I have really been enjoying the opportunity to grow food lately, in both the edible and felt varieties.

Edible Food

We’ve had this raised garden bed in our backyard since we re-did the backyard over a year ago, and just last month I finally had some time to plant in it. There are six different kinds of Bell Peppers, Banana Peppers, Zucchini, Green Onions, Chives, Mint, and three different kinds of Basil.

The Zucchini just started to flower and the Bell Peppers aren’t far behind.

In a large pot near by are three different kinds of Tomato plants in varying sizes and a Tomatillo plant.

All of the plants in the container have flowers and two of them have a bunch of babies. It’s fun to watch the babies grow!

There are also some Strawberries in the yard that are having fruit, but the slugs are enjoying them.

Just about all of the flowers have started to bloom in the yard. There are a bunch of pictures in the Backyard Spring 2010 Album, but this one was my favorite:

Felt Food (Play Food)

My latest hobby has been making play food out of Felt. Here is a basket of what I have created so far.

From left to right there is a sliced Kiwi, Avocado, Lemon, Orange slices, sliced Grapefruit, and a peel-able Banana.
Here is the Banana being peeled, the top stems each have Velcro on them:

Here is a better picture of the Orange slices (I will be making the peel soon):

My favorite food item I have made was a 1st Birthday Cake for Emily’s Birthday, because it is super girly with Pink and Lavender frosting, candle and a Purple Flower in the middle. It is fun to make girly things sometimes. Here is a picture of Emily holding it:

There are more close-up photos in the Felt Food Album. Many people ask me why I have started to make Felt Food, and the main reason for me is that I remember how much fun it was as a kid to pretend with fake food. I think when Samuel is old enough he might enjoy it as well, but in the meantime it is a fun thing to make and is something that works well with my skill set – I only know how to sew by hand.

We have been having lots of fun with friends and enjoying our newly re-done downstairs.

Daniel & Lynn’s Visit

Last weekend we had a really fun visit from our friends Daniel & Lynn with their baby girl Arianne who is 3 months. We had fun playing at our house but my highlight was going to Montaña de Oro. I got a really sweet picture of them in front of the water.

Lynn, Laurie and I hung out a bunch together during the weekend with our babies in tow. We managed to get a picture where all of us were looking at the camera.

There are lots more pictures of the cute babies in the album Daniel & Lynn Visit.

Home Improvement

I’ve been meaning to post this now for a month, but during January and February Joe and I with some help from friends transformed our downstairs. We painted all of the walls a really beautiful blue and it makes everything really stand out so much more. We have a bit of touchup to do, but that will come later. Painting was prompted by us putting in an entirely new entertainment area to make things safe for Samuel. We did a bit of decorating to match the color by getting a photo I took in the backyard of the sunrise printed and hung with two sconces on the wall. Here is a picture of what that part of the room looks like:

Joe and I only completed the living room side of the wall and didn’t have much energy to finish the other side of the room (kitchen/dining room). A few weeks later I had the day off of work and was able to get some friends to come over to surprise Joe with the other side of the room being painted. He didn’t even notice it when he got home because it just seemed to fit so well!

For the techno-geeks here’s what we did with the entertainment area:
New LCD TV that is mounted on the wall with a speaker bar and the subwoofer is on the ground. The component cabinet is actually a TV stand that we use just on its own. Inside the cabinet is a component switcher, Blu-Ray player, Mac Mini (we are borrowing) that is connected to the TV and controlled using Mouse Mote, DVD/VHS player, printer, Wii, and PS2. As you can see from the outside it doesn’t look like all that is in there since we got some cable management devices behind it that are painted the wall color to blend in. The TV mount swivels and extends and our speakers are hooked up also to the Airport Express. Everything is controlled by our Harmony remote. Phew. There are times when I wish we didn’t have any electronic devices at all.

Even though all of these changes and techno-gadgets are nice – especially now that the TV is the appropriate size for the room – it still doesn’t compare to being able to let Samuel roam around the living room and have his playthings available to him. He seems to really like the new setup and the extra room he has to play. Joe and I are really enjoying it, even though it was a lot of work, it was worth it.

Ever since Joe and I purchased our home over a year ago we have been anticipating the day when our backyard would no longer be just a piece of dirt, but an extension of our home.

This weekend that day finally came, when Bryce and his team at Littlejohns Landscaping transformed our dirt plot to a place that we can enjoy for years to come. There is now a large piece of grass surrounded by a lot of hardy and fun bushes, and I even found a new plant to add to my favorites list – Pittosporum. The focal piece of the new landscape is in the left corner of the yard where a circle of pavers and more traditional tiered pedestal fountain rests surrounded by more pretty foliage. In the front left of the yard there is also a planter box for me to play around with growing items for cooking (mostly herbs).

For those of you that are fans of home improvement shows like we are, here are the before and after shots.

Before:

After:

There are still a few more things for Joe and I to work on; the fountain pump isn’t working well, and I need to figure out what is going to go in the planter box and plant it. Other than that, we are looking forward to the summer months when we can have dinner outside, and the time when Samuel is ready to start exploring and playing in the grass.

P.S. I forgot to mention how much our good friend Laurie helped out. She designed the initial plans (we modified the plans a bit) and was invaluable in helping to decide what plants to put in the yard. Thanks Laurie!

After a year or more of searching for a tool to manage our finances, we finally found something that is working for us – Buxfer! I have tried just about every piece of software or website out there (seriously – 10 different apps for the Mac, and about 15 different websites) while continuing to use a really old version of Quicken for the Mac. Nothing had all of the features we wanted at a reasonable price until I re-stumbled upon Buxfer a few days ago.

Here were the features we were looking for (in order of importance):

• Flexible Budgeting (create our own Budget categories in variable timeframes)
• Reporting on spending in budget categories (how much do I have left for groceries?)
• Split transactions (including negative splits – i.e. a portion of my paycheck goes towards paying for health insurance, so that would be a negative split when my salary posts)
• Import of data from Quicken & from banks

Screenshot of Buxfer from the demo

Setting up the accounts to import the data was a snap, and I loved that all of our accounts could be imported every day automatically (there is also a feature to make this more manual if you are worried about security). Once the accounts were setup, then I went about importing the years of transactions from Quicken. This mostly worked well – if a bit slow, although the split transactions didn’t show the split, so I had to edit those by hand. Making the splits was very easy, and tagging items is so seamless. One great feature that is missing from Quicken but is in Buxfer was the ability to tag a transaction as a transfer – this was one of those “why doesn’t everyone do this?” moments. Overall, setting up the accounts with all of our data went well.

Once all of the data was tagged, I went to go manage the tags, and was glad to find that you can group tags under other tags. This allows us put each of our different utilities under one tag called utilities, but still see the individual utilities. Once the data is all tagged, then you can see a list of all of the transactions for that tag, and in your pie charts see how you spent by main tag (i.e. utilities instead of each of the separate utilities). The reporting is pretty nice and gives you a good understanding on spending habits, income, and a pretty funny graph of account balances which looks like the stock market in our case (ups when we get paid, downs when we pay a bill). There are some improvements to be made here, like an easier way to see graphs over time for a specific tag, but if you know what you are doing you can find out the info.

From there we setup the budget information from our zero-based budget in Quicken. This is the area that could use more work, but at the same time has features that were so much better than a lot of other tools. Creating a budget category was so simple and extremely flexible. We put in some items that were yearly and others were monthly, but they had a bunch more options (like every 2 weeks). The budget categories are based on the tags that you setup, so you could have one budget that had a whole bunch of things (i.e. the utilities like above). Once you create a budget, it instantly tells you how much you have left in the budget. If you are over, it shows it in red, and you can have it notify you by email when you go over in your budgets. My only desire here would be to have budgets that could be defined from sub-budgets, but that is just as easily solved by making more budgets for different levels of information. Also, it would be nice if you could do a zero-based budget in Buxfer (it lets you add budgets at any level no matter what your income), but this is also easily solved by using a spreadsheet to balance it out, paper and a calculator, or use Dave Ramsey’s Gazelle Budget Light.

On the really cool feature side, they have all kinds of mobile support, including having a special email address that you can send a text message to so that you can see how you are doing on a specific budget or to add a transaction. So very cool. There is even a dashboard widget for the Mac

Ok, so this may have been a fairly geeky look at financial tools, but it has been such an exciting thing for Joe and I (we’ve been up very late in the night this week playing with it) that we wanted to share it with you.

P.S. Buxfer has 3 different account types: the first one is free, but only lets you have 5 accounts and 5 budgets; the second one is $2/month and lets you have unlimited accounts and budgets – we actually got a free upgrade to this because I forgot that I had signed up a long time ago and they let people upgrade for free who had been around a while; the latter one is $3/month and gives you no ads and the new features (they say there will be envelope budgeting!)

At work they asked for creative projects that they could highlight from their employees, so I decided to send in the Ephesians project (check it out here). It’s kind of intimidating because there are so many talented creative people at my company, but it’s such a great opportunity to share how the Word of God is relevant to everyday life. My prayer is that it represents Him well, especially since the project is so old (I completed it 5 years ago).

Work came back and asked me if I could put it into a Quicktime movie format, so I decided to make a full blown movie out of it during my lunch break yesterday. I hope you enjoy it, click on the image below to open it in a new browser window.

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