Oh my gosh- look what we found in our back yard!!!

Matt found this in the back yard while he was mowing.  We live nowhere near water, so to find a crayfish in the yard is bizarre

Matt saw a couple of hawks fighting, he's guessing this is what they were fighting over and it was dropped

This thing is huge- I've seen a lot of crayfish, but never one this big- I contemplated cooking it up, but it's a lot of work for a little meat, even at this size.  A Missouri lobster though- yum

And it's blue- like the most beautiful blue green, the pictures definitely don't do it justice- we'll probably drive it down to the blue river and toss it in.  It's just to big and healthy to let die.  Mean sucker though- didn't like the photo shoot at all

A revamp of the bloggy blog

I started this blog shortly before I got engaged and it morphed into this ridiculous wedding blog. I was posting and posting and posting all things wedding and pretty back when I was planning. One year later I got married and was so done with wedding planning, I didn't even want to look at all the wedding blogs I had been so loyally following. I kicked them all of my following list and never went back. I kept a few that were actually getting married themselves and were very close to their weddings so I could see how it went, but the wedding blogs that just covered weddings, I was done with. Four days after the wedding, I got pregnant, and now the blog has turned into all things Charlie. This blog is going to be only our family now for pretty much my personal use and updates for friends and family. I even went so far as to go back and DELETE all the millions of dress, shoes, idea posts I was putting up for the wedding. And some day, I'll probably even go back and delete the nursery idea posts I've put up. I kept a few of my very favorite posts like

my favorite wedding ever

The coolest idea for a wedding ever

MN Girls are awesome

Cute pics and more cute pics

And this post that made my heart skip and this one that made my heart double skip

Whew- it's almost a relief to have this blog so cleaned up.

Build me this!

Matt and his dad are a very handy bunch. We will probably be building a playset for Charlie as opposed to buying one. I love this playset, I want them to build this. Just need a side bar to hang swings on and it's perfect!

My wedding flowers

So, fall wedding, no budget, love fresh flowers, love color, this is what I came up with. Don't you love it in fall when everyone starts putting out their mums? They are so full and colorful. I always wanted a big full bouquet. So I thought we'd do mums, just grab them together at the base, cut the stems and wrap a ribbon around them. They are so full, it would just be a canopy of color. Ta-da! A bouquet for under $10. I really wanted red and I thought my matron of honor, who will be in brown, could carry yellow mums and my maid of honor, who will be in red, could carry orange mums.

Fancy multi-colored mums

Then I saw this and I thought- screw the red. How amazing are these mums? This is some kind of hybrid, I'm thinking I won't be able to find it at my local nursery. I did learn of Belgium mums while compiling this gallery- they are much fuller than regular mums.

My other mum post here

Our (non alcoholic) drinks

So, we will have a few people that aren't big drinkers at the wedding. Plus, quite a few teenagers. I wanted to have something besides tea and water for them. We'll have lots and lots of booze- I come from a good ol' Irish Catholic family. I didn't want to be like oh, we have beer, wine, champagne etc or.....coke. We can't afford Jones soda or something cool like that so, with a little help from Matt's sister Sheila (who has become my awesomest helper lately), this is what we came up with.

I looked into Pomegranate concentrate- ugh, just too expensive.

So, I bought pomegranate cherry juice at hy-vee (huge bottle for about $3.50) and raspberry cherry juice (again, at hy-vee, huge bottle for $1.88!) and we sat around and experimented different proportions and using 7-up or generic lemon-lime, (we hate sprite, too sweet). So we decided it's best 1/4 juice to 3/4 pop and we liked 7-up, more fizzie and less sweet. Putting a fresh squeeze of lime is very important- adds a little bit of needed tartness. (Later we mixed it with vodka and it was delicious!). We'll call them Fizzies or something to make them sound fancier than they really are.

They are more pretty than good, but I think people will like them, plus give them something fun to drink if they don't want alcohol.

The Case for Technology

ThruYou is a project by Kutiman that involves sampling videos on Youtube to create all new music. The results are pretty impressive. In Kutiman's own words:
What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated Youtube videos/clips editing together to create ThruYou. In other words - what you see is what you hear.

found via geekologie

Everytime I think technology is going to be the ruin of civilization(as I blog), I see something as cool as this.