3 Days

Three days to go until we finally close on our house. I have to admit there are probably a million things running through our heads today. Anything from what paint color we will use and how the walk through will go to I wonder if the lawyer has all the papers we need to sign. It's hard to believe home ownership is just around the corner but we couldn't be more excited!

Marc is taking next week off work so we can get a jump start on the house work. We're hoping to get some painting done inside the house, some yard work done outside the house and get the kegerator fully set up and functioning. Marc's sister Effie and her family will also be visiting us next week. They won't be staying at the house but they will officially be our first visitors. We're looking forward to taking a break on the house work on Wednesday to enjoy the Fourth of July with them.

We met with our lawyer this morning, this afternoon I have to get the check for our closing costs and then this weekend we are running around picking up last minute items. Hopefully everything goes smoothly on Monday and the next time we post we will be official home owners.

Luna Moth

When I walked out to the car today I was greeted by this guy

A friendly Luna moth (thanks Erin for helping me identify it!). I have never seen a moth as big as this, he was about the size of my palm. He was just hanging out on the rafters above my car. I loved the shape of his wings and the little eyes on the top. 


We've been having some hot weather here lately, upper 90s and humid. We're supposed to get a break this afternoon with some thunderstorms and then next week we should drop back in to the 70s and 80s again. Tomorrow Marc and I are heading to the wedding of his cousin Michael to Melissa. It's going to be a weekend full of family!

Saratoga Brewfest

This past weekend Marc and I drove out to upstate New York to meet up with my friend Kate and her husband Rob for the Saratoga Brewfest. We started out by meeting up in Saratoga Springs for a leisurely lunch. Then around 3pm we headed to the brewfest at the fairgrounds. There was 20,000 square feet of covered space where we could taste over 125 beers from 50 plus craft breweries. There was beer from Stone Brewery in California to Long Trail in Vermont and everything in between. We had a great time trying the different beers and catching up.

After the brewfest Kate suggested we head out to Harvest and Hearth for some pizza. She had found a great review on Chowhound and thank goodness she did. The restaurant was right on the water and as we pulled into the parking lot we were able to watch the sunset over the creek. Originally we were given a wait time of 20 minutes but ended up being seated in just 10 minutes. The pizza was to die for. We split a pepperoni and a mushroom pizza and couldn't have been happier. I guess after the brewfest we were all hungry because the pizzas disappeared quite rapidly.

On Sunday we enjoyed breakfast together and then parted ways. Marc and I headed back to Vermont, stopping for a surprise visit to his mom in Rutland on our way home. It was such a beautiful weekend and great to be able to spend time with Kate, Rob and Marc's mom.

Sparked

In high school we had a certain number of community service hours we had to complete each year. I'm not exactly sure what happened if you didn't complete them but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have been able to graduate or maybe not even have moved on to the next grade level. What I do know is that I had lots of fun completing my service hours and have fond memories volunteering with my friends.

After I left high school I always tried to keep volunteering in my life. I was part of a service club in college and volunteered whenever friends suggested an opportunity. Recently however I have fallen out of the habit. What with our move across the country, our house hunt and purchase, the impending packing and moving, I haven't quite gotten myself organized to volunteer here in Vermont. Thankfully I came across this website called Sparked. Maybe I'm late to the game or maybe, like me, you have never heard of Sparked before. Either way I wanted to write about it because I am really enjoying it.

Sparked is a microvolunteering website. In their words microvolunteering is "volunteering that you can do in small bits of time - from 5 minutes to 2 hours. It's high-impact, high-efficiency do-gooding." Basically you go to sparked.com, set up an account that includes your interests and your skills and then you have access to a list of challenges for which you can volunteer. You choose what you want to do, you choose how long you work on it and that's it! For example I just worked on challenge that was typing subtitles for a YouTube video on Suicide and the Media for an organization in New Zealand.

I think it's a really neat idea and it fits really well into my schedule. I can pick it up or put it down whenever I need to. Plus they have challenges for all sorts of skills and interests so I won't always be working on the same thing. Hopefully this will satisfy my need to volunteer until I can search out other opportunities in my neighborhood.

Local Food

One of the benefits of living in Vermont is our access to fresh local foods. My friend Irene recently shared an article with me that ranks Vermont at the top of the Local Food Index. According to the article the rank is based on the states "commitment to raising and eating locally grown food based on the number of farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms" (CSA). "Vermont has 99 farmers markets and 164 CSAs, with a [state] population of fewer than 622,000".

Marc and I have yet to sign up for a CSA share but we do frequently visit the Norwich Farmer's Market and the local food Co-Op. Plus, once we get into our house we are hoping to make the most of our land and gardens.