Things, things, and more things!

It's been a little (well, a LOT) longer than I meant between updates - oops! Part of it is because I've been spending increasing amounts of my free time here:

...on my treadmill, plugging away as I try to increase my distance. I'll be running a half marathon in June (in Utah) and a full marathon in late October (in Switzerland), so I've got some serious training to do! So far, so good...I'm up to about 4.5 miles nonstop.

I have been doing things aside from running, though!

I finally got to meet my cousin Aaron and his wife Joyce! They live nearby (and are also the only other Pattens I've met outside of my immediate family). We had dinner with them a few weeks ago; it was really neat to spend some time with them. We're hoping to have them over to our house sometime soon!

Mark and I put our fondue pot to good use and cooked up some meat for dinner one night. We also made some salsa from scratch; it was really good. The improvised tortilla chips made from whole wheat tortillas, not so much. Oh well. :)

We also took the time to get my wine kit started! I've been meaning to do this for a while, and finally ordered the kit and the juice. It was rather, um, fragrant after a few days, but it's coming along nicely.

A few days later Mark and I had a Saturday off; our friends Jen and Bryan were getting married in PA, so we drove up for the day to go to the wedding. It was in West Chester, which is pretty close to Longwood Gardens. We didn't have enough time to stop there, but we did have enough time to hit up Ruby's Diner for lunch! Mmm...guacamole burger...

This is actually the only picture I took of any of the wedding stuff. Oops. At any rate, everything was really nice, Jen's dress was really pretty, the food was great, and the drinks were strong. Works for me!

Mark and I have become fairly good at siphoning. The wine is much less smelly now, and we should be doing some more stuff to it in the next day or two. Hopefully all this science turns into something delicious. (And yes, we are so classy that we're basically making wine in our bathroom.)

My parents sent Mark a wind up robot for his birthday. We decided to see if he would win in a fight against my wind up octopus robot. Bacon just wanted to play with them both.

Mark finally got sick of his 'well-loved' GTI a few weeks ago and got rid of it. He replaced it with a brand new Hyundai Elantra. I think he said it only had 14 miles on it when he bought it. It's much more comfortable (and way roomier) than his old car.

And finally, our flowers are starting to bloom! We really lucked out this winter; I think the most we had was about an inch and a half of snow. Works for me!