Perfect View

Somehow, I managed to make this lovely 3-day weekend stretch to the point that I'm not even (completely) dreading going back to work tomorrow. While the weekend was supposed to start off even earlier with our last 1pm "Summer Friday" dismissal at work, I stuck around the quiet office for a couple hours color correcting and tweaking all of Amanda's American Idol meet & greet pictures. Surprisingly, I didn't much mind being at work later than necessary as my time playing around in Photoshop was a nice reminder of how much I enjoy working with the Adobe Suite.

Saturday night we headed out to Naperville with Erin and Kadence for "Last Fling". Kadence had a blast dancing with her Uncle Dan!


On Sunday, my mom and I headed out to Oakbrook and Yorktown... and I bought the Hanging Capiz Pendant from West Elm for the dining room!!


The current online price was $20 less than the "sale" price in store, so thanks to having done my browsing on the website ahead of time I was able to get the online price in store, plus not pay shipping! I absolutely cannot wait to install it, but that will require a "conversion kit" that they unfortunately did not have in stock, so we're going to see if it's something we can buy at Home Depot.

Sunday evening was the Labor Day Extravaganza celebration at the park down the block, so we invited my parents and Manda over for a BBQ and had plans to walk to the park for the fireworks. Turns out that drumsticks on the grill take longer than expected, so our food was just coming off the heat when we heard the first of the fireworks from the park. We decided to hurry and pack up our dinner picnic style, but as my parents went to the front of the house they realized that we have a PERFECT 99%-unobstructed view of the fireworks from right out in front of our house! So, we grabbed paper plates and ate our dinner on the porch with the fireworks overhead.


We'll definitely have to keep our perfect view in mind when the 4th of July rolls around again next year.

Our dinner was super simple thanks to the zest and juice of a lemon, some garlic, a pinch of salt and pepper, a bit of olive oil and a bunch of oregano, which makes for a DELICIOUS chicken marinade. (The original recipe is from one of my latest magazine subscriptions - Bon Apetit!)