Random thoughts

Random thoughts that I've had this week...

- I am so grateful for our apartment. We went to my Brother in law's place and they were complaining about how they can hear everything their neighbor does. As we were there, you could hear a guitar being played and stuff. I realize that is a consequence of apartment living, but we hear nothing that our neighbor does! I think it's the way that the building is laid out, but still. It's very nice not to be able to hear him all the time.

- Got to see two of my "new" nieces on Sunday. Hadn't seen one of them since last Christmas, I believe, so that was cool.

- I have been reminded lately just how blessed I am to have a husband like I do, from looking at circumstances and hearing stories from other people. My husband is good with money and doesn't spend it frivolously (and keeps me in check!), he's caring of my feelings, is faithful, and I never had to wonder if he had my parents' approval. Just a thought.

- C just turned on the Christmas lights and turned off the overhead light to see how much they would light up the room. Not too much, but it looks cheery in here now, so we're keeping them on.

- Said brother in law's wedding is in a week and a half!! We tried to help them out a bit yesterday with the planning. Hopefully it helped.

Happy Thursday everyone!

Our Neighborhood

I've been wanting to blog about my neighborhood for a while.

We have a very eclectic group of people on our street. We live next door to a daycare, which gets kind of noisy at times. 2 houses up the street are very strange. One of them is a round building that is shaped like a dome or something, but it looks very patched together, tiny and cold. I've been meaning to take a picture of it, but haven't. The other house, across the street from them, have many different types of cars. We've seen sporty cars there, junky ones, and I think even ice racing ones. It's really strange.

There are several families that have lots of kids, so there are often kids playing in the street. Our road is nice and quiet almost always.

Onto our house! I was thrilled at the start of summer to discover all of the cool plants growing in our yard. We have bleeding hearts, columbines, daffodils and more that I don't know the names of. The first two are some of my favorite flowers :D We've also had a plant growing that was starting to bloom and it finally came open today and it's roses! :)
In our backyard, we have rhubarb growing (too bad neither of us likes it!) and we think a raspberry bush? It's still too early for them to really be growing though. Time will tell. We have hardly any fireweed growing in our yard, which is unfortunate. I love fireweed. But we have lots and lots of pushki, South Central Alaska's most despised plant.

In our backyard, there is a tiny stream running through separating us from our neighbors. It's now inaccessible due to the pushki, but it'll be fun to see again next spring.

We've also had quite a bit of wildlife. We've had a moose in our yard a couple of times, and one day we had a sandhill crane! (We're near Beluga Lake) We have many birds that come through and the landlords have a birdhouse installed on the house so a family of swallows resides there. A few weeks ago I found a family of pheasants on our street and took some pictures of them. (Way more interesting wildlife [well moose aren't any different) than I had at my house in AP!)

I'm very excited about our yard and neighborhood. It'll be fun to make snowmen in this winter!

This is our "stream" before the pushki grew up.

If you look closely on the right in the middle you can see a baby.

Pushki growing very tall...

Anyone know what this is? It's growing in our yard.