dog – Page 2 – A Smith of All Trades

I love birthdays. I can thank my mother for that. She always made our birthdays wonderful. They are one day a year you get to feel special, or make someone you love feel special. Yesterday was Brian’s birthday, so I came up with a fun way to give him the gifts I’d gotten him.

BIRTHDAY JEOPARDY!

I made a full Jeopardy board (Brian loves that show & trivia games) and came up with 31 questions to go with it! I did one round, plus final jeopardy. Each category had a gift associated with it. My favorite category was: Tina, you “fat” lard. All of the answers had the word “fat” in them. And yes, the next category was Come get some dinner.

Here’s an example:

Tina, you “fat” lard

Watching, thinking of, hearing about or listening to Game of Thrones makes Jess this 8-letter word for tired.

What is ‘fat’igued?

Ding ding ding! For that question, B got the newest Game of Thrones book.

The best category and corresponding gift was in final Jeopardy.

Golden Retrievers

Jess’ three golden retrievers were all named after movie characters. Name the three films.

What are The Land Before Time, Indiana Jones and Ratatouille.

Buzzzz. B got this wrong (he didn’t know my first dog Sarah was named after Sarah the Triceratops in the Land Before Time. Rookie…. Also, Remmy isn’t really named after the rat in Ratatouille. But it worked so well for the clue!).

Since it was his birthday, he still got his gift.

A custom portrait of Remmy!

So this is basically the best, most amazing, adorable gift ever. As a blogger a super small small smallllll business owner (really, I can’t even claim that.. but whatevs), I always love to share other fantastic small businesses. I bought this print from Kathryn Selbert Illustrations, who has a shop on Etsy. I sent her three pictures of our pup with a few details, and she made this graphic drawing, basically combining all three into one adorable cartoonified Rem. LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE. I ordered this for B on Nov. 4, originally planning to give this to him for Christmas. But she sent me the file on Sunday (you can opt to print your own or she’ll send you a print) and I had it printed just in time for his birthday! Talk about amazing timing.

Here are the photos I sent her:

Here’s the illustration she made:

Is she talented or what?!? I love that she pulled in Rem’s bandana (which I think has since been destroyed) and that his big ol’ tongue is hanging out. I also love that it looks like a watercolor painting.

Let’s be honest, this was a gift for me just as much as it was a gift for Brian. We both love it. It’s definitely one of my favorite gifts I’ve ever given.

Kathryn has all sorts of other adorable illustrations available in her shop, so you should definitely check them out. She does two-week turnarounds, so there’s still plenty of time left to order your pet portraits before the holidays!

OK, I’m done raving now. Happy day-after-your-birthday to my main squeeze. Glad you liked your birthday game & gifts.

If you want to check out Brian’s other fun birthday “game,” check out my post on his beer scavenger hunt!

Holiday, Home Improvement

Happy Mother’s Day — and the start of a new project!

May 12, 2014May 12, 2014 Jessica Smith

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms out there! My Mother’s Day was fantastic — I got to see all three of my moms and hopefully made each of their days special. Oddly enough, you will see no photos of my moms in this post because during the time I got to spend with them yesterday I completely forgot to take pictures! Oops.

We started out our morning in Annapolis with my mom (who did remember to take pictures, phew!). It was a beautiful day for brunch on the Chesapeake Bay and we had a wonderful time.

It was also a beautiful day for a duck selfie. Sorry ladies. This goofball is taken 🙂

After brunch, the hubby and started on our new project: replacing our outdated brass closet doors in our living room. You might think it is odd that we chose to replace these doors in the five hours between brunch and when our guests would arrive for dinner. Well, we actually started this project on Saturday. … or, I started the project. I wanted to move our more modern (if you can call them that) sliding mirror doors from our guest bedroom to our living room to replace the brass doors from the ’80s.

The only picture I could find of the doors is here, from when I was painting the living room gray. It’s crazy how much in this one photo has changed! (The TV lived in that spot for maybe 2 weeks, we have a new front door, curtains, paint. That’s a lot for the front area of the house…)

Anyway, you can probably see where this is going. The brass doors were a ~~bitch~~ huge pain to remove and we ended up breaking the mirrors in both during the process. There was no turning back, which ended up being unfortunate because the replacement doors didn’t fit… which of course we learned after I spent 20 minutes hacksawing the frame down so it would fit in the opening. Grrrrr. Oh well!

So we took everything to the dump and planned on putting up new doors in between our Sunday engagements.

Here’s how the closet looks without the doors. Honestly, it looks way better without than it did with haha. You can see at the foot of the closet the strip of missing carpet and our hardwoods underneath! Someday I would love to rip up the carpet and refinish the floors 🙂 Call me a dreamer because it will probably never happen.

We want our doors to eventually look like the closet in our office:

We got the doors hung up, but there is currently no hardware, no paint, no reinforcing the bottom of the doors from the parts we cut off…. we have a little bit more to do! But I’ll save that for later.

Brian’s mom and my step mom came over for dinner as we wrapped up our door project. Thankfully I spent the majority of Saturday cleaning the house, setting up for dinner and prepping food because it was all ready to go when they arrived.

Check out my fancy table 🙂

I got to use my pretty teal napkins for the fist time and a lot of our wedding stemware! So fun. I even set up a “gift station” because I had to move our table from our dining room into our living room so the eight of us could eat comfortably. This chair and table were the only things in our dining room haha. Temporary solution!

Even though there are no moms pictured in this post, we had a wonderful day celebrating with our three leading ladies. Brian and I are fortunate to have been raised by wonderful women.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Garden

Farmer Jess

April 21, 2014April 21, 2014 Jessica Smith

Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I absolutely love to garden. I started my own garden with my dad’s help my junior year of college in the front yard of our rental home and I’ve been hooked ever since. My friends and family know how much I love it. My neighbors even call me Farmer Jess! Did I mentioned that my maiden name means “farmer” in German!?

This weekend was pretty much non-stop yard work and gardening. Brian and I started to tackle a huge project behind our fence, removing all of the branches, bushes, leave, etc., that we’d thrown back there the past two years and shredding it all in the wood chipper. We spent Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon and are about 2/3 the way complete. It looks so much better and our neighbors behind us even came out to say thank you and to introduce themselves! I found three snakes, all of which I tried to save from accidentally being raked and wood chipped But who cares anymore about yard work! I want to talk about my garden!!!!!

I went to Home Depot after Easter brunch yesterday and picked up some perennials for our front yard. I also got some pink begonias for the front of the house. But most important, I bought veggies, and lots of them.

In my excitement to start my vegetable garden I didn’t think too much about quantity… so I went overboard just a little. I bought 18 heads of romaine, 18 heads of spinach and 18 heads of butter crunch lettuce. Holy smokes, that is A LOT of lettuce.

We are gonna be eating a lot of salads this summer.

I also planted a ton of red and white onions! I’ve never planted onions before, so we’ll see how they do. I’m intrigued to find out just how you know when an onion is ready to be picked since they grow underground.

The hubby is excited about the onions — OK, he isn’t actually excited because gardening isn’t his thing at all (although he does like to harvest with me. Of course, the most fun part!), but he does loves onions.

I doubled my gates around the beds with onions because my evil dog loves to 1. be in places he is not allowed to be, 2. dig — but only in dirt, not in grass, 3. be an all-around jerk in his yard. And onions are really bad for dogs. He was only interested in my garden last year when I was inside it and he was on the other side of the fence, so here’s hoping with two fences and no people inside them, he leaves the garden beds alone. I’ll have to do some onion monitoring this week to make sure he’s not sneaking in when we aren’t looking.

The last thing I planted so far was herbs! I planted oregano, tarragon, sweet basil, sweet mint and rosemary. I bought some hanging planters on clearance last year from Target, so I planted my herbs, then hung each planter on the fence. I love how this looks!

I planted the basil with the lettuce since I plan on getting more of it later in the season.

I am pretty pumped that I already have a ton of stuff planted and that I used a bed I didn’t use last year and the space where an old stump used to be, so I’m hardly in any of the prime tomato panting territory! Woo! I’ll definitely be expanding my beds in the corner of my yard this year, too… when the time comes. My strawberries seem to be coming to life again, and the blueberry and raspberry bushes I planted last year… well, who knows how they did this winter. Yikes.

My last exciting garden news, and wow you will all think I am a huge dork, is that my asparagus that I planted two years ago sprouted!!!!! AHHHHH I was so excited I ran to find Brian to tell him. And then I called my dad 🙂 The funny thing is, there’s just one! I don’t know if more will grow or not… but either way, I love my single asparagus and it is going to be deliciousssss.

Anyone start their garden yet? If you did, what are you planting? I am thinking about planting broccoli in a planter on my deck this year. It always gets eaten in my garden, so if I don’t do a planter, I don’t want to plant it again. Too many worms.

As for the rest of my garden, I’m thinking TONS of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash/zucchini, and lots of peppers. Now peppers — Brian is excited for those. Hopefully this year he isn’t foolish enough to bite into a cayenne pepper, seeds and all. Ouch.

Tag: dog

Birthday Jeopardy (and the best gift ever)

Happy Mother’s Day — and the start of a new project!

Farmer Jess

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