living room decor and hair cut

I have spent some time this week setting up a few more things in our house. Now that the living room is painted, I was able to make the large bookshelf and attach it to the wall. I also started unpacking artwork and getting it put up.

In the evening, we often have a lovely view of the sky from the front windows. Here is a picture a took a couple days ago, as the sun was setting. We often have pink light filling the front room around 5:30 pm, which looks very nice.

Here are the results of some of the work I described above. We still have a few boxes sitting out, but the number is decreasing. Now that the bookcase is attached to the wall, I was able to fill it with books and photos. I was actually pretty impressed with the number of books that case holds.

Today, I got my hair cut! I wanted to have it short for Hungary, so it will take less time to wash. Plus, it was getting annoyingly long. Here is the before shot:

And here is what it looks like now:

A warm winter walk

Ginger stayed with us for a couple days again this week, and we took a nice long walk together. Since she can't work the camera well, I took a few pictures with her in them.

We headed south from our house to walk in the Eden Park area. There are a lot of nice paths and a string a small parks. One we walked through has an interesting tower:

Here is a close up of some of the tower's details:

We also walked through a park with two duck ponds and a beautiful view of the river. There were many birds flying around when we were there, along with many ducks and geese in the pond. Ginger wanted to get a lot closer to the ducks, but I made her keep her distance. She did watch them for a little while, and she even barked at a couple of them (who ignored her).

Looking towards the ducks:

Looking back towards the river:

Another nice park in the area is Mirror Lake. I took this picture a few days ago, on a clearer day. You can see Kentucky on the horizon on the right. It is a nice lake to walk around, although it is really a shallow artificial pond.

Warm winter?

We have been having an unseasonably warm winter this year. The last couple days have been especially nice--up to 60 degrees each afternoon and sunny! All this nice weather has me out walking more than usual (for the winter). Today on my walk, I saw these confused crocuses in a neighbor's from yard. The bulbs in our yard are definitely up, but none of them have bloomed (yet). I will let you know if they bloom in the coming days.

And now for something completely different:

We are still eating sushi, since Brian has decided he likes it and I like to practice making the rolls. Here are the filling ingredients I prepped tonight, before making the rolls. I tried using asparagus for the first time, which tasted good.