Olympics fun

I'm a huge fan of the Olympics. This year, our friends Jennifer and Brett hosted an Olympic opening ceremony party. This will likely be the last (and only year) I watch the opening ceremony. Despite the somewhat strange and overly long ceremony, we had a lot of fun hanging out.

In keeping with an American themed dinner, I made s'mores cupcakes! I searched the web for recipes and decided on a version from Eats Well With Others, who adapted a recipe from one of my favorite food bloggers, Annie's Eats.

I chose this recipe because it combined a graham cracker base with homemade chocolate cake and marshmallow icing! Yum!

 
The cupcakes turned out really well. I might add a tad more graham cracker to make the crust a little more substantial but other than that they were perfect. The recipe made extra batter and icing so I made a few additional cupcakes.

Around here

I took an updated picture of our house last week.  The last time we took pictures it was still early spring and it wasn't nearly as pretty outside. Since then we've had TONS of rain which has made everything so much greener and it even seems as if the sky is bluer.

I did not edit this picture at all - it was really that pretty outside!

Dining room chairs

I honestly expected the dining room chair situation to be a disaster. First, have you looked at dining room chairs anywhere lately? Um, the ones I loved at Pottery Barn ran a whopping $200 for the side chairs and $279 for the arm chairs. With our table requiring 8 chairs, this would have been a TON of money. The husband and I have been looking at chairs since we purchased our table (far before it was delivered) and I was aware that we didn't agree on much except those PB chairs. We were slowly preparing ourselves for that large purchase when we ran into World Market a few weekends ago.

And what did we find? Yes, we found chairs that we both like, that are actually comfortable, and that didn't cost a fortune. Yay!

We were really hoping for something rustic, warm, and inviting and I think the table and chairs fit those requirements wonderfully.

Better...and worse

I'm talking about our gardening this summer. In so many ways its been better and in just as many ways, its been far worse than before. It's getting to be the end of our spring/summer season here so it's time to do a bit of a recap of our triumphs and whatever you want to call the bad stuff.

Triumphs:

• Lots and lots of tomatoes and this time the heirlooms grew pretty well
• The pepper plants all grew well and we actually saw almost grocery size peppers (see the caveat below)
• The bird netting worked
• We planted the herb garden and its doing really well

Sage from the garden

The herb garden

Bad stuff:

• BUGS, namely the stupid (insert whatever curse word you prefer - I surely have used ALL of them describing these guys) leaf-footed bugs
• Having to fight the leaf-footed bugs DAILY and NEVER winning
• Thinking we won one time, only to find the stupid bugs on our pepper plants
• Ants built two HUGE hills in our second garden bed
• Cucumbers - I don't know what to say here folks but it just wasn't happening despite the cucumber plants doing their best to take over the whole garden
• The peppers were burned by the sun and eaten by birds so we didn't get a single one despite the plants producing a ton
• The red peppers crossed with the jalapenos resulting in jalapenos that had no heat - a jalapeno isn't worth its salt without some heat (but at least they were edible)

As a result of the time of year and all the issues we're having with bugs, we are demolishing the garden over the next few days. The process started this weekend with the husband putting ant killer around the two hills. Sometime this week or this weekend we will go in and remove everything in the smaller bed and cut back the tomatoes to almost nothing. This year we're going to experiment with the tomatoes and see if they will grow back and produce for the fall season.

It was really hard staying on top of the garden this year because of all of our traveling. That is a huge challenge we knew we would face but it was much more difficult than we expected. Here's to a better fall season!