Our First Anniversary

Hey, this is Deric.
As most of you know we just celebrated our first anniversary on October 21. We weren't sure what we wanted to do, but we just wanted to relax and have a good time. We decided to go to Devil's Den State park and hike some of the trails and have a picnic lunch. Devil's Den is only about 40 minutes away from where we live, so it would be a nice day-trip. We had a beautiful day. We couldn't ask for any better. It was sunny and about 75 degrees, and a little windy. We took Divot along with us as you can see. He really liked running on the trail, and turned out to be a better hiker than either of us were. We were hoping that the leaves would be changing and we could get some good pictures of the fall colors in the Ozarks. However, we had a pretty warm fall and the leaves hadn't really started changing yet. Amanda packed us a picnic lunch and we ate at Devil's Den, then we drove further south to the top of Mt. Gaylor to see the sites looking down into the valley. It was a really nice day, we had a lot of fun.
We headed back home and just had a nice evening at home. Here you can see Amanda in our kitchen, getting ready to pop open some champagne. She is standing next to another part of our anniversary gift to each other. Yep, that is our new stainless steel refrigerator. All of the rest of the appliances came with the house, but we didn't have a frige. One of the guys at work was selling an old one because he was moving, and I am always looking to save a few bucks, so I bought it. Unfortunately it was white and didn't match the rest of our kitchen. The entire year we always said that we were going to buy one, but we never did. Well, Amanda decided that a year was long enough to wait, and we went ahead and got one. When they delivered it to the house we got some bad news. The new frige was too tall to fit underneath our cabinets. I had measured it, and it should have worked, but for some reason it was about a quarter inch too tall. I bought a hand planer and my boss helped me plane down the cabinets enough to just slide the refrigerator in, and now it looks really nice. So our stainless steel kitchen is finally complete.
It has been a few weeks since our anniversary and now the leaves are really starting to change. This past spring we bought an Autumn Blaze maple tree to put in our front yard. We moved into a new subdivision, so all of the trees were these little sticks staked up in the front yards. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to go a little bit bigger. I wanted to set the bar higher and see if any of my neighbors would follow suit. Unfortunately, none of them have yet... maybe next spring. Here is a picture of the front of our house taken a couple days ago. You can see the leaves on our tree have completely changed. It went from pretty warm, to really cold in the matter of a few days and the leaves changed really fast. Our tree still looks kinda thin as far as the branches go, but hopefully next year it will really fill out.
Well, it is time for me to end this blog entry. I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

-Deric