Spotted

Taken out our front window:

This little guy was eating my hostas, but I'll forgive him because he is just so adorable!

 

Jamaican Anniversary Trip {Recap 2 of 2}

Time for the second part of our vacation recap, the activities!

As I'd mentioned yesterday, this was not a typical vacation for us. Usually we I try to cram as much as possible into our trips, since I've got the mind set of 'who knows if/when we'll ever return, so better experience it all the first time.' But this time my husband wanted a mostly relaxing vacation, which is what prompted me to pick Couples resorts, since not only do they offer all of the pampering and laying around on the beach doing nothing that you could want, they also have a lot more activities included in the price than any of the other All Inclusives I looked at.

One of the first included activities we did was a catamaran cruise down the coast. We knew ahead of time to make our reservation at check in for the cruise, which was a good thing because it was already completely booked for the first three days of our trip.

The boat trip lasts about three hours, getting back to the resort just after sunset. Well, if we'd had a sunset that night, but as you can see, we ended up going on a cloudy day.

Jamaican Anniversary Trip {Recap 1 of 2}

Before summer completely slips away, I wanted to post about our 10 day Jamaica trip that we took to celebrate our third wedding anniversary!

We stayed at Couples Swept Away in Negril, and it was an absolutely wonderful place to experience the Caribbean for the first time. It was our first real stay at an All Inclusive (although we did 2 nights at an AI in Puerto Vallarta in 2009, but weren't there long enough to really take advantage), and it was a nice change of pace to be able to just leave your wallet in the room safe. Couples resorts don't even allow tipping, since they have an employee bonus system built into their room prices, so it was really a cash free resort.

Well, That Was Kind of Scary!

So, we had a kind of crazy experience on Saturday afternoon!

I was standing in the kitchen, assembling chicken kabobs about an hour before friends were coming over for dinner, just as a thunderstorm rolled in. We had been watching the weather radar all day, to make sure we would still be able to grill outside, and it was looking like the storm would pass over in about an hour, followed by relatively clear skies.

We don't tend to get much wind at our house, but when we do during storms, it's a pretty neat sight to see all of the trees in our woodsy backyard waving in the wind. And we have the typical-of-a-wooded-yard large amount of sticks and branches that fall when it's windy out.

But as I was prepping dinner on Saturday during the beginning of the thunderstorm, I saw out our kitchen window a larger than normal branch fall on our clothesline.

Photo of the downed clothesline taken from the deck the next day.

The branch startled me, but wasn't a huge deal, especially since I'd been wanting my husband to take down the clothesline (which we'd inherited when we bought the house, had never used, and referred to as the "zip line" since it ran from the side of the house to a tree) forever.

This fallen branch was just the opening act though. But it prompted both of us to go over to the sliding glass doors to peer more closely out at the storm for a minute. Putting us in prime location for the main event, watching with mouths agape as an over 50 foot tree fell into our yard!

Yes, this giant log below is what we got to witness falling toward our deck. And yes, we definitely heard the tree fall, it was loud, and took out several smaller trees on its way down!

Simple-But-Cute Mailbox Flower Bed

I've recently gotten back into taking ~2 mile walks/jogs around our neighborhood a few evenings a week, just to stretch my legs, but not do anything too strenuous in the heat of summer. And while on one of my jaunts around the neighborhood, I was inspired by a neighbor's simple-but-cute mailbox flower bed. So I made my own in our yard!

 House numbers blurred for privacy