hot summer days...

goodness did it get hot! we've had such a wonderful summer, aside from the crazy monsoon rains that is!!! and now it seems that the summer heat has decided to grace us with its presence - though a bit late. it's really not so bad, just made for some sticky yard work today! i pulled all the weeds out of our front flower beds and we randomly had an extra bag of mulch laying around, so i sprinkled that around and it looks all fresh and clean again - i love it!!! we also have real birdy visitors coming to our bird feeder and i couldn't be happier! i'm trying to get some good pictures of them, hopefully someday soon i will and i can post them. but we now have, in addition to the sparrows and doves, cardinals (boys and girls!) and blue jays and some sort of little finches :-)

what a day we had yesterday. in an effort to save a little money we decided not to add me to bub's dental plan - i'm young, i've got relatively good teeth, right?!? well, i had my six month cleaning yesterday and found out i need a crown - ahh!!! that's a mighty expensive procedure that they informed me i'm needing to have done in the next couple of months. good golly! oh well, gotta take care of these pearly whites, i hope i can pick up some extra sitting jobs.

i also dropped my phone in the parking lot of the Y and it broke in half! bub was thankfully able to ghetto rig it back together with a hair tie and some crazy glue... enough that if i'm very careful with it i can still talk on it. we're trying to track down someone's old verizon phone though and see about using that b/c i'm afraid mine probably won't last much longer... oh well, i wasn't really fond of that phone anyhow.

i've got jury duty on monday too. i'm sort of excited about it, but not really at the same time. i think it's awesome to take part in something like that, seems like a civic duty or a privilege, you know? but on the other hand, my lovely employer won't cough up the money to pay me, so i'm going without pay for at least monday, possibly longer if the trial takes longer. i get that i'm not working, so why should she pay me, but on the other hand, if i worked for a real employer they would HAVE to pay me so i feel like in an effort to be a nice person she could at least throw me a bone and pay me a little something. ok, i'll stop - i don't want to gripe about work here. i think i'm just so stressed about everything else going wrong that taking unpaid time off work isn't helping. life is expensive, owning a home is expensive, booking plane tickets for a trip to portland at christmas is REALLY expensive. i'd LOVE to see her live off what she pays me. ok, i'm entering grumpy territory - i'll stop!

to end on a happy note, hmm, let's see... mom and i went to gatlinberg (did i spell that right?!?) last weekend. it was our first time going there. i can't believe that this august marks my 8th year in tennessee and i had yet to visit, well, that town i can't spell. it was fun! we found this neat little part of the city that was all arts and crafts shops and we spent the whole day just going from place to place. i found the coolest christmas gift for miss and uri and some yum yum yummy fudge and mom did some shopping too! it was a nice afternoon of mom and daughter time :-) then we headed back to her house and watched twilight - ok, so it was actually pretty good. i need a twilight buddy to go see the new movie in november with me now - any takers???