Balcony

Here are some pictures of our balcony, where we love to sit at night and drink wine. Last night it rained and it was finally cool enough to eat outside, so we got to use our new table for the first time.

Where we will have dinner once it gets cooler!

The sitting area on the other part of our balcony.

My flowers. The two on the end are the ones that the squirrel completely destroyed :(

Our Little Home

Here are few pictures of our new apartment since none of our families, and only a few of our friends, have seen it. Enjoy!

Kitchen

Here is the view of our kitchen from the living room

View from the dining room

Guest Bathroom

Guest Bedroom

We still need to hang the curtains and find a place for the TV

This room has turned into a "put everything in here that has no other place" room, but eventually we'll get a bed in here and really turn it into a guest bedroom. This is the room that is bothering me the most right now!

Living Room

We're still trying to figure out what to put above the TV, and over our little book shelf, that is just a temporary wall hanging until we can find something we like better to put here.

Dining Room

Our bedroom

We'll eventually replace this with a dresser, and then use this as our TV stand in the living room.

Master Bathroom

I can't wait to get new towels for our bathrooms!

There is still a lot we want to change and add, but we're saving that for when we get married. If we replaced everything now we'd have absolutely nothing to register for!

Joke is on you little squirrel

After spraying my flowers and plants with soap and hot sauce yesterday I decided to be extra sure he wouldn't come and eat my flowers again by covering all of the plants with cayenne pepper. It was making me sneeze, so I thought there was no way he could sit there long enough to eat off each of my flowers.

I was wrong.

This morning I found one plant that was covered in orange flowers last night has had each flower and bud perfectly bitten off, and another plant that I had brought back to life after he almost killed it, also missing the one flower that was about to bloom. So much for my purple flower theory...

I am so mad. Right now I can only hope he's rubbing his eyes with his little cayenne pepper covered paws.

From now on I'm going to bring all of my plants inside at night.

Annoyed

First, just let me start by saying that I am an animal lover. It's why I stopped eating meat, why I cry when I see a stray dog, and why I slam on my brakes when a bird (or butterfly) flies in front of my car, but now I have some sort of a critter ruining my plants and flowers and I am starting to get angry!

Over the last month I had a grasshopper (yes I know it's not technically an animal, but it has eyes and it moves which is close enough for me) that was living on a small tree we have on our balcony. Charlie and I thought he was cute and even named him. I started noticing holes in my leaves, and then my leaves started falling off and turning brown. It finally occurred to me that is was the grasshopper eating my tree! I didn't have the heart to kill it, or spray it with anything, so Charlie knocked it off and I found a website that said to spray the tree with a mixture of water and Dawn dish soap to keep insects away. I did and he hasn't returned.

Last weekend I noticed 2 of my plants with pretty purple flowers had mysteriously died almost overnight. They were big and green and then all of a sudden lost all of their flowers, turned brown, and then shriveled up and died. I thought it was maybe because of the crazy heat we had and didn't think much about it again until this morning when I found my pretty zinnia, that was green and had three big purple flowers on it with two more about to bloom last night, looked like this:

All of the flowers and leaves were chewed off and it was just a bunch of sticks :(

His gift to me.

I was so mad! I Googled it and got it narrowed down to rabbits and squirrels. I live on the third floor, so it can't be a rabbit. This leaves me with squirrels. I always see them climbing on the side of our building and jumping to the nearby trees (at the time thinking "how cute!"). I also found that they like purple flowers, which would explain why it was only my three plants that made big purple flowers that have died. I definitely don't want to hurt the squirrels, but I want my pretty flowers! I read that spraying the plant with cayenne pepper will keep them away, so I added some hot sauce to my soap spray that I used to keep the grasshoppers away and sprayed it on all of my plants. Hopefully this will keep the little guys from destroying my other pretty flowers!

It's Official

After all of the looking we did in Dallas we finally decided on a wedding in Norman, which wasn't even originally on our list. Everything we found in Dallas was very expensive and very impersonal, both of which are not our taste. There is a beautiful gazebo right next to my Dad's house, so after taking a good look at it, we decided it was much more our style. Plus, I can get ready at my Dad's house and not have to worry about traveling somewhere with all of my things.

That is my Dad's backyard to the right, and I'll be walking out from there and over the bridge to the gazebo.

Lots of shade from the summer heat.

Another view

We'll be doing a small, private ceremony here with only about 75 people, and then immediately following we'll have a reception with about 200. This works out best, since most people don't REALLY want to see the actual wedding anyway!

I'm SO relieved to finally have that part over with.