I hope you all had a great 4th of July weekend! We went to our community park on Saturday night for the fireworks. We usually sit on the hill every year but decided to sit on the soccer field and that was the best place! We brought chairs & blankets so we were able to lay down and watch the fireworks.

The rest of the weekend was spent at Home Depot getting stuff for our garage, working on websites and relaxing. We also had dinner at my parents’ house. I’m so lucky that my parents are awesome and fun to hang out with because I obviously didn’t think so when I was younger.

We played games & sat outside to watch the storm. The storms that we have here in Arizona are exciting & fun!

Credit: ABC15

Hello monsoon season! We had a really huge dust storm last night. It also rained for a little bit. Tyler and I hung outside for a while. The rain felt really good and I love the smell of the rain here in Arizona.

This morning, I walked outside to see the ground coated with dirt and looked over to my car…

…to see Carmella all dirty from the dust storm. Beautiful, huh? As I was driving to work this morning, I thought about getting Carmella washed but it’s pointless since we’re supposed to have another storm tonight and it’s monsoon season.

I got off the freeway near work and saw that the car wash place was really busy and cars were lining up. Seriously? There were even some cars that weren’t covered with dirt waiting in line. Pathetic!

Carmella can handle the dirt and will probably be washed tonight by the rain. :)

See how close the house is next door? It was really nice when no one was living there but then 5 months ago a nice & sweet family moved in. One of our bedroom windows is faced this way. I love having the windows open to bring natural light in but with our bedroom we haven’t been able to really open the windows.

So last month we found this great shade from Costco for $40. My dad came over to help Tyler get it up. We were concerned about the shade moving so we drilled holes on the side and got super duty bungee cords attached then hooked them to the shade and now it works great!

Ta-da! Doesn’t it look great? I like how it has a natural color so it blends right in with everything else. Maybe we should go buy bathrobes and have breakfast outside now that we have our privacy. Oh right, we don’t wear bathrobes…too heavy and feels weird!

Anyways…now that we have our privacy, we still had one more problem. Every day when we come home from work and walk into our bedroom, it was like walking into a sauna. It gets sooo hot in our room since we don’t have sunscreens. We have had some restless nights where it was too hot even with the fan on full blast. With the temperatures rising, we knew it was time to get sunscreens.

My dad works for a sunscreen & door company, so he was able to get us a quote for 5 windows and a sliding door. We wanted to do only our master bedroom and bath for now. My dad didn’t want commission so we actually saved a lot of money and got 5 sunscreens and a sliding door for under $300.  (Thanks, Dad!!!)

We know the sunscreens are working and helping because Tyler woke up late the other morning for work. It was too dark in our room for it to be almost 7AM! It’s actually cooler in our room and really makes a big difference. Imagine drying your hair with a blow dryer in a sauna!! That’s how hot it was in our room and bathroom before.

This past weekend we saw these chairs for sale at Bed Bath & Beyond and knew we were in need for an upgrade. The chairs were priced at $39.99 each and we had 2 coupons for 20% off of one single item so because of that we made 2 separate purchases. So we were able to save $16!

We had dinner outside the other night and even played a game too. It’s just the perfect time to do things outside before it’s 100 degrees which is just around the corner!

Sigh, I can never get enough of this!

P.S. I changed the design of my header again. :)

Happy New Year!!  We rang in 2011 at a party. Our awesome hosts got creative & made this 2011 sign with Christmas lights! We all had a great time dressing up & bringing over appetizers. We stayed until 3AM and then headed home.

We stayed up a little bit after we got home with 2 other friends and played foosball until 5AM. I even kicked my hubby’s butt at foosball! What a great way to begin the year, I know. :) For those of you who didn’t see my tweet about the foosball table, Tyler convinced me to buy a foosball table with our Christmas money. I’m just so glad it was on sale so we had some Christmas money left!

It snowed in some areas of Phoenix earlier this week!!! And it happened to be where I live so I just got home in time to see it snowing. I headed over to my parents’ house since they live closer to the mountains. It was that exciting that I had to take a picture of the snow on my sweater. Haha, don’t judge me! We never get snow in Phoenix. Sure, I’ve seen snow before especially when I lived in NY when I went to college…. but this kind of snow was different!

As I was leaving, you could see mountains with snow far away. It was gorgeous! I even turned around since I wasn’t that far away from my parents’ house to tell my Dad to check it out. He interrupted me and said, “You came back to tell us that?!” Um, yes, Dad… I’m a snow-chaser!!

Seriously, I don’t know where 2010 went. Just when I got the hang of writing 2010… I guess 2011 decided to roll in. Anyways, I wish you all a great Happy New Year!!