have a snack, because it was all I could do to restrain her. But don't worry, I'm keeping an eye on her...

I blame it on the postal service

We got a package in the mail today, it showed up like this:



Upon opening it, we found this:



Sadly, the delicious huckleberry jam that my mom made us did not make the trip out to Illinois. I wasn't too bummed about it until Tiff told me that she wouldn't let me eat any because of the broken glass that now peppered the jam. It was probably good advice, but seriously, this is huckleberry jam! All I got to do was smell it, and that just made me want to eat it more! Anyway, I think I'll be able to get over it, but it was really sad, and I can only imagine that it made some postal worker very unhappy, and whoever else's mail it leaked on probably wasn't too thrilled about their sticky-berry-smelling-love-letters either. Or hey, maybe it made their mail a little more fun, like scratch and sniff! Who knows? Maybe one of those people is readying this right now, asking where this delicious smell came from! It's Soda Springs Idaho man, only in jam form!

One word: Awesomeness

This last week I went up to Aurora Illinois with my job at Caterpillar, and I must say it was pretty awesome. At the plant I work at we make engines, most of which go into either over the road trucks, generators, boats, or (relatively) smaller equipment. It is pretty cool, but in Aurora, they make some of the BIG stuff. Namely excavators, wheel loaders, and landfill and soil compactors. As part of my trip, I got to DRIVE the beautiful piece of machinery pictured above (one like it, I didn't have my camera). It was SWEET! I got 'er going about 17 mph, and I tell you what, these things turn on a dime! This was definitely a benefit of working for CAT!

Midwest Mountain (?) Biking

We finally found adventure!!! There are a couple of small state parks just outside of Peoria that have some pretty good mountain biking, which is quite surprising, considering that there aren't any mountains... Anyway, it's not quite like out West, but at least there are a lot of trees, and there are actually some pretty good trails that criss-cross all through the parks. Wha-hoooooo!!!

The Love-Cactus

We call this our love cactus. We got it on the honeymoon and it barely survived the trip to Peoria (see our first post for the story). We're using it as preparation for parenthood. We figure if we can't keep a cactus alive, we may need to wait on children.

"The Rhythm Kitchen"

We went downtown to this restaurant with some friends the other night. "Eclectic" I think is the pc word for it (I just think it was a little weird, and my food was soggy). But hey, anywhere you can listen to electric guitars while eating soggy food off a dirty plate is, um... eclectic?

Here is Tiff in front of the place with a creepy mannequin...



...and these are the arms an legs hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen