Jennifer's 365 Project

Yup. It's one of those kinds of days.

Pizza on the grill again.

I love that thing.

Today is my younger cousin (first cousin, once removed) Ashlyn's wedding day over in Linwood.

I didn't snap any photos of the wedding ceremony, but I did get a few of the reception. As you can see, it was a setup for a large crowd.
It was great to see my grandmother and aunts and uncles, as well as several cousins I haven't seen in ages. Plus the food was tasty and they had an awesome photobooth they rented.
All in all it was a great time. I'm glad I got to see my family and enjoy an evening with them. I wish we got together more often (and that it didn't take 3 hours to drive to visit them).

Yes, it is very hot outside. But I couldn't resist my craving for home-made chocolate chip cookies.

Unfortunately I was out of regular chocolate chips so I settled on mini M&Ms. For the record they are not as tasty as full blown chocolate chips. 

I got to wander the halls of the local community college downtown while looking for my credit union branch (which is located in the school). Being there brought back memories of hanging out in school classrooms without air conditioning. It was so warm!

One of the fun parts about working downtown is getting to hang out at Rosa Parks circle after work. I actually enjoy hanging out there quite a bit. It's not as scenic as walking along the river, but it's a pretty peaceful place to hang out and read a book when you have some downtime.

Sometimes the most peaceful thing is just listening to leaves blowing in the wind.

It was nicer out today so we decided to enjoy our last day of vacation at the park. It is a weird day when I say the weather is nice and it's 80 degrees, but I suppose compared 100+ degrees, it is.

We walked over to the park by us and enjoyed a tasty lunch. Palmer Park is almost always peaceful and quiet, no matter what day we are there (I'm not even sure people know that park is there).
One of the great things about the park is the boardwalk and all the cool things you can see, like this adorable fawn. It's not a very good photo, but promise me, it was adorable.


Now I wish I had taken my SLR with me on the walk....

Next time.

After the movie, which I thought would be ok for anyone who was under 17 and had not seen the Toby Maguire films, we hung out for several hours eating and chatting.

After awhile the sun started to set and we decided we should all head home. We migrated from the restaurant to the parking lot where we promptly hung out awhile longer to internet videos, which is kind of awesome.

Sometimes it's hard to catch up on everything in an afternoon, but we tried!

If you're interested, Chis has a spoiler-laden rant here which hits most of the major issue I had with the film.

 It's really hot outside....
..so I tried to avoid going out too much. I did go out in the morning to pick up a package from the post office  (and it was totally worth going into the heat to have dinner and drinks with Lori). 


Adorable tiny routers I ordered arrived and were ready for modification. My intent is to take this small little box and use it as a wireless repeater so we can get wifi on the deck. So installed OpenWrt and got working.
Chris and I messed around with the solar lights a little as well. Chris did most of the work shaving off the plastic with the dremel and trying to free the solar panel from it's enclosure.

We still haven't embedded it into anything yet, so  wasn't able to test the newly freed solar panel on the newly painted jars from yesterday.
Instead I just used the existing cap I have just to see how it looked. They're alright, but not as colorful as I'd hoped. Maybe the larger jar needs another coat.

We kicked off our Thursday vacation day with a trip to the vet for Leki (he's due for his shots). As he was the last time several years ago, the cat was a holy terror (despite what he looks like in the photo).

As he gets older and older he's less and less tolerant to things. As a kitten he handled car trips to Traverse City as well as new houses and people very well. With out much travel the last few years this cat has gotten less and less tolerant of change.
I have some cherries that are super ripe and bordering on going bad so I decided to make some cherry cobbler this afternoon.

Of course, it's really hot outside (about 100 Fahrenheit) so I didn't really want to turn on the oven...
..so instead I used the grill. I used the basics of this recipe, but just doubled the cherry amount instead of using blueberries and cherries.
I did slightly overcook it on the grill. I suppose 100+ degrees will help the cooking process along. I even shaved about 10 minutes off the cooking time too.

It was still delicious.
I'm still trying to figure out the perfect solar light and this afternoon seemed like a perfect opportunity to work on it. I found a few more cheap solar lights for a dollar and snagged them. My plan is to strip away the majority of the plastic and install the sensor directly on top of the jar lid.

While we were out went and hit a local craft store to pick up some outdoor mod podge (glue, essentially) and some cheap canning jars. Unfortunately they didn't have any outdoor mod podge so we picked up some super glossy stuff and hopefully that's good enough.
I added some food coloring to the mod podge and coated the glass jars in orange paste.

Now to to wait for them to dry and see how they look in the dark. I'd like to create something similar to this blogpost, but the solar lights I have are much smaller and, frankly, uglier (also probably why they were only a dollar).

Ok, it's really hot outside. Part of me would love to go out and check out some 4th of July festivities but that would be fun for about five minutes and then I'd be miserable in the heat. So instead I stayed indoors and worked on my Arduino projects.
I really like the potential of the LCD and the buttons, so spent several hours integrating the snail mail notifier code into the LCD code. That way you can push a button and get a notification on whether mail has been delivered (I'm still working on a text message/email notification as well, but that's proved tricky with the setup I have). Unfortunately there's a conflict between the two sensors, I think, so the code isn't working right.

But I've made progress! It's just not working 100%.

Yet.
I also decided that today would be an excellent day to grill. Tasty home made pizza with none of the heating-up-the-house-with-the-oven side effects.
The trick with grilling pizza is to cook both sides of the dough before layering on toppings. All in all I'd say it came out very tasty - but then I'm partial to virtually anything that's grilled. Heck, I kind of want to grill watermelon.