shiriously?: Where have I been?!

Apologies to you, blog, for this unwarranted (yet totally warranted) hiatus. No hard feelings?

So where to begin? Not much house work has taken place at Chez Braffe (or Jafflow, take your pick) as of late. Mark and I rallied this weekend to clean, paint our guest room door, and paint a mirror. We should have the door and mirror complete tonight, so photos will follow soon.

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and I can hardly contain myself! They have only seen our home through the blog, and it definitely shows better in person if you ask me. They arrive on Friday evening, will stay with us Friday night, then drive up to Santa Barbara on Saturday morning for the day/night. On Sunday morning, they'll be back just in time for my dad to teach Mark (and I) how to re-facade the stucco on our exterior. My mom leaves early on Monday morning, but dad will stick around a couple of extra days to help us with some random projects around the house, which will hopefully include, replacing our kitchen window, installing a new ceiling fan, and fixing the socket in our master bathroom.

If you haven't figured it out already, my dad is super handy. And by super handy, I mean he can do practically anything -like Superman with a tool belt. He even built us new doors for our bathroom cabinets and shipped them to California. *I will be priming and painting them soon.

So back to where we've been... Mark turned the big dirty thirty last week! We decided to make a weekend out of it and went up to Boston, where he had never been before. We ate tons of chowdah, lobstah, drank lots of beeah (with an obligatory visit to the Sam Adams Brewery,) played in the leaves, hung out with old friends, and even went on the Ghosts and Gravestones tour, through the old cemeteries of Boston. Here are some photo highlights from our trip.