Days with the Dorans

It was the end of an era for Ali but I think that she didn't feel it as much as I did. We moved her out of her "Apartment" which was more like a house (that's her bedroom window up top). She lived there with five other girls and to be honest, I was impressed they lasted as long as they did. Four of them decided they wanted to live elsewhere and so Ali and her college bestie, Hannah, will be be heading to a new apartment in August. Because her one lease ended before the new one started, she had to move her things into storage so Jeff and I decided to make a weekend of it and scratch off some of our adventures. Jeff and I went up separately and we took Joey and his friends Mike and Liam out to dinner at Jon's restaurant. It was great to see him too. After dinner Jeff and I went to Bells. We had some yummy drinks and I ran into a coworker (Danielle- such a small world). There was a Led Zepplin tribute band that we could hear and that made it fun too!  Ali got to Kala...

We have been trying to visit Jeff's mom for a bit now but we were gone for a week up north and it seemed the dates we could make, she couldn't. We were happy to finally be able to connect. All of the kids were working so it was just Jeff and I that went up so we decided to do a quick adventure date as well. Bay City is not far from Grandma's house and the adventure was to go to the "Tummy Ache Candy Store." It was a very small place too so we knew that it wouldn't be a long stop so we hit it before heading to Saginaw. I LOVED how colorful and unique the place was. There were baskets with candy that you could pull down from the ceiling and drawers that you could pull out with candy in them. There was also a retro-looking fridge that had yummy chocolates inside. Although it was small and we spent some time looking at everything, I am sure that we missed somethings. We got a few things (retro like candy that you don't see around anymore and Jeff got a caramel...

  We took our scratch tickets with us up north and found two nearby that both had to do with kayaking. Since we had our own kayaks, we had Z bring them up when he came on Tuesday so that we could used those to avoid a rental fee. Of the two we decided to do Bellaire because it was close and just really entailed kayaking and checking out a food barge on torch lake. We decided to go after Joey got to down so the four of us (Z had to go back home to work plus he spent most of his time with Kat), the boys had a kayak and Jeff and I had a kayak. We blew them up in the parking lot and were on our way. I was a bit nervous about parking but it actually wasn't a big deal. I was nervous for a bit since we went so far we could no longer really see what was happening on that shore. Jeff and I defintely went faster than the boys but it was fun to watch them having fun and catching up. We did an out and back since Torch lake it big and according to my watch, we did about 3 miles. The food barge ...

We were eager to go on another adventure date so this time we were off to Dearborn. It was weird that it happened to be another "art themed" date but this one was certainly different. We went to Speckles and Splatter, dressed in ponchos and threw paint at our canvases. When we started, it looked so funny because the wall was full of paint, but the canvas was so clean. They had big bowls of paint and we had a bucket of water to clean our brush and basically we just dipped our brush in the paint and threw it at the canvas. It was a lot of fun and we kind of felt like Dexter (a TV show about a serial killer who also was a blood spatter guy). I had a lot of fun and the process was actually quite therapeutic. Even non-artsy Jeff had fun! My Painting Jeff doing his They gave us some boxes to put our canvases in and told us it would take a bit to dry. We loaded them in the trunk of the car and then went to a music store that was right next store. They had a lot of vinyl and other th...

  For my birthday, Jeff got me a box of scratch off adventure dates for places throughout the state. We decided to scratch our first one and see what we were doing. The way the cards work is you can see WHERE something is and some clues about what it could be about (see the bottom of the card), but you don't know what you are actually doing until you scratch them! Well, we decided to head to Royal Oak because it wasn't too far and wasn't too expensive. We did some wheel throwing at the Creative Arts Studio. I didn't even know what "wheel throwing" was but it's basically making pottery on a wheel. We had a private lesson and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, my nails were a little too long (I meant to cut them- they grow so darn fast), so I had to use my knuckle but it still worked. We also got to pick out glazes so that when they fire our bowls they'll have color. The lady took a picture of us which was nice. After, we went out to lunch at Ale Mary...