Long Time, No See!

I'm back!

Sorry it's been so long my friends, however I've been keeping busy. As you may know, my brother and my sister-in-law came to visit. They arrived early (according to MY calendar, haha), we showed them everything there is to show around here, we watched plenty of March Madness, and then of course, they had to go home. Booooo. Time always flies when you are having fun.

We spent a lot of their trip relaxing. My brother and his wife are both teachers, and my brother is a varsity boys basketball coach at the high school he teaches at. It sounds like they'd had an insanely busy last couple of months, so lucky for us, relaxing is what they wanted to do :) While the boys laid around watching basketball and playing video games, my sister-in-law and I were able to squeeze in going to the gym and on a couple of runs. We even ran a 5k! We both got PR's, and my sister-in-law came in 2nd in her age division, and 18th overall! I finally got my time under 30 minutes, arriving at 28:51. It was a feat for me! I was really excited and proud, and now I'm ready for my next goal- placing in my age division and getting one of those medals. I know I can do it. 

It seems the kids flew into Kentucky on the last heels of winter. The day they flew in is the last day we got a coating of snow. It was a little rainy and overcast for most of their trip, but we did get a couple of days of "shorts" weather. We definitely took advantage of this, getting outside for walks, hiking to the back of the hubby's grandfather's property, and sitting outside splitting a bottle of wine. 

All in all, their trip went so fast! We blinked, they were here, we blinked, and they were gone. So much fun though! I definitely had a couple of melancholy days after they left :)

So I will be moving back to my food blogging. I'm slowly getting things back to normal around the house, and that means planning recipes to blog about. The weather has not been conducive the last couple of days for photography. I had dark thunderstorms moving in at my peak photography times on both Thursday and Friday, for which my workaround is not taking pictures at all. Today is shaping up to be lovely though, so I expect to take lots of pictures when I get back from a long run.

In other happenings, I've got some new visitors in the yard-

This brown squirrel shows up every day around 4 pm.

The chipmunks have settled in. I've seen at least 5. They are so dang cute. I just love them.

The American Goldfinches didn't move in until we put up a black oil sunflower seed feeder.

Unfortunately, these Brown-Headed Cowbirds have started showing up. I'm letting them be for now, but I'm not fond of these "arseholes of the bird world".

A Big, fat, clumsy Turtledove. They crack me up with their seemingly clumsy movements.

Gizmo would get them all. If I would let him :)

I'm going to rap up this ramble-y post by talking about the latest book I'm reading. I picked up a non-fiction to read. I do that occasionally. 

Image source: Amazon

I'm just fascinated by ghost stories. I have been since I was a kid. I'm not really a believer in anything supernatural, but that doesn't mean I don't like to read about it and imagine things. I love that this book contains "true" stories. True in the sense that strange things happened to random people, not true in the sense that I believe ghosts exist. I get a kick out of the reading the stories, because a lot of them probably do have just weird explanations behind them. A weird explanation that may not have been plausible at the time of the happening (most of the stories are from the 1800's). Overall, I'd say it's a very dry book. It reads like a book that a professor would have you read for a class- if that class were "Haunted History" or something of that sort. I'll probably read an easy fiction after this book (in fact, Divergent is sitting next to me right now!) since it is so matter-of-factly written. If you are a ghost story lover, you will enjoy this book!

I hope everyone is having a relaxing weekend. I'll be back tomorrow with new recipes, yippee!

And I just have to say, GO CATS!

Kentucky will be playing in the national championship tomorrow!

We have a happy hubby in this home :)