Spring is in the air....

Since I had such great success with my topsy-turvy tomato planter last year, I decided to replant it again this year. The thing is a beast and takes up a good portion of our tiny balcony.

I decided to buy 3 tomato plants (grape, regular and one specifically bred for a planter) and we'll see how it goes. I also planted a yellow pepper and strawberry plant. Last year I had one red pepper but it rotted before it was ripe enough to pick. Big bummer. Hopefully we'll have better luck this year!

I also planted a basil and cilantro plant. Randomly a parsley plant survived the winter and is hanging on by a thread....we'll see if I can get more than 2 leaves to grow off of it!Spring is here! Nick bought me my first (two) bunches of tulips!!! Yay!

the girls

Audie has been desperately trying to snuggle with Bella, but Bella has made sure the little one keeps her distance. So, Audie has been inching closer and closer....they can almost share a pillow now but Bella has still not let Audie actually touch her. Probably has something to do with Audie biting her butt whenever she has the chance :)

Here's Audie in one of her many sleeping positions. She's a funny one......

New Addition....

We got a little Yorkie/ maltese mix on Sunday. Since I named Bella, Nick picked out the name 'Audie' (as in Audie Murphy) even though she's a girl. It seems to fit as she is a tiny but mighty little fighter. She's just starting to respond to her name and sorta comes when called. Potty training is in full force.

Nick made a little sweater for her out of his sock :) She's very sweet but I think she may have a little devil in her ;)

Crepes

This morning I decided to make an old favorite. Crepes! We had some strawberries, blueberries, bananas for the insides and yogurt for the sauce. They were really yummy!

Nick decided he didn't want his crepes rolled up, so we made a layered crepe. Each layer had yogurt and then either strawberries or bananas....he had 5 layers!

They were huge and needless to say, neither of us finished our entire breakfast :)

Kitchen Improvements!

This weekend, we decided to try to maximize the space in our tiny kitchen. With only 2 undercounter cabinets, we had a hard time fitting all our pots and pans in one. So, we took a trip to home depot :)

We took our blank wall and added two curtain rods.....

Placed an 'S' hook for each pan and up they went! We were able to open up an entire cabinet and move all the kitchen stuff we had in the hall closet into the kitchen. Were it's suppose to be!!

Voila!!!

Bang! Bang!

While Caite and Brian were here, we decided to go to a shooting range. Nick was the only one with experience so he gave us all one on one instructions.

Here's Cait with our ear and eye protection. It was all indoors, so it was still really loud, even with the hearing protection on. I think Cait and I jumped at every shot!
Brian was loving it! We tried two guns, a 9mm Glock (like the cops use) and an M4 semi-automatic. I was really surprised at how heavy the guns were, how much they kicked and how loud they were.

We shot for about a half hour, it was freezing cold and our ears were ringing by the time we called it a day. But it was pretty cool to try for the first time!

We were surprisingly good aims, considering this was our first time!

New York City

Just after Thanksgiving, Caite and Brian came down to visit and we were able to spend a day in New York City. We got up super early on Thursday morning and took the Megabus 3 hours into the city. And we didn't even have to worry about parking :)We knew we had a lot to pack into a day, so we prioritized everthing we wanted to do....Ellis Island was our first stop for the day. We took the ferry past the Statue of Liberty (or Li-buuuuuddy, if you ask Brian) and had an amazing view of the city.

Then we had tickets for a 'hop on- hop off' tour that took us around the city with a guide and we could get off at any stop. We decided to check out Rockefeller Center with the Christmas tree and the ice skating rink.

We really had to move, as there are so few hours of day light during the winter, so by the time we made it to Central Park it was getting dusky. We came upon another skating rink with the city as an awesome back drop.

We had dinner reservations at Gordon Ramsey's restaurant Maze. It was an amazing dinner, and between the four of us, we tried nearly everything on the menu!

After an amazing dinner, we headed back out in the cold and made our way to our final destination....

We passed some landmarks along the way. It was amazing how the entire city was decorated for Christmas! It really got us in the mood for the holidays!

Our last stop was the Empire State Building. We were cutting it kinda close timewise to getting back to the bus stop for our ride home, so we really lucked out that there were no lines and we were able to walk right up to the elevators. By this time, the temperature had really dropped so we didn't really want to stay out long anyway.

The view was just amazing! You could see for miles in every directions, it was such a clear night.

Our only group shot just before we left the Empire State Building and walked back to the bus stop to take the Megabus back home. We got to see a LOT during our day in NYC :)