in bloom

My bet on when the orchid would bloom was way off. It started to open up yesterday and this morning was completely open. So, even Colin was three days off, but I still owe him a back rub.


In other outdoor news, our garden is looking good! Our tomato, bush beans, cucumber, and potato plants are in bloom. Yay! I harvested our second round of compost and made compost tea from it last week, so our garden got an extra boost of nutrition, and I gave some concentrate to three other people to share the love.

ladybugs and an orchid

This orchid was blooming when it was given to us back in February. When it stopped blooming, I didn't have much hope for it because I've never been able to get an orchid to bloom again. I stuck it under the patio table, where it got the water drips from the faucet that's under there. I guess it loved it because now it's about to bloom again! And, it looks like multiple blooms might come out!

So, Colin and I bet on when it would break forth into full bloom. This is how it looked Sunday. I bet on Monday and it still looks pretty much the same. Colin's bet was much more conservative - this coming Sunday, I think. So it looks like he wins the free massage.




We bought a little plastic tub of ladybugs on Saturday and released them Saturday night. I took pictures Sunday morning, but now there are none left in sight in the garden. I don't know if they'll come back, or if they had time to lay their eggs. I hope so! We bought them to see if they'd take care of our whitefly problem.

fondue!

I've had an easy week of not working much (doing most of the work I'm doing at home), so I had time to make homemade marshmallows and meringues for our last book club fondue party on Tuesday night.

We had three cheese fondue, shrimp and hot wings from The Boiling Crab, veggies, bread, and salad. Yum!

And then chocolate fondue with marshmallows, merigues, strawberries, bananas, pretzels, and two kinds of cookies. Oh so tasty.

Monday garden update

We have white flies and need to do something about them. Some of our seeds never sprouted, but our bush beans and tomatoes at least seem to be doing great!

The apartment complex trimmed the tree that was blocking some of our garden's sun, so maybe it has a bit of a better chance after all!

weekend...

Ah, another weekend gone so quickly!

Colin surprised me with a night out on Friday night. We enjoyed dinner at a vegan restaurant in Laguna Beach, a few minutes on the beach, and then the symphony in Costa Mesa! We got the cheapest tickets, which look over the back of the orchestra and provides an interesting view. It really is amazing to see all those instruments come together so smoothly and beautifully.

Tonight we met with the Korean couple who live directly above us for language exchange. I wasn't really looking forward to it, but it was pretty fun! The men met in our apartment and the women met in theirs. We spent half the time speaking in English and the next half speaking only Korean. If we keep it up, I think it might be my best language learning opportunity yet! They don't speak English well, so our default language is Korean. With all my other language partners, the opposite has been true, so I'm looking forward to seeing what progress I can make. I had sort of resigned myself to the fact that my Korean might not get any better, but now I'm a lot more hopeful that I can improve.

The other thing I got done this weekend is branch out a little on my Etsy shop. I was inspired with some of the vintage fabrics I found in the store I'm working at now to make some accessories to give discarded fabrics new life. I posted three new things on lelabela.etsy.com and am working on a few more:

Audra's visit

Going through my photos, I realized I never posted pictures of my cousin Audra's weekend visit more than a month ago!

We did some of the same things that were on the agenda for my cousin Sarah's visit, like going to Redondo Pier for yummy shrimp, potatoes, and garlic bread.


Audra wasn't here for long, but we squeezed in as much as we could, including Vietnamese hour long massages and an afternoon and evening on the beach with Girl Scout dinner packets.


We ended her visit with In-n-Out, a trip to see the Hollywood sign, and Rodeo Drive on the way to the airport.

If you're down with a couch/floor in the living room to sleep on, come visit!

fun photo booth

This picture is from our friends' double one year old birthday party for two cousins a few weekends ago. They set up a photo booth with props and we had a little fun. We set up a video guestbook with props at our wedding, but we still haven't edited (or really looked at) the video from it!