4 hours of tennis and this is what happens...

I think I need to buy titanium strings :)

Plants are nice

Over the past month or so, Nick and I have decided that we needed to spruce up our place a bit, particularly our patio. After our trip from Europe, we realized that we forgot to ask someone to water our plants, so when we got home, we discovered that all of our plants on the patio were dead. We never did anything with them, so for a few months, we had a few dead plants and a grill on our patio, making it oh so pretty to look at, especially when it's the first thing we see when we open up our curtains. Anyway, we decided it was time to do something about that, so we went to a couple of nurseries around town and to buy outdoor plants, as well as some indoor plants.

Whenever someone asked if we were looking for anything in particular or if we had some type of theme we were trying to work with, our answer was basically "something that you can't kill very easily." I was thinking that we would be shown a lot of cacti, but I was surprised to see just how many varieties of trees there were that didn't require continuous watering and could withstand many days of sun.

One type of tree that we purchased was nicknamed the "Oriental Pom Pom." It looks like some type of bonsai, since each 'pom pom' looks very neatly pruned. They were cute, so we actually got two of them, plus a couple of house plants. They arrived a couple of weeks later, which resulted in our patio having two living Oriental Pom Poms and a bunch of dead plants. We decided the Pom Poms needed friends because they looked really lonely, so we went to another nursery and purchased some larger trees to fill up our patio space, as well as a couple more indoor plants.


They were delivered last week and I must admit that having living plants on our patio has really made a huge difference. It's really nice to open up the curtains to see green (as opposed to dead plants, or the huge concrete wall that is on the other side of the fire lane that our patio is on). Also, the indoor plants really give our place some character. We're not entirely sure what Kitty thinks of them though...we're fairly certain she thinks they're toys because we've noticed some bite marks on some of the leaves.

So, we're both happy with our decision to add greenery to our place. I just hope that Nick's able to take care of them for longer than a year so that we don't have to go through this process all over again next year.

Kitty likes plants:

Blue Cheese Truffle

So a couple of weeks ago, I get an email from Vosges Haut Chocolat saying that Katrina's newest collection will involve cheese and chocolate. So for a short time, she was offering samples of her working recipe for a blue cheese truffle, with a purchase of anything. According to the description, the blue cheese is combined with white chocolate, which is then completely enrobed in dark chocolate. At first, I had no interest in it, mostly because I really don't like blue cheese...but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Katrina could actually make me like blue cheese. So I placed an order of some boxes of chocolate and made sure to enter the promotion code to receive my blue cheese truffle sample, and then patiently waited for my order to arrive.

A few days later, I receive my order, which came in a huge cardboard box (I don't have the exact measurements, but it seemed like it was almost 3 feet cube). And then I open up the box to find an equally large styrofoam box inside and begin to wonder how big my order actually is. I discover that the box is 80% full of those plastic air pockets...it feels like a huge waste of resources, but it might have been because I ordered a cake, which needed to be heavily insulated to survive the delivery. Anyway, I open up the order to quickly find the blue cheese truffle that I've been so anticipating for so long. I sort of wanted to try it then, but decided that I would wait until I got home so that Nick could enjoy it with me.

I also changed my status message to reference the blue cheese truffle, which elicited a few IM's asking if I had already eaten it yet. Eventually, the work day ended, and we went home. I immediately show Nick the blue cheese truffle, which is neatly packaged in a small cellophane envelope tied with a purple ribbon. Nick takes the truffle out of the envelope and takes a bite out of it, and produces a look of sheer disgust...it was as if he was about to spit out the truffle, which didn't make me think that I would enjoy it at all, especially since Nick's the one who actually likes cheese. However, I bravely took a small bite of the truffle. I seriously could only taste the blue cheese at first, and then the dark chocolate kicked in later. It was a very interesting taste, and one that I did not want to have again anytime soon. We threw the uneaten piece of the truffle in the trash :(

So, in the end, it was a crazy taste experience. I'm wary of the full on cheese and chocolate collection, but I think I will get it just to taste the other flavors.