Before we left the lake Saturday to venture to St. Louis for just over 24 hours I snapped a couple fast pictures of the new landscaping. Kenny then informed me that I had better delete them or at least not show them to anyone. He says that anyone that wants to see our nice new landscaping has to come visit and see it in person. So, my apologies to you all. I guess you have to prove that you love us and then you can see how pretty our house looks.

On a side note for the deck - I am going to try to find out where our property line is because we have to have a 5′ set back per Osage Beach. Well I’m a little concerned with that because I don’t think we’re that far from the property line. It’s kind of funny when your deck really is your entire back yard. Well, it won’t be the whole back yard since we have to leave some room for the fire pit!

Kenny and I decided to tackle another project at our house. This time it was outdoors and entailed landscaping the front of our house. We didn’t get a chance to do anything last year since we didn’t really get moved in and settled until late spring, so this year we decided it was time. The whole thing started out with Kenny building a retaining wall so that we could have a level bed to plant in on the front, left side of our house. He did a great job doing it at night and in the rain back in January. Needless to say, we didn’t get around to planting much in January. The next step was getting some top soil to level the bed by the sidewalk and start to fill in the retaining wall which happened over the next few months. Bringing us up to just a few weeks ago.

Kenny decided that he wanted to do a water feature in the front as well, so we settled on a pond with a small fountain. Kenny dug that out and got the fountain set up and planted a Japanese maple and some decorative grasses while I was in St. Louis at seminar. I came home and was pleasantly surprised to see how great it looked. In the past week and a half we have purchased and planted a number of other bushes, flowering bushes, perennials, and annuals. Now let me just say this, the lake has the rockiest, most difficult soil I have ever seen. I’m sure that there is worse stuff out there, but we didn’t have to dig in it. We had to break out the pick axe to plant things. To put a 2 gallon salvia plant I had to dig out a rock the size of a small bowling ball and Kenny ran into rocks way bigger than that digging the pond. It was really hard work and I miss the easy planting we had in St. Louis! We got the last of the planting done Wednesday night and mulched last night. So pictures will be coming soon!

Next up: A giant deck in the backyard and a fire pit. And hopefully no more digging!

This weekend Bob, Jen, and Yao came down to the lake to visit. The original intent was to go out on the boat and show them some of the lake. But because winter decided to come for a visit too, the boat ride was nixed.

Yao came down Friday night and we went out for some late night adult entertainment at Flirt. Neither of us had any idea what to expect with it being the first time at the lake for both of us. It turns out that it’s kind of just a nice place to hang out. Bob and Jen joined the party Saturday morning. We hung out for a little while and then met Krissy for lunch at The Happy Fisherman (Yao’s been talking about it since we moved to the lake). While the decor almost made it worth it, the food and the cracked out waitress didn’t really make for a great experience. The restaurant did redeem itself somewhat on the way out with a toy grabber arcade game with dollar bills strapped to a lot of the toys. Naturally I had to give it a shot. With 50 cents I managed to pull out 2 stuffed animals and a dollar. TRIPLE PRIZES!!! The rest of the day and night was spent rocking out on Rock Band, cooking, drinking, and killing each other on COD4.

Sunday consisted of a visit to Kay’s (still awesome), a little more killing, and some rocking. All in all, a great weekend with great friends. There will most likely be some pictures on Bob and Jen’s site and someday I might set up a picture account so I can post pictures as well.

The microphone came in on Thursday, so the Can Do’s can finally continue their world tour. We also dewinterized the boat yesterday, so maybe if it’s nice tomorrow we’ll take the first boat ride of the new year.

April 12th is the kickoff of the new visitor season for the Marcantels. Anybody that wants to join us that weekend is welcome, just let us know. I believe the list so far is Yao, Bob and Jen. The more the merrier.

Friday night Krissy and I went to Columbia to go to dinner with Will and Kat and go to Sam’a for a very specific reason. They have Rock Band for $20 less than everywhere else. We got home a little after 11, so I resisted the urge to open my new toy for fear of not sleeping at all that night.

I broke it out Saturday while Krissy was at work and spent a few hours training for my inevitable rock stardom. Krissy got home and reluctantly picked up the guitar and actually did pretty well for her first time. Then she picked up the mic and it was over. She’s addicted to Rock Band.

Unfortunately, the mic stopped working for some reason that same night. Not a good sign for the durability of the product considering we didn’t do anything to make it stop working. Krissy got mad and quit because she couldn’t sing on our world tour anymore. I called EA the next day and, almost as if they were expecting my call, they were very accommodating and very, very nice about it. We’ll have a new mic in a couple of days.

In the meantime, we formed a new band and Krissy is now a drummer. My wife is addicted to a video game…I love it!

We now have a boat and Rock Band. If any of you can keep from visiting us down here, then you are a much better person than me.

Okay, so my girl Jillian didn’t win, but I am really glad that Christian won over Rami. From the beginning I was a fan of Kevin, Christian and Jillian so having 2 of those 3 in the finale was awesome. I liked both Jillian and Christian’s collections but I do agree that Jillian’s may have been a bit disjointed. However, I did not like the fact that Christian got away with the first half of his show all being black big blousey tops with skinny cigarette pants. How many times can you send that down the runway and call it different? Just because you slap a belt on it doesn’t mean it’s a new look! I do love him in general though and I think he’s really fun.

On a side note, how cute was that dress that Jillian was wearing? I want one!

I can’t wait for a new season of Runway and now I can turn my attention to Top Chef which is another one of my favs! So in the off season “Make it work people. I’m aut!”

For those of you who are bad friends and didn’t know it was Kenny’s birthday or didn’t take the time to call him today you should be ashamed. The world is a better place because of Kenny’s kind, gentle, loving, and overtly friendly nature. Okay, so some of that is a stretch, but we are all lucky to have him around because he is a wonderful person and he’s funny as hell. Happy Birthday Kenny, I hope you have just as much fun this year as I did last year spending my time with you!

This past Saturday about 14 bars around the Lake participated in the Mardi Gras Pub Crawl. Will and Kat came down for the night and we headed out for the buses and the bars. To sum it up, it was a pretty decent night. My highlight was at Peckers (a dueling piano bar not a male version of Hooters). The piano player with the baby mullet played a stirring rendition of “Because I Got High” and yelled and cussed at everyone sitting near the stage that wasn’t singing along. I’m sure the three other people that were with me have their own highlights, so please share.

Next year more people should come down. It would be a lot more fun with a big group.

This should probably be more than a little update, but I’ve been really busy and Krissy doesn’t care about any of you.

We went on vacation in Florida and Krissy ran the Disney half marathon and I ran the Goofy Race and a Half Challenge (half on Saturday, full on Sunday). We both survived the races - Krissy was happy she finished and I was happy I could still walk afterwards. We enjoyed the rest of our vacation with five days at Disney (got to introduce Bob to the happiest place in the world), one day shopping, and one day at Sea World.

Since we’ve been back, we’ve been very busy. My boss got put on the Ameristar job, so I was left kind of in charge of installing and templating at the lake and in Columbia. Krissy has been catching up on some design work for a model home.

That’s the real short version of our past 3 weeks. I’m sure Krissy has more to say, so you’ll be able to read even more about stuff you don’t care about.

Something ironic happened to me yesterday. On the way to work I turned from our street onto 54 and saw something stretched across the road. I let my eyes follow it to see a dead dear right next to the driveway of the elementary school. This was no ordinary dead deer. It had been struck so hard that it was split in 2 pieces, front and back. Horrified, I couldn’t look away and then saw all of it’s guys lying next to it. Gross. So this proceeded to lead to many conversations all day about people hitting deer with their cars. Well last night I had to drop a co-worker off at a car dealership in Eldon to pick up his car from an accident he had a month ago. Those of you not familiar with Eldon it’s about 20 minutes from where we live. (It’s the exit by the Earth Angelz strip club with all the crazy lights). Well I dropped him off and was driving back down the dark street to get back to the highway and what did I do? Run over a dead deer that someone right in front of my hit. Horrible! I started screaming and freaking out thinking I ran over it’s head. . . gross. So I turned around and went back to the car dealership to get my car checked out. My car is pretty much okay but the service guy said to get it in to a shop to do a full inspection. The eerie thing is that when I drove back to the auto shop the deer was gone! I think someone took it home to eat for dinner! Apparently that’s normal here. Yuck. How ironic is all that?